When everything gets taken away from you, people do not especially expect you to rise above those circumstances and do great things. For Isame Faciane, Senior defensive lineman for the Panthers, the event was Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that cost the United States nearly $108 billion in damages.
Hurricane Katrina, which is currently in its eighth anniversary, caused massive damage to the shores and state of Louisiana, where Faciane is from. The damages included up to seven feet of water in the home where he was raised by his grandparents.
“My grandparents had a lot of stuff that they could call their own and it was taken by the storm. We lived in one of the mobile homes provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a long time after it happened,” Faciane said. “It also didn’t help that my grandfather was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease fairly soon after we got into the mobile home. He was given two to six months, but lived past that until July of 2007.”
Faciane, a 6 foot 4 inch and 275 pound defensive lineman, uses this storm and his grandmother as motivation to get to the next level.
“My grandmother doesn’t get money from disability and still has to pay for everything she does. My main goal is to make it where she doesn’t have to work or pay for anything anymore,” Faciane said. “She and my grandfather had their house entirely paid for and now she is alone and having trouble making it from month to month.”
Faciane recently got a tattoo of a mural depicting the storm so that he may be reminded of it whenever he looks down.
His new defensive line coach, who has had a long tenure in both the NFL and at the collegiate level, has been one of the best things for his career.
“Coach Patterson has shown me great film on guys from a few years ago to even back when I was about 3 years old. It sounds funny but a decent amount of all the film he shows us of professional players and his former collegiate players focus on the same thing, Faciane said. “He has made us learn completely proper pass rushing techniques and it’s helping a lot. He has adjusted a lot about me and it has been helping me to be the best that I can and I have the ability to pick his brain until I leave here.”
Coach Andre Patterson, who has had an illustrious tenure in the coaching profession, gave a comparison to a former NFL defensive lineman who he had worked with in Pittsburgh.
“I would say that he has the ability to be in the top two percent of the defensive linemen I have coached in my life,” Patterson said. “When I was at Washington State, I had seven linemen go to the NFL and I wouldn’t put it past this group of linemen including Isame, Paul [Crawford], and Greg [Hickman] to add to that number along with some of the others down the line.”
Faciane also spoke on the team being ranked to finish last in the conference and near the bottom of Division I in general.
“They don’t really expect anything out of us, so we can surprise them. We are going to be a Cinderella story this season,” Faciane said. “When I got to high school we only had about 25 guys on the team and we only won two games. The next year they expected us to do the same thing and we ended up winning the district. Again when I came here, they had gone 3-9 just like this past season and no one expected anything from us and we started winning and then we started to gain more and more fans back.”
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