Some people would say it's the ultimate compliment a Rhode Island high school football player could receive.

"He would have been welcomed at Rogers," Hope football coach Michael Gibbons offered about Shea Deignan.

When Gibbons talks about Rogers, he's talking about the days when he there, back when Gibbons was a two-time All-State lineman in the late 1980s. It was part of the high school football dynasty mentored by legendary coach John Toppa.

Not everybody could play for Toppa. Yes, you needed talent. You don't coach 10 teams to state championships over a 17-year period without a lot of talented players. But Toppa's teams had more than just talent. There was dedication; there was focus on a goal; there was pride in workmanship.

All the qualities Gibbons sees in Deignan.

"He's one of the special ones." Gibbons said.

It has been a different and delightful season around the Hope football field this fall.

The Blue Wave, a team that hadn't won more than two games the past three years and hadn't won any type of football championship in nearly 20 years, earned a share of the Division IV regular-season title with 7-1 record.

Like all championship football teams, there are offensive stars. Fidel Wright scored 12 touchdowns and rushed for 819 yards in eight games. Stephen Wegbey added 6 TDs and 434 yards to the rushing total.

You'll never see Deignan's name on the offensive stat sheet. He is a center -- the guy in the middle of the offensive line who starts every play, but never gets any credit for the points on the scoreboard.

But when you turn the page to the defensive stats, you can't miss his name. The Hope football team has been credited with 401 tackles so far this season. Deignan, a 5-11, 235-pound senior linebacker, has made 73 of them.

"We wouldn't be where we are without him," said Gibbons.

But it's more than just the tackles and pass interceptions that have impressed Gibbons.

"He's a leader. He's the type of kid who keeps the people around him under control. It's like having another coach on the field," added Gibbons.

"Normally we don't let kids make suggestions, but usually when he says something he's right on," Gibbons continued.

It hasn't been an easy journey to the role of gridiron leader.

Deignan never knew his father. His mother raised him and his older brother, but four years ago his mother died of cancer.

It can be tough on a teenager to have just lost the only parent he has ever known.

"I had to go through a few things, like struggling in school and stuff like that. I had to find a way to relieve myself. Football did that," said Deignan.

But he hasn't always been able to play it, at least not on an organized level.

He started playing the game when he was about 6 years old, while growing up in the West End of Providence, but there were some years when he was too big to make weight for the youth football team. And there were the economic realities of life that often can cause a struggling family to change residence.

"We moved around a lot; that's just the way it was," said Deignan. "I have gone to school in Middletown, Newport, Woonsocket and a few other places."

For the past four years, he has been living in Providence with his older brother.

"Basically it's just me and him now," Deignan related about his 27-year-old brother, John.

He didn't play high school football in his freshman year -- the year after his mother died -- but then he realized he needed an outlet.

"I didn't think about high school football until the end of my ninth-grade year," said Deignan. "That's when I said, 'What can I do?' and I decided to play high school football."

But playing high school football in the city isn't always a simple after-school activity.

There are more distractions, temptations that can lure a teenager away from a physically and mentally demanding sport.

"In Providence you grow up seeing a lot more things happening [than in the suburbs]," said Deignan. "The other kids go and do other things. They see things and the things that get them in trouble seem to be more fun. Instead of doing something that they would find out is fun if they actually go out and try it, they just do other things because everybody else does it."

Even getting to practice every day can offer a challenge.

Deignan is a student at Providence's Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy. Under Interscholastic League rules, students at schools with fewer than 400 students that do not have athletic programs play sports at the high school in the area of a city where the student lives.

So every afternoon, Deignan has to travel across downtown Providence from the Textron classrooms on Broadway to the Hope football field.

"It's no big thing," Deignan said about not having the luxury of just walking out of school and onto the practice field, like most high school football players.

"If you like it a lot you will do it, more than just saying it. I think kids say they like football, but they like to watch it more than they would like to play it," Deignan continued.

"Football is a lot of work, but I love it."

Now the game he has always loved, but didn't seriously play until three years ago, could be opening doors to the future.

A few months ago he started receiving letters from college football coaches.

"I didn't think about that," Deignan said about football possibly creating some college in-roads. "I just wanted to play. I didn't think about going to college and playing football until I realized I actually could. I just thought about trying to go to college like any other regular kid."

But now the college coaches are asking Gibbons for game films and stats.

"He can definitely play college football," said Gibbons, who enjoyed an outstanding collegiate career as an offensive lineman at Springfield College.

"I'm telling the college coaches he's the type of kid you want in your program."

"I definitely want to play football in college. I have applied to Wagner and Stony Brook, and I'm thinking about some other colleges were I could play," said Deignan.

"I want to major in education so that some day I can be a coach like Gibbons."

On Wednesday night, Deignan, Gibbons and the rest of the Blue Wave will be at Conley Stadium when Hope meets Central in the first game of the annual Providence Thanksgiving Eve football doubleheader.

Next week, there will be a playoff game on Tuesday night, then maybe a Super Bowl appearance the following Sunday. But regardless of what happens over the next week or so, there's a future that wouldn't have been the same if Deignan hadn't played football.

And how would he have done at Rogers back in the late 1980s?

"I would have been fighting him for playing time," said Gibbons with a smile.

jgillool@projo.com