POCATELLO — When he was a junior at Chaffey High School in Ontario, California, Michael Dean went to a satellite football prospect camp hosted at one of the other area schools.

The camps are like mini-combines for high school players — college hopefuls run through drills, compete in one-on-ones and test their measurables, often in front of college coaches.

Dean showed off his track speed, and everything was going well until he got to the weight-lifting station, where he discovered that he couldn’t do even one bench-press rep at 185 pounds.

That’s not exactly a surprise for a short, skinny high school junior, but for one with dreams of playing college football, like Dean, it was a wake-up call.

“Like, if I can’t bench 185 now, no team’s gonna pick me up,” Dean said. “So from that summer on, it took me a year and I was already benching like 260, 250 pounds. (I was) getting muscle mass, getting stronger, anything I can do to help myself, since I can’t really control height.”

That’s been the story of Dean’s career so far. Blessed with athletic gifts but cursed with a 5-foot-5 frame, he’s been overlooked at every level.

A concerned citizen once sent a letter to Chaffey head coach Chris Brown, worrying about Dean’s safety and criticizing him for playing someone so small.

Little did he know that not only was Dean’s grandfather the head athletic trainer at Chaffey, but that the younger Dean was so elusive that nobody could ever square him up for a hit.

Idaho State was his only Division I offer out of high school, but he’s been one of the most electrifying players in the Big Sky Conference almost since the day he stepped on campus in Pocatello.

By controlling what he can control, he’s become a fan favorite at ISU, and, with four games left in his career, is in the top 10 in school history in receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns.

Not bad for a kid who once struggled to throw up a rep at the bench press.

“There’s a thing in recruiting in college that’s, the smaller you are, the more special you have to be, because if he’s not special, he’s just another short guy,” Idaho State head coach Rob Phenicie said. “We get a lot of that here. ‘Hey, I got the next Michael Dean for you.’ It’s like, well, no, you probably don’t, because this guy’s pretty special. … He had offers from like Humboldt State and Azusa Pacific, but we were his only Division I offer, so he came up here and now he’s a captain.”

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Every Michael Dean play is a showcase of breathtaking potential.

One snap, the diminutive wide receiver might be cutting through the backfield to take a pitch; the next, taking the top off the defense on a go route.

When he gets the ball, he lights games on fire — every touch could be a touchdown.

He can dance through defenders or run by them, a kinetic blur that shows what can happen when you marry top-end speed, an unconventional athletic background, and a great football brain.

And it all happens to come in a package smaller than the team’s kicker.

“I prefer our receiver corps to look like a basketball team,” Phenicie said. “And if our receiver corps is like a basketball team, at least Mikey’s the point guard. When the pro scouts come through here and everybody’s looking at them, I tell them the same thing. I said, there’s one thing that’s going to be hard to sell. He’s 5-foot-5. Period, done, end of story.”

Growing up, Dean was always moving, playing every sport imaginable. He did the traditional ones, of course, but also rode BMX and motocross.

At 6 years old, he was doing backflips off a trampoline in the yard, so his parents put him in gymnastics for a few years.

Way before he was old enough to play, he would entertain the crowd at Chaffey High home games as a ball boy by cartwheeling and flipping up and down the sideline.

As a freshman, he went out for track for the first time and won the conference championship in the pole vault, setting off a decorated career in that sport that ended with him vaulting 15 feet, 3 inches as a senior, the eighth-best mark in the country that year.

He also won conference championships in the 100, 200 and long jump.

On the football field, he led California in rushing as a senior with 2,555 yards and 37 touchdowns.

“He could do it all,” Brown said. “Whether it was putting him on their best receiver, having him return kicks or you know, I played him with some Wildcat stuff. He played quarterback when the quarterback got hurt in a playoff game. ... A lot of different things. And so he’s just a competitor. The guy wants to win.”

Despite that resume, college recruiters would take one look and back away. Even into his senior year, no one wanted to take a chance on a short running back.

“I would have coaches coming in weekly, but the sad thing is I never pass the eye test,” Dean said. “So I would get these scouts or recruiters coming in all the time, pulling me out of class, talking to me, texting me all the time — and then I would never hear from them again.”

Even the coaches at Idaho State weren’t convinced at first.

It took a defensive coach to bring Dean to campus, as defensive coordinator Roger Cooper noticed him on a recruiting trip and kept pushing for the Bengals to offer him.

As Phenicie remembers, ISU was already recruiting wide receivers Trey Bell, at 5-foot-9, and Isaiah Walter, at 5-foot-10, plus had Josh Crane, 6-feet but just 175 pounds, in the pipeline once he returned from a two-year mission.

“At the receiver position, you try to recruit some length or size or height,” Phenicie said. “Trey was committed, and Josh was pretty much committed. Coop kept pushing (Dean), and (former assistant) Matt Troxel (and I), we were just like, ‘I don’t know, he’s so small, man.’ And finally we said okay, but we were like, we gotta be careful, we can’t sign a bunch of smaller receivers.”

Dean capped his high school days as only he could — finishing with a 4.0 GPA and backflipping off the stage after receiving his diploma — and came to Pocatello as a running back.

His first ISU touch, in the season opener against Simon Fraser, was a 17-yard catch, and he went down and made the tackle on the next ISU kickoff after that drive.

He had a late 15-yard touchdown run in that game, but really announced himself three weeks later in the Bengals’ Big Sky Conference opener against Sacramento State with one of the great stat lines in ISU’s recent history — four carries for 154 yards and two touchdowns, a 62-yarder and a 91-yarder that remains the second-longest in school history.

“I definitely brought the speed as a freshman,” Dean said. “I felt like I got to flash and show the coaches who I am and what I can do on the field and what I can give them as a player. So I wouldn’t say that established me as thinking that I should be the starter, but I think it showed them that I had the opportunity to play at this level.”

After that game, the coaches gave him that opportunity, moving him out to wide receiver to try to leverage his exciting skills in space.

Dean had played there occasionally in high school, most notably in a senior all-star game that Brown coached — he moved his star out to the slot to give him a chance to show college coaches he could play that role — but Chaffey usually ran a very run-heavy offense that Phenicie described as “power pitch.”

“We had like six or seven plays,” Dean said. “The toughest thing for me was learning coverages, because that’s something I didn’t have to know in high school. I never had to read a coverage in high school unless I was playing like, cover three on defense.”

Still, as Phenicie guessed he might be, Dean was a natural at wide receiver. He had five catches for 50 yards against Southern Utah just a few weeks after making the switch, and continued to progress throughout the season.

“(He was) very, very natural in picking up everything,” said Phenicie, who was the receivers coach at the time. “He’s a football savant. He’s always in watching film, but you explain something to him one time and he understands that. … The details of the receiver assignment stuff, he picked it up right away. Not only that, he picked up reading coverages. Everything just slid in very naturally.”

After that, the legend of Idaho State’s tiny dynamo really kicked into high gear around the Big Sky Conference.

Dean had 754 yards and eight touchdowns as a sophomore in 2017, including a career-high 133 yards as the Bengals upset FBS Nevada.

He had 863 yards and 10 touchdowns — including four in one game against Idaho — as a junior in 2018, earning second-team all-conference honors, and then set a new school record in the 60 meters in the indoor track season that winter, running 6.74 seconds to finish second at the Big Sky championships.

“I had the guy (Northern Arizona’s Christopher Grant) for 40, 50 meters and he got me in those last three to five meters,” Dean lamented. (Northern Arizona cornerback Khalil Dorsey was also in the finals of that race, and Dean’s football teammate Tanner Conner and Weber State star Rashid Shaheed competed in the prelims).

In 2019, he’s been just as dangerous, with 33 catches, 559 yards and four touchdowns through eight games.

Just like in high school, the Bengals have used him everywhere — catching the ball, running it on sweeps, returning punts.

“I like it because you can literally score on any play,” Dean said. “We move around so much, I kind of get to play a little bit of everything, play some outside, inside, running back, receiver to the boundary. It’s awesome. It definitely takes some learning, takes some discipline in the film room, but it’s a lot of fun being with coach Phen and (offensive coordinator Mike) Ferriter.”

When this season is over, Dean isn’t sure what he’ll do. He’ll graduate in December, and has a standing offer to coach track at Chaffey in the spring as he trains for the NFL combine and ISU’s pro day.

Phenicie thinks he has a chance to get a camp invitation with an NFL or CFL team. If that doesn’t work out, he’ll have a year of eligibility left for track, whether he goes to graduate school at ISU or somewhere else.

The thing that’s for sure: he’ll leave behind an outsize legacy at Idaho State, and it won’t be just because he overcame his height to be a successful Division I receiver.

In fact, it won’t even be entirely for what he’s done on the field.

“He’s one of the best I’ve ever been around in terms of the whole package,” Phenicie said. “Great young man, great family. I can’t say enough about him, he’s always had over a 3.5 GPA his whole time here. Loves the weight room, everything else, and he’s a great teammate.”

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Control what you can control, and become a star.

“I’m thinking about this year fall camp, like just having such a huge group of guys coming back from the summer and seeing all these new kids, how great the feeling was,” Dean said. “I know my time is winding down really quick, but it’s not something I’m trying to focus on. I want to help out these younger guys, so I’m just trying to do what I can to make sure they’re set up for the future too.”