Nick hates to admit it, but he's different.
Unmistakably, undeniably different.
He can watch television, but has to sit two feet from the screen. He can read, but has to hold the book inches from his eyes. He can hit a baseball, but it can take 30 swings.
The 14-year-old from Dalton says his eyesight is normal.
Doctors say he's legally blind.
"I can see just fine," Nick said.
"He has no idea what we can see," his mother said. "So to him, what he sees is normal."
Nick doesn't embrace being different. But he's teaching a town that there's nothing wrong with it.
The difference between eight years is 300 feet. It's the space between the football field and the parking lot at Pine Grove Park in Dalton.
Eight years ago, Nick's mom, Bridget, drove him to the park, hoping Bridget DiCarlo he'd play football.
He'd always been nervous about trying new things. This day was no different. Nick refused to leave the car.
It was a routine he and his mom would repeat a handful of times before she abandoned the thought of her son playing the game.
"It was right over there," Bridget said, pointing to the parking lot one football field away. "I really wanted him to play. It was a sport where he didn't really have to see the ball. He could
"Eventually I gave up on the idea."
Nick suffers from Familial Exudative Vitreoretinopathy, a hereditary condition characterized by scarring of the retina that can lead to vision problems. Nick's FEVR is severe, putting his vision at 20/200 when he's rested and 20/400 when his eyes are tired.
Thus, an object that appears 200 or 400 feet away from Nick is only 20 feet away from a person with perfect vision. He doesn't wear glasses; they wouldn't help.
"Legally blind is a very deceiving term," said Lynn Shortis, a Berkshire County-based teacher for the visually impaired who worked with Nick early in his life, when his denial was at full strength.
Shortis recently has started working with him again.
"A lot of times, you can pass as being fully sighted," she said.
"They don't want to look different, to be seen as different, but there are certain things that you need to do differently. You can see, but at the same time, you can't. It's difficult. It's like you're a part of two different worlds."
Once too afraid to play football, Nick now teaches it.
He's been an assistant coach in the Dalton Community Recreation Association's flag football league for the past two years.
He coaches 10 children between the ages of 6 and 8.
During a game in late October, Nick stood in the center of the field. He called out one player's name and pointed to the right, waved another to the left, and then tugged on the back of another's shirt and moved him a few yards backward. He stood where a middle linebacker would, in the middle of all the action he'd missed out on when he was that age.
After his defensive unit made the tackle, Nick waved the group into a huddle, pausing to wait for the distracted player who was diving at imaginary opponents.
"You have to have patience," said Nick, a sophomore at Wahconah Regional High School. "Sometimes they don't like to listen. But it's fun. I like being in charge."
The league doesn't keep track of wins and losses, or even the score. It stresses fundamentals.
Every player runs with the ball.
Everyone gets a chance.
It was the perfect place for Nick to take his.
"It's strange to say, but the kids are young, so I think it's more of a lesson for the parents than the kids," said Ernie Wellington, whose 7-year-old son, Xavier, is in his first year with he team.
"The kids just think of him as Nick. I'm accepting. It doesn't matter to me as long as he's doing a good job with my kids, and he is."
"Coach Nick is nice," 7-year-old Quinn Gallagher said. "He's fun."
Nick can see only through the right-hand corners of his eyes, so he often looks at the ground or into space. When you shake his hand, it seems as if he's looking past you.
He can't read a classroom chalkboard, and his spelling development was slow because he couldn't spot words sprinkled throughout his elementary-school classrooms.
It's difficult to get a sense of just what Nick can see. He's legally blind but doesn't use a cane or a walking stick. Doctors have told him he may never drive, but he's capable of jogging to practices and competing on the Wahconah swim team, which begins working out later this month.
He's become so active that even those around him don't notice his condition.
"When [head coach] Chris [Gallagher] told me he was legally blind, I was shocked," Wellington said. "I knew he was a little different. I figured he had trouble seeing or trouble making eye contact, but he's out on the field, working with individuals, grabbing the ball and getting kids in position."
As a middle-schooler, Nick was shy and reserved. Bridget was concerned that he didn't have a broad social circle and that he spent weekends at home.
"I hated middle school," Nick said. "But I always had friends."
Now there's far less reason to worry.
Nick used to feel like he was just accommodated at school.
Now he enjoys it.
Aaron Robb, a history teacher at Wahconah, e-mails his lessons to Nick each week, allowing him to follow them on PowerPoint.
This allows Nick to learn visually, like other students, because he can see when he sits close to the computer screen.
After a year of teaching Nick history, Robb recommended him for honors classes, and the teacher still chuckles with the vehemence Nick displayed in discussing the 2008 presidential election and why he preferred John McCain over Barack Obama.
After a recent class, when Robb had put the homework assignment on the wall, Nick asked Robb to write it on a Postit note.
"I asked 'What for?' " Robb said. "I forgot. To most of us he's not blind. He's Nick."
Nick, or Coach Nick, as his football team calls him, has become a bustling teenager.
He mentors special-needs students in a program run by Robb at the Dalton CRA, works at a camp for visually impaired kids, and hopes to attend college somewhere with a bustling public transportation system that will allow him to get around.
In sports, Nick's coaching career began two years ago at the encouragement of Gallagher, the head coach of their Kelly's Package Store team.
Nick's sister, Briana, died of brain-stem cancer in 2004 at the age of 5, and Gallagher was a lifelong friend of Bridget's. Trained as a psychiatric nurse, Gallagher worried about how Nick would handle both his differences and the death of a sibling.
The family worked through the tragedy, even putting together an annual fair in Dalton - Briana's Fun Fair - with proceeds going to the Give Kids the World program.
But the ordeal made a significant emotional impact, one that Nick remains reluctant to discuss.
"I don't remember much," he said of that period, in which he was in the fifth grade. "I don't have a good memory."
"I think that answer tells you all you need to know," family friend Annie Ronayne said.
For the disabled or the unsure, an athletic field is as worrisome as it gets. Projectiles fly from every direction, and unless you're athletic, there are few ways to protect yourself - either from the pain of a direct hit, or the embarrassment of one.
In football - particularly in tradition-laden, run-heavy Dalton - the whole point is to be physically superior, with the most ablebodied emerging victorious.
For someone with a disability, fitting in might be the most impressive achievement of all, the most meaningful sign of maturation. To Bridget, it's one of the biggest signs that Nick has begun his march into adulthood.
When one of the spongy footballs flies from the side of the field and clunks Nick in the head, he chuckles rather than turn red.
Shy and quiet, Nick opened up to his flag football team, spending the last few weeks of the season scheming how to make the experience special for the group graduating to the Peewee level.
During the final week of the year, Nick spent one night drawing up certificates on his home computer for the 8-year-old players. He spent another day on the high school campus, asking Wahconah's head football coach for extra helmet decals, which he handed out at the team's banquet last Sunday.
"I wanted to show him that, as a community, we're going to help him get him through this," Chris Gallagher said. "And, at the same time, he can contribute. He can help us. He's been a huge help to me."
When Gallagher eventually follows his son Quinn to a higher level, he'd like to bring Nick along to help coach.
Nick, after all, has proved that he can. And that he cares.
"Coaching has given him confidence and a sense of purpose," Bridget said.
One of her proudest moments came when she attended one of Nick's games and, in the middle of it, Gallagher came over and started a conversation with her.
"It was kind of like, 'Wait, who is running the team?' " Bridget said.
Then it hit her. On the same field her son had once feared, it was clear: He was confident. He was committed. He was Coach Nick. And he was starting to open eyes.
To reach Chris Carlson: ccarlson@berkshireeagle.com, (413) 496-6251
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