The Line of Fire

If you ask Raekwon Robinson, a running back at Malcolm X Shabazz High School and Jaheem Burks’ best friend, what happened was ultimately their fault. It was Jaheem who wanted to go to Jersey City on that freezing January night in 2018 so their group of friends could go to a basketball game and then a party. Afterward, it was Raekwon who had insisted he was so hungry that they had to go to the store, even though it was after midnight.

“When I see [Jaheem] not doing what he used to be able to do, I choose to think about it, to see what could I have done differently,” Raekwon says, standing outside the Shabazz fieldhouse on a bright, blustery fall afternoon in Newark, New Jersey as he describes the regular flashbacks he still has. It’s just cold enough that he has a long sleeve shirt on under his pads, and clear enough that if you squint, you can see the New York City skyline from the field.

“I don’t want to blame it on myself, but I forced all of us to go to the store,” he says. “And because we went to the store, that happened.”

Jaheem, Raekwon and their friends were walking back from the corner store with juice tucked into their sweatshirt pockets. The closest chicken shack had already closed for the night, so as they walked back to the friend’s house where they were staying, Raekwon started putting in an order for Domino’s on his phone. It died because of the cold, and he looked up to find five men he’d never seen before in hoodies and ski masks staring at them from inside a car and on a nearby porch. It was odd, but none of them said anything so the group just kept walking — discussing pizza toppings, Raekwon remembers, smiling in disbelief.

A few seconds later, they heard gunfire erupt behind them. Raekwon and the rest of their friends took off running. “I was laughing because it caught me so off guard,” he says. “I was just like, wow, I might have a really crazy story.” Then a bullet flew by his head and hit an ambulance window. “I didn’t see it, I heard it,” Raekwon says. “That’s when I got scared.”

After the gunfire stopped, he heard Jaheem yelling. He’d been shot six times from his butt down to his calf, piercing his femoral artery. “I tried to get back up and run, but I got shot again so I stayed down on the ground,” says Jaheem, stoic and seemingly unperturbed by being asked to discuss the incident before practice, sharing his experience in measured, precise sentences just nine months after it happened. “First I was thinking about my life, to make sure I would make it,” he continues. “Control my breathing, stay calm. I just wanted the pain to go away.”

Raekwon found his friend sitting in a terrifyingly large pool of his own blood. The police, on high alert because of another shooting a few hours prior, had gotten there first, but Raekwon says they were simply documenting the wounds instead of tending to them.

“It was too cold to cry,” Raekwon says. “I was already shaking because it was so, so cold, and then I didn’t know what was going on. I knew he was going to be OK because it didn’t look like he was in pain, but the cops were yelling at everyone to back up and moving his body around all crazy — I’m like, stop moving him! That’s a puddle of blood that could probably fill up one of those whole boxes! [He points to a box of football gear.] The whole time they were moving him, more blood was coming out. There were no bullets inside him because they went straight through.”

He didn’t cry until the next day, when Jaheem’s aunt called and told him that Jaheem had been shot six times. “That broke me down,” Raekwon says. “I don’t believe Jaheem thinks about it — he still hasn’t cried about it, ever. I’m surprised.”

Jaheem had two surgeries; in one, they had to replace his artery. He spent two weeks at the Jersey City Medical Center before moving to a rehab facility in West Orange. At first, he would try to walk with a walker; every time he stood up, though, he got lightheaded because he’d lost so much blood. But once he got to rehab, he slowly learned how to walk again, going from a wheelchair, to crutches, to a cane, to just a limp that’s now all but disappeared.

“There was no way I thought he was suiting up this year,” Shabazz coach Darnell Grant, 47, says. “I’m like, ‘Listen man, you can take stats. I’ll put you in the booth, or you can help me coach.’ He looked me dead in the eyes: ‘Coach, I’m playing. You’ll see.’”

It’s a little slice of Americana right in the middle of Newark. The Friday night lights show two teams of teenage boys hopped up on Gatorade and bravado, butting heads on a brisk late October night. A healthy crowd of family, friends and neighbors cheer them on, many clutching lukewarm cups of ramen noodles or cocoa to fight the chill.

When the starting quarterback for the home team, Shabazz, is taken off the field after a hard hit, a new one steps in — a development that garners little fanfare from those in the stands, mostly content with the goose egg their opponents are laying.

But it should. The back-up QB is Jaheem Burks.

As he leads the team down the field, ultimately setting them up to score a touchdown, fans don’t know his name. They haven’t heard anything about a football player being shot. There’s no ceremony, no comment from the stadium announcer. Jaheem is just playing his game, exactly the way he wants; he’s already made the local news for his recovery, but there are plenty of people on the local news who hadn’t been so lucky. His own tragic accident (at Shabazz, they take care to call it an accident — “It wasn’t meant for him,” Grant explains) and return to football is barely a blip.

“We don’t play the pity party,” Grant says from his office the following week.

About an hour before practice starts, Grant sits behind his desk, hands folded, facing a few stacks of the academic progress reports he insists his players fill out each day. There’s a long table in the middle of the room where he meets with students, and sometimes monitors them during detention. When he’s not coaching the team, he’s the school’s dean of discipline, arriving at 7:50 a.m. to ensure kids are where they’re supposed to be, doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The last thing he has time to do is feed a redemption story that’s plenty remarkable on its own, for a community where honoring every victim of gun violence could easily become an all-consuming project.

“Don’t feel sorry for us,” he says. “These guys are champions.”

Grant is speaking literally: the team is defending its state title. Figuratively, they’re quite close to another, less tangible sort of triumph — this time, though, over much more brutal odds.

During his nine years coaching at Shabazz, Grant has lost four players to gun violence and had 10 players get shot, some on their way home from practice. One player was shot 14 times and survived. The day before our conversation, someone was wounded by gunfire near the school’s athletic field; the football team had been inside watching film, but a soccer game in progress had to be halted.

Last January, when Grant got the call that Jaheem had been shot, his reaction was one of relief. “I was just so happy he was alive,” he says. “That I didn’t have to go to another funeral.”

Grant is one of hundreds of high school football coaches across the country grappling with how to mitigate the effects of a problem they’re far from having the resources to solve: gun violence in America. Obviously, given that so far in 2019 over 10,000 Americans have died from a non-self-inflicted gunshot wound, it impacts almost everyone. But plenty of kids — especially those growing up in places like Newark, where such violence is numbingly ubiquitous — look to football to grant them a degree of immunity.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an “escape” from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect. If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe. A litany of cliches exist to describe the alternative: “Becoming a statistic.” “Dead or in jail.”

Grant knows most of his players have had someone in their lives for whom those cliches apply. “That’s why we have so many kids — we get the guys who don’t want that,” he says. His no-cut roster runs between 80 and 90 players from both Shabazz and smaller neighboring schools without football programs, depending on how many helmets he has. “They want to be something different.”

He also knows that concerns about concussions have cut into youth football participation nationally; in suburban Plainfield, New Jersey, where Grant has raised his six children, there’s no Pop Warner team for his twin seven-year-old boys. They have to drive to the next town over.

Shabazz, though, hasn’t experienced any decline. “It doesn’t affect us,” he says. “Football is going to come down to the people who have an option. My guys don’t have an option. They gotta play. They need to play. We don’t have lacrosse here. We don’t have established soccer here. Football, basketball, track. That’s the thing.”

But what Grant and his peers have found out the hard way is that even as it offers them structure and incentive, football alone is not enough to protect their charges. At least 67 boys and men 25 years old and under identified as current or former football players have been shot and killed in 2019 so far. Of those, 32 were under 18; the youngest, Washington, D.C.’s Karon Brown, was 11.

“What’s changed that now these kids growing up in the same neighborhood as I did gotta worry about life and death?” Grant remembers wondering in 2004 — the first time he lost a player, at a previous coaching job. He stood next to a high schooler who had been shot twice in the head, lying dead on the sidewalk a month after he’d gotten a scholarship offer from N.C. State. “I was so infuriated by the adults. What did we do differently? What didn’t we do for them that was done for us? Why is it no longer safe?”

It’s a detail that almost always makes the headline, whether the victim was 14 or 34: football player. Sometimes there’s a quote from the coach, or the school. Maybe the only photo in the local news files is one of the kid making a play. Maybe the yards he ran last season are somewhere toward the bottom. Very rarely do these stories get national coverage, with the 2015 murder of Zaevion Dobson — who was heralded posthumously as a hero — as one notable exception. But for many local outlets, the story is a depressingly familiar variation on the kinds of gun violence-related deaths that too often don’t get covered at all.

Its subtext is clear: this is not just another kid, this is a football player. A kid who tried; a kid who worked; a kid who was doing all the Right Things to avoid a fate as inevitable in America as fireworks on the Fourth of July. A football player died, and we should mourn more than we would otherwise but not that much, because another football player will die next week and next year, and we will pretend like it is exceptional when, in fact, it is the rule that children and young adults and old adults die preventable deaths every day because of the confluence of entrenched systemic discrimination and widely available lethal weapons.

We should mourn because he knew the odds were stacked against him and worked to overcome them anyway, as though his fate was ever fully in his own hands to begin with.

“You hear about kids that were the best that never was getting brutally murdered, and the story will be good until you bury them — about two weeks,” says Niketa Battle, 46, who lost a player each of his first two years as the head coach at Mays High School in Atlanta. He’s in year four. “But if a kid goes and plays in a DI program and gets in trouble, you’ll hear all about it. I always tell my kids, ‘Nobody cares if you get killed. Not at Mays. That’s what they expect, because of the area you live in.’ That’s the harsh reality.”

Somewhere deep down, maybe, we understand that each death signifies a greater failure. But it’s one that we tacitly accept with each “Football Star Shot and Killed” headline that passes by. An unfortunate one-off. How sad, we think. How terrible, as though a young person dying who didn’t play football is more tolerable. It’s a way to predigest tragedy, to filter an American epidemic into words we can understand: a football player died.

A little more than once a week, somewhere in America, a story like this runs.

Tyson Whiting

Football has been a lifelong love affair for Jaheem, who was born and raised in Newark. He watched Jerome Bettis run over people for the Steelers when he was five and has been a Pittsburgh fan ever since. That same year, his mother died of breast cancer (his dad is not in the picture), so Jaheem and his two older siblings went to live with his aunt and cousins. At nine, he started playing organized football; in middle school, he met Raekwon, his compatriot on and off the field. So when he was shot, his motivation to recover fully was clear.

“I couldn’t have that mindset like, just lay down and be lazy all day,” Jaheem says. Grant says he would have been a starter at receiver and defensive back his senior year had it not been for the shooting; he was back in the weight room at Shabazz before he was even officially back at school. “Obviously when I first got back, I wasn’t really running how I am right now. But I had to get up and work on my legs and try to get back on the field because I love football. That’s what I love to do.”

As for Raekwon, when he returned to school the Monday after the shooting, he dropped from honor roll to failing within a matter of weeks. “Before, I saw him every day,” he says of Jaheem. “I still see him every day. But just him not being around me, and I really couldn’t call him to speak to him... it was hurting me. I came to school just to come; I didn’t do nothing.”

It wasn’t the first time gun violence had impacted his life — when asked if he’d ever known anyone who was shot and killed, Raekwon holds up one hand to count and quickly runs out of fingers before giving up — but it was the first time he had witnessed it. Coincidentally he had signed up for an in-school leadership and healing program called the Bulldog Brotherhood, where he was referred to a counselor who helped him get makeup work to bring his grades back up. He says he learned about trauma from the program as he was experiencing it, which helped him.

“Being from where I’m at, I figured it would happen,” Raekwon says of the shooting. “I didn’t expect it, but I expected it. Not that we were doing anything wrong, I just — I don’t know. Around here, there’s no telling what happens.”

Data supports Raekwon’s grim hunch. Though gun violence statistics are notoriously hard to pin down, gun homicides tend to be concentrated where people are, in cities; small ones with disproportionate degrees of poverty, like Newark, tend to have higher rates. Fifty-two percent of gun homicide victims are Black men, according to the most recent available CDC data. Their reports also conclude that gun violence is the leading cause of death among Black children, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be shot and killed — a statistic that came perilously close to representing Jaheem and Raekwon.

That is not to say the experience of gun homicide victims — even those in a narrow category like current and former football players 25 and under — is homogenous. There have been at least 190 victims matching that description since 2017, according to the inevitably incomplete data collected by SB Nation. They lived in 38 states and Washington, D.C., in small towns and big cities alike. Some were white, some were Hispanic, most were Black. Some were shot in cases of mistaken identity, like Jaheem, or just caught in the crossfire; some were in disagreements that got heated. Some were victims of intentional murder, or of a stick-up gone wrong. Some — like Jordan Edwards, Isaiah Christian Green, Archer Amorosi, Leo Brooks Jr., D’Ettrick Griffin, O’Shae Terry and De’Von Bailey — were killed by police.

No matter the circumstance, most just wind up described as “in the wrong place at the wrong time”; a cliche that fails to account for the fact that they were exactly where they were supposed to be — walking to school or sitting at home or at a cookout to celebrate their graduation — and it didn’t make a difference.

“Nobody wakes up and says, ‘You know what, today I’m gonna plan on getting murdered,’” says Camden, New Jersey coach Preston Brown, 34, who leads the Woodrow Wilson High School team. He’s lost two players within the past year. “But there’s no margin for error. What might, in communities with more of a safety net, seem like harmless teenage shenanigans — seeing your friends, going to parties, getting a slice of pizza — become life-threatening.”

The way communities and media respond to these deaths tends to reflect how often they’ve seen them. Coach James Williams, who runs the team at Houston’s Fort Bend Marshall High School, lost his first player last December after seven seasons as the school’s head coach and 19 years in football. “It caught me completely off guard — it’s never something you think about or imagine would happen,” the 44-year-old coach says. He’d had players shot before, but never seriously injured or killed.

Williams’ Buffaloes had just closed an undefeated season and were preparing for a playoff run when 17-year-old Drew Conley, who had just transferred to Marshall that summer, was shot and killed by his uncle. “Definitely had a great personality — nothing but positives with that young man,” says Williams. “He made a big impact in a short time.”

The team, cheerleaders and band wore decals with his number — 3 — and hung up his jersey in a locker at their semifinal game four days later. “Remember 3” became both a rallying cry for the team and a hashtag, as Conley’s friends and teammates grieved and shared memories on social media. Conley’s funeral was two days before the team’s state championship game at Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium; five of his teammates were pallbearers. They wound up losing, a minor tragedy by comparison, but still heartbreaking given the shadow already cast over what should have been a pinnacle of Conley and his teammates’ high school experiences.

“Of course you want to win, but it was an accomplishment just to be there — especially under the circumstances they were in,” Williams says. “Losing a player two weeks before the state championship is such an emotional rollercoaster. The guys had to overcome so much, but they knew it was important to Drew, and that he wanted it badly for everyone.

“[Gun violence] is not prevalent where we are — it was just an unfortunate incident,” he continues. “Some areas have less crime than others, but there’s no safe area. At the end of the day, this can happen anywhere.”

For many other coaches — like Newark’s Darnell Grant — the first time they found out they’d outlived one of their players has long since past. Sometimes it’s too painful for both coaches and players to remember all those they’ve lost.

“It’s scary because the kids are kind of numb to it, to the point where every year you know it’s going to happen,” Brown says. Last fall, a recent graduate of his Camden program named Diquese Young, who had been accepted to college but deferred for a semester to help his mom, was shot and killed at 19. Six months later, Young’s good friend and former teammate Sincere Howard, 17, was also shot and killed. Brown recalls a recent shooting behind their field while the team was practicing; they paused to make sure it was safe and then went back to work.

“We kind of keep things among ourselves, and try not to focus on it so much,” he says. “The more you bring it up … there’s a whole tie-in of emotions, not only from the young people’s standpoint but for all of us, adults included.”

“I’m just going to be honest with you: if I was in suburban Atlanta, [players dying] probably would have been more of a shock,” Battle says. “I’m not going to say that my kids are insensitive to death, but they see it so often that it might be something that they’ve just grown to accept. I hope I don’t come off as very numb. But here, if you don’t have some sort of a tough skin about where you’re working, it will eat you alive.”

Battle, who has lost two players in the past three years, estimates six Mays High School students were killed in that same period. Mays student D’Ettrick Griffin, who had played recreational football, was shot and killed by Atlanta police earlier this year. In August, two boys aged 12 and 16 were shot outside a Mays football game; the 12-year-old may not walk again.

“I ask myself, why do I watch the news all the time? I know it’s nothing but negativity about what’s going on within the community,” says the 46-year-old coach, who also teaches physical education. “But I have to turn it on because I’m worried about my kids.”

He sometimes finds himself sitting at his desk in despair — the same desk he speaks to me from, the same desk that’s his base from 7 a.m. to 8:30 or 9 at night during football season, the same desk that’s the destination of his 45-minute commute. “Half of me is questioning, like, ‘Why are you putting yourself through so much stress?’” Battle says. “When I got this head coaching position, I had no gray hair. I’m graying so fast now, it’s crazy. I don’t know when I can just go home and rest — I literally have to get in the house and turn my ringer off.”

Battle grew up in Tifton, Georgia, stayed in-state to play football at Savannah State and Georgia Southern, and entered the corporate world before beginning his career as a coach. “It just wasn’t fulfilling, knowing that was going to be my life for the next 25 to 30 years,” he says. So he quit, and started coaching in suburban Atlanta. Nineteen years later, his longest tenure has been at Mays — which has also been his most challenging position.

“In the suburbs, my worst fear was a kid going to jail,” he says, adding that his peers working in suburban schools are most concerned about keeping kids from vaping. “Now my worst fear is waking up to one of my kids having been killed.”

Battle lost his first players in 2011 while working as the head coach at Morrow High School. He remembers talking with them before summer started, wishing them well and offering some counsel.

“I told them, make sure you love on everybody because it’s not guaranteed that we’ll be around next year,” he recalls. “But I just meant that people might move with graduation. Two of the kids would end up being killed.” One died in a high-speed car chase, the other was shot. Recently he found out another former player from that same year had been shot and killed.

“When you were a part of those kids’ lives and then tragically, whether it’s one year later or 10 years later, they end up getting killed…” Battle trails off.

“You have kids that are very edgy, and think bad things might happen to them,” he concludes. “But it also happens to the good kids, the ones that don’t participate in any form of street violence. Some kids will wake up and try to live a different life, but just can’t escape it. But football is their outlet to try.”

***

It’s the same outlet that Battle, Grant and Brown found first themselves. All played football in high school and earned athletic scholarships to help pay for their degrees. What they ultimately decided to do with those degrees, though, was to return to places near where they grew up, eschewing any idea about “escape” as advancement. They chose to help more young men find the kinds of opportunities that are too often much harder to come by as Black students in underfunded schools; as sons whose families might be working long hours just to get by.

“If my coaches had just coached us, and didn’t take hold of us the way they did — be fathers to us, monitoring every aspect of our lives — most of us would not have made it,” says Brown, who graduated from Woodrow Wilson himself. Brown’s younger brother was shot and killed in 2011, at age 20. “When I became a coach, I could do no different than what was done for me. You have to do everything in your power to protect them.”

The first step is to keep players as busy as possible. Creating programming that compels them to be at school as long as they can stand — study halls, practices, weight training, film study, meetings, team meals — all year round, six days a week, takes precedence over designing plays or coming up with game plans. Often, the funding for such supplementary programming at already-strapped public schools comes out of their own pockets.

“Like I tell the kids, from 3:30 to 9:30, I’m with you,” Battle says. “Those are football hours. That’s the same time that kids are going to give to the streets. You’re not playing against an opponent, you’re playing against the streets. And the streets are going to win every time. But if I have them in football practice until 9:30 and they get home at 10, there’s nothing they can really do but go to sleep, come back and do it again.”

The streets, to Battle, mean gangs. In Atlanta the number of gangs has nearly doubled in the past decade, spurring Battle to speak with his players ever more regularly about why they should avoid them. During one such talk, a player asked to say something; when Battle told him to go ahead, he raised his shirt to show a bullet hole in his chest, telling the rest of his team, “Y’all don’t want to end up like me.”

“He comes out and works harder than almost all the kids on this team, and he’s sitting there with a bullet hole in his chest,” Battle recalls, still incredulous.

He believes his team can offer some of what the local gangs might seem to: a sense of belonging in the midst of an environment that he characterizes as “a war zone.”

“The thing is, if you don’t take an interest in the kids, who’s going to?” he asks. “A lot of kids will feel more like they’re worth something [as a gang member], because somebody’s telling them they’re doing well even though they’re doing wrong.”

In Chicago, coach D’Angelo Dereef has gone one step further in keeping his players physically away from their too-often violent Garfield Park neighborhood. He hosted a weeklong lock-in during training camp at Al Raby High School for the sixth season in a row this summer, a reaction to what he sees as a spike in gun violence.

“Every week is a violent week in Chicago — this is one week where their parents can be relieved,” he explains. Dereef, 46, initially came up with the idea not long after he moved to the city from South Carolina; tragically, he lost a student to gun violence almost immediately. “I was a 30-year-old man coming home crying to my auntie and uncle’s house,” Dereef remembers.

So he thought of doing a lock-in, which would at least be a temporary refuge. After facing initial resistance because of the cost, he finally got approval by assuring that he and the other coaches would collectively provide food and solicit donations from local businesses. It’s mostly subsidized by Dereef himself.

First, he takes their phones for the entire week. Instead, they focus on football and what might ultimately — and unfairly — be survival skills: conflict resolution and how to talk to police. Most important, though, is to “show them brotherhood, and make them one: one team, one family,” Dereef says.

His job isn’t over after the lockout, though; when we talk, he’s on his way to try to find out why a particularly promising kid has stopped coming to practice. Dereef gets frustrated when he sees people underestimate his players, or assume they’re unmanageable. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” he says. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding. Why is this kid scared to come to practice? We need this kid here because this could save his life.”

A few weeks prior, he’d been negotiating with a freshman player’s parole officer to let him come to practice — the player had been found with an illegal gun and was under house arrest. “I told him, you’re 250 to 300 pounds — you’re a big ol’ target,” Dereef says. “People are going to hide behind you when they start shooting, and you can’t hide behind nobody. You’re a bulletproof vest for everybody out there. Don’t be a crash dummy, be with us.”

Tyson Whiting

No coach can be with their players all the time, though. “It’s the away time,” Grant says of the moments he worries the most. “It’s when they leave us. Right now we try to run a six-day-a-week program, 12 months out of the year. But that last day and a half, we don’t have them.”

“I just worry about what’s going on from Friday night after you get home from the game to Sunday afternoon,” says Battle. “As long as I can put my hands on them, I know they’re good. But once they leave, they’re going back to the same areas that they’re trying to fight so hard to get away from.”

The technology-enabled cure for that worry is lots of group-texting, and communication with teachers and parents; sometimes they’re just checking in to make sure players have made it home safely. On snow days, Grant has his players send him videos of themselves working out to keep them occupied.

All the coaches stay in touch with their alums, texting and calling to make sure they’re still pushing forward and staying safe. Dereef calls his former players every Sunday: “How’s school?” “Are you leaving the girls alone?” “Are you leaving the weed and drinking alone?” After all, their lives are only slightly less precarious once they get to school: 2019 Giants draft pick Corey Ballantine was shot while celebrating making it to the league, and his friend and Washburn University teammate Dwane Simmons was killed in the same incident.

“I never talk about football,” Dereef insists. “I got them prepared for football.”

Pushing students academically can be as simple as letting the players know that someone is watching, that someone cares. “Some kids, you grow up talking about the day at school at the dinner table every night,” Grant says. “My guys don’t always get that — and because it’s not a big priority in the house, it’s not their priority. It’s about trying to build a surrogate family around the game of football, just to give them all the resources and access that everyone has every place else.”

Grades are typically the coaches’ biggest concern: all aim to have 100 percent college acceptance rates for their players, even if they’re not going to play at the next level.

“My thing is to at least have the choice,” Grant says. When we meet, a scout is in the next room talking to some seniors on the team. “If I don’t give you an option, why wouldn’t I expect you to fall into the same traps as everybody else? I gotta give you something different.”

“All my kids aren’t going to be 3.0, 4.0 kids,” Battle says. “But if I can get a kid from an F to a C, just to be able to say, ‘I told you you could pass, you just gotta put your mind to it’ — that’s the little incentive they need to keep going, because they found someone that can believe in them.”

The hardest part of the job, the coaches say, is the feeling that it might be impossible to give the players enough. Feeding them once is something, but what if there’s no food at home? Finding a tutor might help their grades, but if they go home and the electricity is turned off, how can they do their homework? And of course the worst case scenario, the one that all of these coaches have already confronted: what if they do everything they can, and a player does everything he can — and still winds up dead before his time?

Like Diquese Young, the Woodrow Wilson player killed in 2018 who had deferred college to help his mom. “When he was in school, he was the perfect guy,” Brown says. “He did all his work, he did track and football, he was always on time, he was a leader. If there was beef among other people in school, he would be the dude that could mediate it without an adult being present. He had that kind of presence.”

Young was accepted to over a dozen schools. “It was a bad idea; he should have been away at college,” Brown says. “The hood doesn’t have any feelings.”

Or his friend and teammate Sincere Howard. Or Coach Battle’s players, Carlos Davis II and Marquez Montgomery, neither of whom will ever be older than 15. Or any of the other boys and men whose names make up the far-too-long list at the bottom of this story.

The worst has happened, but each coach has picked up the pieces and kept going. After all, there are too many good stories to let the tragedies drag them down.

“Just seeing the kids that wake up and have hope,” says Battle of what inspires him to keep coaching kids both on the field and through the many risks they face each day. “They light up, because they’ve probably been told for so long that this is your life, and this is what your life is always going to be — and then they get exposed to something else.” In 2018, he had 20 players sign National Letters of Intent out of a 39-player graduating class.

“There’s nothing you can do about what happened in the past,” Grant says. “The only thing you can do is try to make it not repeat itself — that’s the motivation to work harder.”

***

Jaheem and Raekwon are now roommates at William Paterson University — Jaheem wants to study computer engineering, and Raekwon wants to study math.

Grant helped see them off this spring, working with them to sort out their college prospects and, more importantly, taking Jaheem get shoes for the prom. Everything is almost back to normal, but might never be completely the same.

“He was such a goofy, silly, jovial kid,” Grant says. “Now you see a seriousness about him that you didn’t before. I look at him sometimes, like man, they took his childhood away from him. They made him become a man too fast.”

Raekwon says since the shooting, he’s stopped walking around his neighborhood. Unless he has a ride, he tries to stay in the house. “I was careful before, but now it’s just like...I don’t do much,” he says. “You won’t see me going to the store or anything like that.” This year, another player on the Bulldogs was shot and survived, as was another Shabazz student.

After nearly a decade at Shabazz, Grant is starting a new position coaching at West Orange High School. There’s no doubt he’ll still be mentoring his players off the field, but he acknowledges that working at a more diverse school — where his non-football hours will be spent on academics instead of discipline — will be different.

“At Shabazz, sometimes it was just about the bare necessities — things that are supposed to come from home and for whatever reason they’re unable to provide,” he says. “In West Orange, there are two parents in the house but maybe they’re both working in the city. Kids are kids — they face a lot of the same struggles.”

Coaches around the country will continue the thankless work that Grant did for years, the work of trying to protect players even after they’ve learned firsthand that their best efforts may not be enough.

“Man, I’ve got to make sure these kids know that I care about them,” Battle says. “I just don’t know if I, Lord forbid it, might lose another one this year. I hope the cycle is broken — I pray to God it is. But in the event that it’s not, this is the job that I signed up for.”

The problem is insurmountable, the violence inescapable. But every year, coaches like Battle will open their teams to all, padding their no-cut rosters with any kids who want a place to show up and be seen — regardless of how good they are at football. There are always more kids with more possibilities, and to these coaches, their lives are worth protecting with everything they have.

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This piece is dedicated to all gun violence victims and survivors, and those who love them. Below are 190 football players 25 and under shot and killed between 2017 and November 2019.