A violent clash of football haves and have-nots

In the world of Sacramento prep football, starring for the Grant Union Pacers turned teenagers into local celebrities. McClatchy’s boys knew them by number and name.

“There’s 11, the freshman,” a McClatchy player said of Koby Shabazz, who was the smallest player on his team but also its leader in receiving yards and already hearing from college scouts.

“There’s Wayshawn,” another boy said of Wayshawn Parker, a lightning-quick running back with a growing collection of Division I scholarship offers.

“Uhhh, there’s Kingston,” another boy said of Kingston Lopa, the city’s most in-demand recruit, a 6-foot-5 heat-seeking-missile of a linebacker, who turned down LSU and USC to play at Oregon next year.

The McClatchy Lions had lost their first three games of the season by a combined score of 142-0. But they had won their fourth, sending a surge of optimism through the program that couldn’t have come at a better time: Their fifth game was against Grant, a defending state champion that had produced 27 NFL athletes and counted nearly twice as many players and four times as many coaches as McClatchy.

“We’re going up against the biggest and baddest of the area Thursday night, but these guys put their pads on just like you,” Tracy Mitchell, the school’s football coach and guidance counselor, had told his players that week. “There’s nothing superhuman about them.”

But now that the pads were on, there was no obscuring the reality barreling toward the 34 boys in white and red: They were about to put their bodies at risk in a game no one outside their locker room gave them any chance of winning.

Competitive imbalance exists in all sports. But crashing into a dominant opponent in football means not just losing by a wide margin but getting physically pummeled — and potentially facing a heightened risk of brain trauma. And as football participation rates fall across most of the country, those mismatches are becoming harder to avoid in some places — Davids battling Goliaths in an age-old drama that takes on darker tones as a growing field of research reveals the true dangers of playing the sport.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Sacramento. In states along the Pacific coast, high school football participation has dropped at larger rates than the nation as a whole. Roughly 14,000 fewer boys in California played high school football in 2022 than a decade earlier — a decline of about 13 percent when adjusted for public school enrollment. But in California’s football hotbeds, some of the best programs in the country continue to thrive, preserving an elite tier of teams amid a sea of programs struggling to stay afloat.

In Orange County, the Bay Area, San Diego, the Inland Empire, and the Sierra Nevada foothills, top teams have clustered in super leagues designed to maintain competitive balance throughout the season. But in the Metropolitan League, which includes seven public schools from Sacramento and its closest suburbs, some of the Central Valley’s strongest and weakest teams converge. Last season, the league’s top three teams, including Grant, defeated the league’s bottom three, including McClatchy, by an average score of 57 to 6.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” Norma Hernandez recalls thinking when she saw her son, Sammy, take the field against Grant. “They are so much better than us. Why we’re playing each other, I don’t understand.”

For McClatchy’s players, though, the daunting risks brought a chance for monumental rewards. The matchup featured two of Sacramento’s oldest high schools, both founded in the 1930s and locally renowned for their distinctive histories. A win against Grant would ring through the city and cement a joyful memory they would reminisce about for the rest of their lives. College scouts were in the stands, too, drawn by Grant’s blue-chippers but open to bestowing scholarships on anyone capable of excelling against them.

“Somebody could change their life today,” bellowed Rodney Davis Sr., who had a 16-year-old son on the team and volunteered as an assistant coach, as the boys prepared to make their way to the field. “This game matters.”

Adding to the motivation: It was Grant’s homecoming week. To keep the party from getting spoiled, teams tend to schedule the event around a non-threatening opponent.

“They chose us for their homecoming,” Mitchell said to the players. “That’s disrespect. You guys could shock the world!”

Under a glowing orange sky, the team lined up outside the locker room, then marched through the parking lot, toward the stadium, which thrummed with raucous cheers and music from Grant’s drum line, louder and louder the closer they got. They walked through a maze of cars and spectators sizing them up. One man in a Grant T-shirt asked with sarcasm if he was looking at the junior varsity team.

On the field, Mitchell sensed his players on edge. Scanning the serious faces gathered around him, he tried to loosen their nerves.

“I want y’all smiling,” he said. “Don’t quit, don’t give up, and don’t be afraid.”

Across the field, Grant players danced to the drums, moving with a casual swagger. The boys on McClatchy’s sideline stood like statues. Some had never played football before this season. Most had never played before high school. For all the hope he had stirred, Mitchell could see that his players held no delusions. As kickoff approached, he addressed the previously unspoken possibility that hung over them.

“Listen, guys, I don’t care if the score is 100 to nothing,” he said. “You keep playing.”

Then, almost in a whisper: “Keep playing.”

Monday, Sept. 18, 5:15 p.m.

In the hot, dry air of summer’s final breath, junior Sammy Hernandez-Hartman tucked the football and cut past teammates posing as Grant defenders. It was the week’s first day of practice, and Sammy was preparing for a game he wasn’t supposed to play.

Last year against Grant, Sammy suffered a concussion after taking a big hit.

“I looked up, and the sideline was all blurry,” he says. “I couldn’t walk straight.”

His mother, Norma, sprinted down the stands, watching from the fence as a trainer asked him the series of questions used to diagnose concussions at every level from Pop Warner to the NFL. Norma wanted him to stop playing football right then.

“I know that after one concussion, the next one is going to do more damage,” she says.

Sammy pleaded to remain in the sport. After a doctor cleared him to suit up two weeks later, mother and son negotiated a deal: He could stay on the team on the condition that he sit out the next year’s game against Grant.

“We will go out of town, whatever, but I will not let you play against them,” she recalls saying.

Baseball had been Sammy’s favorite sport growing up. But years of watching the San Francisco 49ers with his parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles and cousins made him a football fan, too.

During those Sunday gatherings, Sammy’s older sister, Maricela, would retreat to her bedroom upstairs to watch a movie, while shouts of joy and anguish echoed through the house. She came to believe the sport’s popularity stems from bringing people together by providing “these excuses to hang out, instead of just saying, ‘I miss you, let’s hang out,’ ” she says. “It’s such an ingrained part of our culture that if you don’t like it, you’re an outcast.”

One day, in the summer after eighth grade, Sammy asked his parents for permission to play in high school.

“And I was literally just like, ‘Wait, no,’ ” Norma recalls.

But Sammy pressed his case. After spending part of seventh grade and all of eighth grade stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, he was eager to connect with his peers — a yearning that may help explain why the national high school football participation rate in 2022 rebounded to match the 2018 mark. The August practices, he said, would offer a chance to bond with other boys before classes started.

“Then you start school and have friends already,” Norma recalls him saying.

Sammy’s dad, Mike Hartman, who wasn’t a big sports fan, called a relative whose son recently played high school football. From that conversation, he learned that the sport took brain injuries more seriously than it used to, with updated concussion protocols, rules aimed at eliminating the most vicious hits and, in California, a state law limiting full contact at practices to 60 minutes a week. Mike declared his tepid support.

Norma asked Sammy to watch “Concussion,” the Will Smith movie that chronicled the NFL’s effort to suppress evidence that the sport was more dangerous than league officials publicly claimed. It didn’t temper his interest. She, too, reluctantly agreed to let him play.

After spending ninth grade at a private school, Sammy transferred to McClatchy, a public school with a strong academic reputation and an art deco campus in Land Park, a stately neighborhood draped with canopies of trees. He joined its football team at a promising moment. The year before, McClatchy had a winning record and made the Sac-Joaquin Section playoffs for the first time in 25 years.

He was afraid to hit at first, “but you get used to it,” he says. By his sophomore season, he wasn’t merely used to the contact but hungry for it. “I like just getting to go out and hit somebody as hard as I can,” he says. “Not many opportunities in life you get to do that.”

His concussion last year left him with headaches and brain fog. For nearly two weeks, Maricela observed him sitting on the couch each day, silently watching television, “struggling to think,” she says. “It was scary.”

But once Sammy had recovered, he was more concerned that the injury meant he had to promise his mom that he would skip the Grant game the following season.

“She was all worried that it happened once, so it could happen again,” he says.

His teammate Cesar Romero Jr., a hulking senior and team captain who anchored McClatchy’s offensive and defensive lines, shared Sammy’s enthusiasm for the game’s combat. In their eyes, football forged a unique camaraderie through the collective understanding that each player was putting their body on the line for their teammates.

“You can’t get that feeling anywhere else,” says Cesar, who grew up watching Raiders games with his dad, Cesar Sr. “It brings something out of me. I can’t let go of it.”

Ending up on the wrong side of a collision didn’t instill fear in Cesar, he says, but only hardened his resolve. In the second game of this season, while McClatchy was getting blown out by a team from the suburbs, Cesar took a hit that left him dazed. The trainer diagnosed him with a concussion. When Coach Mitchell refused to let him back into the game, Cesar broke into tears.

He didn’t miss much. In the third quarter, a McClatchy player suffered a broken leg and left the stadium in an ambulance. With McClatchy down 44-0, both coaches agreed to end the game early.

“It’s scary,” Cesar Sr. says. “But we love this sport.”

The following week, without Cesar, McClatchy lost 55-0. He returned for the fourth game, against Kennedy, McClatchy’s biggest rival. Two thousand spectators packed the stands, including a sea of McClatchy students wearing matching white shirts, chanting support for their winless classmates, tossing handfuls of baby powder into the air to set the mood.

“No matter how good your other teams, a school is known by their football team,” says Mitchell. “Kids want to be part of that for the same reason I wake up early on a Sunday morning. It’s football.”

Despite its sparse football tradition, McClatchy has maintained higher participation numbers than other city schools of its caliber. Much of the credit goes to Mitchell, who has been a counselor at the school for a decade and was the junior varsity coach for two years before taking the varsity job at the end of last season. He knows almost every student on campus and encourages any boy with size or athleticism to play. When concerned parents ask him about the sport’s dangers, he explains that he can’t guarantee a player won’t get hurt, but he tries to mitigate the risks by training coaches to recognize concussion symptoms, submitting helmets for professional inspection every two years and teaching his players rugby-style tackling techniques that emphasize using the shoulder instead of the head to initiate contact.

After opening with three scoreless games, Mitchell reconfigured the offense. Against Kennedy, when the team needed to gain a precious few yards, he removed Cesar from the line and handed him the ball. Recovered from his concussion, he bulled his way forward for two touchdowns. The most dramatic change, though, involved Sammy, who was elevated into a starring role. Quick and sturdy, he carried the ball 18 times for 146 yards, the most of any McClatchy player in a game this season, and scored his first varsity touchdown. McClatchy won, 34-18, setting off an ecstatic celebration in the locker room.

Then, just as Sammy’s football prospects looked brightest, his year-old promise came due. Grant was next.

But much had changed in 12 months. He was one of the team’s most important players now, its primary offensive weapon. His teammates needed him. Any chance McClatchy had of keeping pace with Grant hinged on Sammy’s ability to move the ball. And what if he proved capable of burrowing through Grant’s vaunted defense, in front of all the scouts and all the city? His mother knew he couldn’t bear to pass up the moment.

“The closer we got to the Grant game,” she says, “I realized Sammy wasn’t fully on board with that plan anymore.”

Two days before Homecoming

Tuesday, Sept. 19, 3:59 p.m.

One minute before Grant’s 4 p.m. practice was scheduled to begin, Hakim Reynolds, a senior linebacker with a bashful smile and 3.3 G.P.A., stepped onto the track encircling the field, broke into a jog, and called out to his teammates: “Ay, let’s start that s— up! Let’s go!”

They followed him for a lap, then lined up in rows across the field, where Reynolds led them through warm-up drills.

“It’s a good day, baby!” he boomed.

Stragglers still making their way from the locker room faced a barrage of reprimands from teammates.

“Do your f—in’ lap!”

“Don’t cheat that s—!”

“Stop walkin’, bruh, come on!”

The team’s coaches stood casually off to the side, chatting in a loose circle, not a single eye on the field. Of the 15 coaches on staff, 13 were Grant alumni, most with deep family ties to the school. The motto painted on campus walls, “Pacer for Life,” reflected a community knitted together for generations.

“If you’re not kin to everybody, you might as well be,” says Oscar Hayes, the eldest assistant coach, who attended Grant in the 1970s, when its athletic department was best known for baseball. His granddaughter was now a ninth grader there.

The coaches didn’t need to watch their players warm up because the Pacer way is deeply entrenched. Elders passed down customs and expectations. Koby Shabazz and Kingston Lopa had older brothers on last year’s team. Ronnie Noa, a sophomore lineman, had played his freshman season lined up beside his cousin, Alani Noa, who was now a starting offensive lineman for USC. Another cousin played at Fresno State. A third at Utah, a fourth at Kansas. Now, Ronnie’s younger brother played on the Junior Pacers, Grant’s feeder program, which fields youth football teams in five age groups ranging from 6 to 14 years old.

On Saturdays, Ronnie gathers with more than a dozen family members in the living room to watch his cousins on TV. During commercial and halftime breaks, kids and adults alike head to the apartment building’s front yard to throw a football around — with a penalty of 10 pushups for anyone who drops it.

“It’s really just in our blood,” Ronnie says of the sport. “It just don’t feel right without it.”

More than a third of Grant’s players are of Polynesian descent, part of a diaspora that has expanded in Sacramento in recent decades, infusing Grant’s football culture with a wave of immigrant families bringing generational passion for collision sports. The Noa family contributes to a trend increasingly visible to anyone who tunes in: From 2011 to 2022, the number of Division I college football players of Hawaiian or Pacific Island descent rose from 340 to 521.

Ronnie’s roots in Grant’s community trace to his grandfather, Sekope Noa, a member of Tonga’s national rugby team who moved to Sacramento in the early 1980s. He landed in Del Paso Heights, a neighborhood of mid-century homes with wood sidings and iron fences built over old ranchland north of the American River, because it offered affordable housing thanks to decades of white flight and redlining policies that suppressed property values of the predominantly Black residents.

He couldn’t find rugby on American television, but football was on 20 Sundays a year. Growing up, Ronnie’s mother, Lineni, remembers her father making sure they made it back from church in time to catch the 49ers on television.

“We fell in love just watching,” Lineni says.

Lineni was a star basketball player at Grant, graduating in 1997, before going on to play at Hampton University. After a stint on the Sacramento Monarchs practice squad, she returned to coach for Grant’s basketball team in 2006. On Friday nights, she was among the alumni in the stands, where well-worn seat cushions lined the wooden benches, peanut shells speckled the cement steps, and parents wore shirts screen-printed with photos of their sons.

Over those years, she witnessed one of the greatest stretches of football dominance in the history of the Sac-Joaquin Section, where strip-mall suburbs sprawl around lush green farmland across northern California’s Central Valley. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Grant won 207 games while losing just 36, racking up four section titles in 15 years and a state championship in 2008, when it defeated famous football factory Long Beach Poly in a game televised on ESPN. By the time her oldest child, Ronnie, was 10, he was a Junior Pacer. But as his high school enrollment approached, Lineni began to doubt whether Grant was the best place for her son.

Grant’s run of dominance was an outlier in California. Football, with its copious gear and high insurance costs, is the most expensive of all school-sponsored sports. The most successful programs tend to bloom from affluent Zip codes, where fundraisers bring equipment upgrades and parents send their kids to private training clinics in the offseason.

As Grant ascended to national prominence, some of its Metropolitan League opponents no longer offered much competition. With families flocking to Sacramento’s newly emerging suburbs over the last three decades, city public schools lost enrollment, reducing the supply of potential football players. During one stretch from 2006 to 2008, Grant beat McClatchy 78-0, 86-0, and 89-0.

To minimize mismatches, California Interscholastic Federation officials reevaluate league assignments every four years and allow schools to petition for a change every two years. Grant switched to a more competitive suburban league in 2010, continued to thrive, then in 2018 moved into the section’s toughest league, made up of schools from the high-income Sierra Nevada foothills. But the program struggled to keep up with opponents in the top conference, suffering four straight losing seasons, firing its longtime head coach, and sparking concerns that it was succumbing to the downturn that plagued other public school around the city. Athletic director Carl Reed, an upbeat computer science teacher who played at Grant in the mid-1990s and served as an assistant coach for more than 20 years, took over as head coach and decided to move the team back into the Metropolitan League for the 2022 season to help restore the joy football had long instilled in the school’s community.

He promoted Syd’Quan Thompson, a Grant star in the early 2000s, to co-head coach, empowering him to oversee the team’s on-field strategy. Thompson poached a rival’s quarterback coach, Josiah Johnson, to modernize Grant’s antiquated offense, and he went about speaking to parents who had developed doubts about the program.

Lineni was planning to send Ronnie to private school, with his football promise assuring a robust financial aid package. But she had known Thompson for years. Beloved among his players, who nicknamed him “Syd Legend,” Thompson had graduated from Cal, then played a season in the NFL before a torn Achilles’ tendon derailed his career. His family, like those of many of his players, was entwined with the program. Two younger brothers followed his steps: Ricky, a star on the 2006 section title team, now joined him on the coaching staff, and Shaq, a star on the 2008 state championship team, was in his ninth year in the NFL. Lineni was convinced Syd was an ideal mentor to help Ronnie get to college.

“Football is a tool for us,” Thompson says. “Sports are short-lived, but the resources you get around you can last a lifetime.”

Last fall, Grant returned to its dominant ways, winning 12 of 14 games en route to its second state championship. Alumni dubbed the season “the rebirth.”

The success carried into this season. Entering its homecoming week, Grant had won four of five games and placed third in the Sacramento Bee’s weekly ranking of top local high school teams. Grant’s only defeat was a 21-18 heartbreaker against second-ranked Oak Ridge, a Sierra Nevada foothills powerhouse whose stadium in the El Dorado County highlands boasts a scoreboard with a video screen, a concession stand serving Chick-fil-A sandwiches, and cannons that boom after every home team touchdown.

Competing in the Metro means lower transportation costs and games against schools with similar demographics — the majority of students on almost every Metro League campus this year are non-White and qualify for subsidized lunch. Grant’s most recent game, on Sept. 15, was its first of the season against a Metro League opponent. Luther Burbank High School had been a playoff contender a decade ago. But its enrollment diminished by 30 percent from 2003 to 2019, and the football program stumbled amid the sport’s concussion crisis. This season, Burbank arrived at Grant’s stadium with 15 players, the minimum required under state rules. Grant was up 35-0 by halftime, on the way to a 48-0 victory.

To keep players sharp in the days before a contest none of them were worried about, Reed aimed to “make practice harder than the game,” he says. As dusk turned the palm trees into silhouettes swaying against the lavender sky, Grant’s starting offense smashed against its starting defense, battling to push the ball into the end zone in a heated competition that ignited trash talk among coaches. Boys celebrated big plays by waving their wrists in the air to mimic Colorado University quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who recently had gone viral for taunting an opponent by flaunting his watch.

The stadium was alive with energy. An E-40 song bumped from a speaker. Majorettes rehearsed dance moves on the track. Parents looked on from the stands. Students hunched on the wooden bleachers tapped out homework assignments on their laptops.

On the other end of the field, the Junior Pacers began strapping on their pads. Their practice would begin once varsity practice ended. Nearly every varsity coach stayed to help out, to establish a continuity that ensured a steady stream of talent to the high school. Syd and Ricky Thompson, along with several of their old teammates, now had kids on the Junior Pacers.

Many of Grant’s top players started playing tackle football before middle school. But Hakim Reynolds, the senior linebacker leading warmups, didn’t put on pads until eighth grade. Unlike some of his higher-profile teammates, he didn’t yet have any scholarship offers, but he was emerging as a star, the standout player of the Burbank game, when he tied a Sac-Joaquin Section single-game record with three interceptions returned for touchdowns.

He hoped to attend an HBCU. One of his teachers described her alma mater, Tuskegee, as a place that felt “like a second home,” he recalls. A football scholarship meant he could advance his education without taking out hefty loans. Every play was another chance to heighten his stock before time ran out.

Teams like Burbank and McClatchy posed a particular challenge. College scouts watching a highlight reel or reviewing statistics consider an opponent’s merits, so to make an impression Grant’s players had to “destroy them,” Reynolds says.

“We’d rather play harder teams,” he says. “We don’t want anybody to really be hurt.”

Thursday, Sept. 21, 7:18 p.m.

On the first play of the game, Sammy ran a sweep to the left side. Norma had relented on the year-old agreement; she watched from the stands in a state of “constant panic,” she says.

Hakim sprinted to cut him off. Before he could turn the corner, Sammy collided with a wall of Grant defenders, who drove him into the ground.

Sammy felt a sharp pain in his hand. McClatchy’s trainer feared he had suffered a fracture. After a single play, his night was done.

“A part of me was almost glad that he got hurt on the very first play,” Norma says, “so I don’t have to worry about it the rest of the game.”

It was an ugly game. Grant defenders shoved McClatchy’s offense backward, blasting through the line and swallowing whoever had the ball. Grant’s offense never had far to go and didn’t need more than two or three plays to reach the end zone, rattling off five touchdowns within the first nine minutes. At the end of the first quarter, the scoreboard showed 35-0.

“It was boring,” Kingston Lopa says. “It felt like there was no point in playing.”

Some McClatchy players were even avoiding contact, Hakim says, retreating rather than pushing ahead to block or tackle their opponents.

“They were just playing like they didn’t want to play against us,” he says. “They played scared.”

But Grant players couldn’t ease up. College scouts from Oregon, Mississippi State, and Arizona were in the stands. The Arizona scout had dropped by the school that morning to meet with Koby Shabazz, the first time the freshman had experienced a recruiting visit. He immediately called his parents.

Late in the first quarter, McClatchy’s backup running back hurt his leg when he crashed into a pack of defenders. He tried to stay in the game but could barely stand and soon had to limp off the field.

With his two top running backs suddenly out, Mitchell turned to a player on the sideline and asked him to go in to replace the injured teammate. The boy refused.

“They not blocking,” he said.

Mitchell faced a dilemma he had never experienced as a coach. He needed somebody to play, to carry the ball, to try to gain yards and score touchdowns — never had he imagined that nobody on his team would want the spot. He gazed at his players lined up along the sideline, contemplating whom to ask next. Some stared straight ahead, as if to avoid eye contact.

Suddenly, a voice behind him said, “I’ll do it coach.”

It was Rodney Davis Jr. Rodney, a lean junior who often cracked up his teammates with spot-on impressions of their coaches, usually played wide receiver on offense and linebacker on defense. He had touched the ball exactly once all season. He had grown up playing basketball and hadn’t seriously thought about joining the football team until Coach Mitchell invited him to sign up last spring.

Many of his friends were on the team. Though his early weeks in pads felt uncomfortable, he acclimated to the physical rigors and mental demands, discovering that the sport gave him “more of an adrenaline rush” than basketball did, he says.

Against Grant, though, there was little he could do. Rodney expected the players would be big and fast, but what impressed him most was their understanding of the game. “They were well organized,” he says, “and always knew where to be.” With one side unable to gather even the slightest hint of momentum, the action didn’t look much like a football game but more like a conquest. As McClatchy’s players tired out and lost any hope of shocking the world, the hits turned more violent. More boys limped off the field. The team was no longer competing to win but to survive.

Grant’s supporters lost steam, too, their homecoming energy dimmed from the absence of on-field drama. McClatchy parents leaned forward with nervous eyes and restless legs, silent except for occasional shouts of encouragement.

Halfway into the second quarter, McClatchy’s quarterback took the snap and looked to pass. Behind him, Kingston blitzed from the left edge, sprinting unimpeded into the backfield. Kingston had already dropped the quarterback three times and seemed poised for another thumping sack. But Rodney Jr. saw him coming, and a split-second before Kingston would have slammed into his teammate’s back, he threw his body in front of the superstar linebacker — and then everything went black.

Thursday, Sept. 21, 8:07 p.m.

Every player took a knee. The stadium fell silent. An ambulance rolled onto the turf. Rodney Sr., along with Coach Mitchell and trainers from both teams, crouched over the boy. Paramedics unscrewed Rodney Jr.’s face mask off his helmet.

He was disoriented and barely able to keep his eyes open. Noises sounded muffled. The world seemed titled. He felt like he was underwater. There was no doubt that he had a concussion. As paramedics strapped Rodney onto a stretcher, his teammates gathered around him to express support.

By the time the stretcher wheeled Rodney to the ambulance parked at the edge of the field, more than 20 minutes had passed since the play that toppled him.

“Listen, I know it’s emotional,” Mitchell said to his players. “It’s football. It happens. That’s all precautionary measures. He’s going to be fine.”

Back when Mitchell played for McClatchy in the early 1990s, the scene wouldn’t have been so jarring. A concussed player wouldn’t have been stretchered off into an ambulance but helped to his feet, guided to the bench, offered water, and asked if he felt capable of returning to the game. Few in the stands would have realized the extent of the injury.

Now, though, there was no ignoring the harm football caused. The ambulance wasn’t just a protective measure but a reminder of the game’s stakes: the depths of its dangers and the widespread efforts to manage those risks responsibly. The ambulance offered a Rorschach test, a symbol of the sport’s brutality to some, a mark of the sport’s progress to others.

All McClatchy’s players saw, though, was the vehicle shuttling their damaged comrade to the hospital. The faces gathered around Mitchell looked dejected and petrified. He glanced up at the scoreboard: 47-0, six minutes left in the second quarter.

Mitchell consulted with assistant coach Ron Braxton, who had the same thought in mind.

“This is not real war,” Braxton remembers thinking. “We’re not going till the last man down. It’s not hard to want to protect them.”

Mitchell walked over to Grant coach Reed and asked if they could call it a night.

Recounting the exchange later, Mitchell says he felt embarrassed to make the request. College recruiters were in attendance. It was Grant’s homecoming. In all his years coaching, Reed had witnessed countless blowouts and scores of injuries, and not once had an opponent proposed to end a game early.

But he couldn’t refuse a coach’s plea for mercy. Both men returned to the sidelines to inform their boys.

“Grab your stuff, get on the bus, and let’s get the hell out of here,” Mitchell said to his team. “Let’s go be together as a family.”

The players on both teams lined up at midfield to shake hands. The public address announcer explained to the confused crowd that the game was over. One grandmother on the McClatchy side objected to the decision, shouting, “What are you teaching these kids?”

But even Cesar Jr., the tough-as-nails captain who cried when a concussion kept him out of a game, believed his coach made the right call.

“Seeing him laying there, it was difficult,” he says. “It sucked. I wanted to play football, but basically, we were on track to end the game with barely 11 players.”

The McClatchy boys picked up their duffel bags from a pile on the sideline and made their way toward the parking lot, pausing at the track to let a parade of motorcycles and convertibles stream past.

The homecoming festivities were underway. The cars carried Grant students nominated for homecoming royalty. The public address announcer tried to hype up the crowd, still reeling from the sudden vibe shift. The drummers performed and the majorettes danced. Grant’s players lined up along the track to watch. Nobody seemed to be in a celebratory mood.

As the party sputtered to life behind them, the McClatchy boys filed onto their bus, still wearing shoulder pads as they sunk into their seats.

The day after Grant’s Homecoming

Friday, Sept. 22, 4:07 p.m.

The classroom carried the heavy air of a confessional booth. Mitchell had opened the team meeting with a simple question: How do you feel about what happened last night? One after the other, the boys unloaded their vulnerabilities.

“I was scared. It didn’t go away the way it usually goes away.”

“When people asked me if we would win, I would say, like, ‘Hell yeah,’ but I personally felt deep down that I was kind of faking it.”

“I didn’t do my part. I was hella nervous. It got to me.”

“I apologize to my teammates who got injured because I didn’t do my job.”

“We thought we tried, and it wasn’t working, so we might as well stop trying.”

“It seemed like nobody wanted to play.”

“Before the game, I was not scared. In the locker room, I started getting scared. On the field, I got really scared.”

As the boys began to realize that their friends shared their emotions, the tension in the room loosened. Speakers began peppering their comments with self-deprecating humor that uplifted spirits.

“Going there, I was a little scared, but I feel like we could at least score a point. But once I got on the field, lined up for the first play, I was like, there ain’t no way.”

Laughter filled the room.

Some minutes into the meeting, the door opened, and in walked Rodney Jr. The boys clapped. Rodney went around and slapped hands with everybody.

He had woken up with a headache that morning and stayed home from school, but he wanted to show his teammate that he was okay.

“I just wanted to let people know injuries happen, and you’ve just got to bounce back,” he says.

His memory of the night was hazy. He had spent a few hours at the hospital with his father. They returned home around 1:30 a.m.

Sitting alone in the quiet living room after his son went to sleep, Rodney Sr. had poured himself a glass of cognac. He understood the dangers his son faced playing football. He allowed him to play because he believed the rewards outweighed the risks. Those rewards didn’t include a college scholarship or professional riches. To Rodney Sr., football’s primary benefits were more abstract, and harder to measure.

“That human connection, that’s the biggest currency, that’s what I want for him,” he says. “I don’t want him to miss the bonds with his teammates. People he’ll know for the rest of his life. I just want him to have fun, make happy memories, and enjoy being a kid. I don’t have all the answers. I’m just trying to do my best as a father.”

Back in the classroom, the coaches looked ahead at the games to come. In two weeks, McClatchy would play Monterey Trail, a school that opened in the southern suburbs in 2004, quickly built a football juggernaut, and last year was the only Metro League team to beat Grant.

“They play the same type of come-at-you-and-get-your-ass football that you just saw last night,” Braxton said.

Over their last three match-ups, Monterey Trail had tallied 150 points to McClatchy’s 7. Two other forthcoming opponents, Laguna Creek and River City, had beaten McClatchy last year by a combined 93-26.

The season wasn’t going to get much easier. At the end of the Friday afternoon meeting, Mitchell asked the boys another question.

“Who wants to stay on the team?” he said. “Stand up if you want to continue playing.”

To measure tackle football participation rates, The Post collected data from the National Federation of State High School Associations’ annual reports. The NFHS doesn’t require state associations – which include public and, depending on the state, some private schools – to follow a specific process for collecting this data, and states have varying approaches to account for schools that do not submit their roster sizes. In the Post’s analysis, only boys who participated in 11-player football are included.

In general, years refer to the fall of an academic year, so football participation in the 2022-23 school year is described as 2022. Participation rates are adjusted based on public high school enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The values for 2022 are projections.

The NCAA releases demographic data that is self-reported by athletes and coaches, following federal guidelines for collecting and reporting race and ethnicity information. The NCAA places international athletes in their own category, so they are not counted in the totals for each race.

Data reporter Emily Giambalvo contributed to this report. Editing by Joe Tone. Copy editing by Ryan Romano. Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Video editing by Lindsey Sitz. Design by Andrew Braford. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar. Projects editing by KC Schaper.