CoachReed
My smartphone says “Feels like 101°” at the edge of the practice field, but I notice that coach Carl Reed Jr. isn’t sweating. He looms in the shade of a shuttered concession stand, his eyes fixed on his football players, the Lutheran High School North Crusaders, who are very much sweating. In black T-shirts and shorts, they’re hustling through drills on cut grass while trying to social distance in this summer of COVID-19. They may be the best small high school football squad in Missouri. Last year, they won the Class 2 state championship. But since then they’ve lost nine seniors to graduation. Reed doesn’t know, on that roasting July evening, what will come of the 2020 season, but he says that whatever happens, “My babies going to be fine.”
His confidence is puzzling at first. Hours earlier, the Missouri State High School Activities Association had cleared the way for athletes to compete in the fall but left the final decision to local authorities—and the local authority for Lutheran North, St. Louis County, had adopted a cautious phased approach to youth sports, especially high-contact ones. The county put a temporary block on games and scrimmages and also set strict rules for practices.
Those rules explain the quirks of the drills unfolding before us. Here’s Travion Ford, a star senior and defensive end who’s already committed to play at Mizzou, ready to pounce. He explodes off the line, smacks into the one-man sled (a steel dummy), cuts to the right, then stops and flashes his hands out so a teammate can spray them with sanitizer— an assiduous display of hygiene in this famously gritty sport. Later, when the group takes a break to gulp water from repurposed milk jugs and juice bottles, they space themselves apart. The assistant coaches, meanwhile, rib one another through their masks. There will be no tackling today.
“During a normal practice,” Reed says, “everybody’d be on top of each other, yelling and screaming and fussing.”
The disruption doesn’t bother Coach Reed, because to him, football—though still one of his great loves and obsessions—is not an end unto itself. He believes that for his players, it’s a portal to a better life, and that the portal remains open, even in the pandemic.
Nearly all of his players are Black, and most of them, he says, “come from really hard places.” Reed aggressively positions them to get scholarships, and his success rate is astonishing: Since his arrival at Lutheran North, in 2015, all of his seniors who’ve sought athletic scholarships (about 40 in all) managed to get one, including seven from Division I schools. In June, Reed put out a call to recruiters at historically Black colleges and universities, trying to get his boys on their radar; within a few months, six HBCUs had extended offers. This year, he has five seniors on his team. Two have already committed. Reed doesn’t doubt that the remaining three will end up with scholarships, even if the pandemic alters—or cancels—the season.
Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
He hypes his program daily on social media, dubbing Lutheran North “Scholarship High” and repeating this phrase: “You can go anywhere from here.” Talented athletes from other parts of St. Louis have even transferred to Lutheran North and played for Reed (although transferring for athletic reasons can render a student ineligible to play for a year; transfers are evaluated by the MSHAA). Reed’s teams have grown so formidable over the years that some schools in the Metro Athletic League, including John Burroughs and Priory, now refuse to play against them.
Yet Reed says that even if his kids don’t play college or professional ball, they’re forced to adopt a mindset that will serve them elsewhere. Across the field from us, a clutch of players are trudging up and down a steep grassy slope—punishment for being sloppy in a drill, Reed explains. “Why is it OK to not do your job right?” he asks rhetorically. “You know what you’re supposed to do, so why can’t you do it? Either you have no discipline or you just don’t care. It’s all about discipline and attention to detail.”
Last year, Reed noticed that one of his stars, Antonio Doyle, was lollygagging in practice, so he banished him for a week. Doyle, now a freshman linebacker at Texas A&M, remembers being furious in the moment but returning the next week with fire in his chest. “He had to show me that nobody’s more important than the program,” Doyle recalls. “Ninety-nine percent of what he’s teaching you has nothing to do with football.”
Reed believes that good coaches push kids to the brink of quitting but also take into account each kid’s personality. He points out a freshman who’s in the back corner of the field, lunging in the sun. “He’s gonna be special,” the coach half-whispers. “He has control of his body, and as a youngster, he has control of his mind, which is the strongest muscle.”
“Does he know he’s special?” I ask.
“Nah, I haven’t told him yet,” Reed says. “I don’t want to scare him.”
Practice is winding down. I squeeze in one last question: If the season does in fact go forward, which high school team in Missouri is he most worried about?
He shakes his head. “Just us,” he says. “If we’re doing all we’re supposed to do, nothing else matters.”
