Student reactivates fan page with popular Coach D videos

Coach D’s Instagram fan page is bigger than ever, despite an attempt to take it down.

Thirkell Debellote, also known as Coach D, is a P.E teacher at skyline. His fan page started off when one of his students, Olivia Diaz, couldn’t take his P.E class in her sophomore year because it was full.

“it wasn’t really planned out that much; it just popped up in my head,” said Diaz. With the help of Coach D, Diaz started the fan page at the start of the 2023-24 school year.

A fan page is an online page that can be used by fans to support a person, group, or team. The Coach D fan page is used to “help him feel happy and supported by students at Skyline,” said Diaz.

When asked about his main goal for the fan page, Coach D said he wanted to spread a message of “health and safety across campus.”

Over the 2024-25 school year, the fan page grew to about 850 followers and was well-known across the school. Videos from the account routinely opened with Debellotte saying “Good morning, Skyline community”, going on to provide motivational messages like “Follow your teacher’s instructions, stay in class, and you’ll be safe.”

However, the page was banned by Instagram over the summer due to people making “unpleasant comments” about the videos posted on the page. This ban caused the account to be deleted permanently. Coach D found out about the ban while he was teaching summer school.

As the fan page’s creator, Diaz discovered the ban when she was logged out of the account.

A new account was formed by Diaz and Coach Debellote, and they started posting videos at the start of the school year.

As of Oct. 12, the recreated fan page has 278 followers and 13 video posts. Diaz said she plans to post a new video once a week to @coach.dfanpage.

In one of the videos, Coach D can be seen welcoming the Skyline community, then challenging viewers to do the “boots on the ground” dance, which he was teaching his P.E classes.