FAR BEYOND FOOTBALL

Coach’s playbook includes life lessons

Ed Johnson, better known as Coach Ed, questions Dylan Lowery, 12, the varsity captain of the Sunset Tigers, about why he left his helmet at home before a practice at their field in Little Rock’s Southside Park on Sept. 19.
Ed Johnson, better known as Coach Ed, questions Dylan Lowery, 12, the varsity captain of the Sunset Tigers, about why he left his helmet at home before a practice at their field in Little Rock’s Southside Park on Sept. 19.

— A dozen boys at a time gather around an assistant football coach as he unleashes a haze of mosquito spray.

“Bow your heads like you’re praying, and it won’t get in your eyes,” yells Dylan Lowery, the 12-year-old team captain of the Sunset Tigers.

A rainy September weekend left standing water in the former creek bed that is now Southside Park. The tiny tree-lined property is better known as Sunset Park by the residents of Little Rock’s South End neighborhood, a small community east of the State Fairgrounds and south of Roosevelt Road.

More than 90 boys standing in line for bug spray play for the three tiers of Tigers. They range in age from 5-13. The coaches go through five cans of mosquito spray a week when it rains, said Coach Ed Johnson, the founder of the Tigers better known in the community as Coach Ed.

The field, a few yards from a back gate of the fairgrounds, has been the Tigers’ home since 1971.

The park is near the bottom of the city’s park maintenance schedule. The grass is often high, the bathrooms are leaky and snakes slither in the drainage ditches.

During home games, trains rattle and screech about 15 feet away from the edge of the field, drowning out the sounds of players, parents and the coaches’ whistles.

But the kids keep playing, and the parents keep cheering.

“There’s nowhere I would rather be on a Saturday,” says Coach Ed, sitting in a battered folding chair stationed beyond the end zone. “It might not be the Taj Mahal of fields, but this is our heaven.”

For 41 years, boys have flocked there — boys who didn’t have the money for more expensive programs; boys whose mothers decided they needed positive male role models; boys who followed their friends to practice because they wanted to be part of a winning team.

The football program, which targets at-risk youths and has spawned 18 National Football League players — including Keith Jackson — goes mostly unnoticed by people outside of South End.

“If you were a boy who grew up south of 630, you played for Coach Ed,” said community activist Robert Webb, whose lanky teenage frame appears in several Tigers team photos from the 1980s.

“You may have only played in one game or come to a few practices, but you played for Ed. The program has had a role in so many lives.

“There aren’t enough programs that address the needs of kids in this community, and there are even fewer aimed at teens once they age out.”

Various plans being considered for expanding the State Fairgrounds have some residents in South End worried for the Tigers’ home field.

Two of those plans focus west and avoid South End. A third looks at 58 acres of houses along Battery Street and stops just short of the park.

A fourth option affects the Tigers. Under it, the Arkansas Livestock Show Association, which sponsors the State Fair, would petition to build an offramp from Interstate 30 to the back gate of the fairgrounds. The association could look at acquiring the park, depending on the arc of the off-ramp and whether the train tracks need to be moved.

Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department spokesman Randy Ort said recently that the department has not begun studying the proposal, doing engineering on the possible location or having discussions with federal transportation authorities about the possibility.

Meanwhile, Coach Ed — now 63 — announced in November that he plans to quit coaching next season and hand the reins to his assistant coaches.

He will continue to sit in his tattered chair beyond the end zone, help arrange away games, and handle administrative matters or field repairs, however.

Letting go of something he’s spent so much care cultivating won’t be easy, and he jokes that he’s only 98 percent sure this will be his last season ... “unless some extenuating circumstance happens.”

TEACHING LIFE LESSONS

Coach Ed says the Tigers program started as a way to help himself as much as a way to reach boys who needed something positive in their lives.

Before he became Coach Ed, the Little Rock native was a 20-year-old Army Ranger who spent 15 months in combat in Vietnam.

Two injuries brought him home early and ended his military career. He was injured after stepping on an explosive hidden in a peanut butter can. Then a few months later, he was shot in both legs during an ambush.

Doctors told him that he would never regain full use of his legs. Lying in bed at the Little Rock Veterans Administration hospital, he said, he had a conversation with God.

When he got home, he said, he knew he would walk again and that he was supposed to start a football team.

“I hear all the time from my past players how much the program meant to them,” he said. “But without this program, I don’t know if I would have made it through all of that. I think we all needed something positive in our lives.”

During the first few seasons, the team gained fame for its winning record.

The program switched leagues several times, leaving a city league and eventually heading out on its own as an independent a few years ago.

Because of the team’s reputation, it was easy for it to attract opponents from as far away as Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri and other places.

The team wins, and it wins with grace.

While most youth leagues in Little Rock charge upward of $75 per child, Coach Ed makes do with $3 per boy. The players spend part of spring training sanding and repainting chipped helmets, and all the boys are issued used pants, pads and jerseys. They usually all get a crisp new pair socks.

He negotiates with sports stores and bus companies for team equipment and travel deals. He relies on parents and community volunteers to provide concessions, take tickets and do occasional maintenance jobs.

“He’s like a surrogate father to me,” says Michelle Smith, a player’s mother, who runs the concession stand.

“We argue and fuss, but the parents know when these boys enter those gates, they belong to the coaches, and they’re in good hands. He’s a role model, and he teaches them things that stick with them.”

Coach Ed guides his team members with life lessons peppered with football strategies and sportsmanship requirements.

“You can’t play if you aren’t in school,” says Jahmar Miller, 12. “And don’t assume they [their opponents] can’t play better than you,” he added.

“And you have to be respectful of your parents, and we have to be good winners and good losers ... show sportsmanship,” says Dylan, the team captain.

“I’ve learned to ... step up and to have confidence in myself since I started playing,” he adds with a grin. “I used to be shy.”

Almost every week, Coach Ed invites guests.

Prison guards, police officers, pastors, former felons, business owners and even state representatives visit, all to help the boys think about and plan how they want their futures to turn out.

He practices positive reinforcement off the field, too. Boys who go to church, for example, get invited out for burgers, or to play video games and talk about football at his house.

“You don’t go to church, you don’t go to McDonald’s,” a former player joked.

Coach Ed also hangs yellow paper signs on trees around the park to catch boys’ attention on their way to see their player statistics or to the concession stand.

Encouragement is everywhere.

One of his favorite signs reads, “An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”

SOME BOYS LOST

Despite his focus on positivity, Coach Ed knows his boys are not saints.

Once the team made the local news in a southeast Arkansas town for having a food fight at a McDonald’s that was so messy that the restaurant had to be shut down for cleaning.

Another time, coaches noticed on an overnight trip that the older players were flocking to one boy’s motel room. The boy had figured out how to order more than $50 worth of adult films on the motel television, leading to a ban on overnight trips for more than a year.

The coaches now recount those incidents with roars of laughter, but other stories are not at all funny. Ed assesses every boy and every circumstance independently, but boys who have run-ins with the police are not allowed to play.

This year, one player was arrested after his father used him to help sell “fake drugs” to an undercover police officer. The coaches think the 11-year-old was subsequently sent to a youthful-offender lockup in Louisiana, closer to where his mother lives.

Coach Ed reaches more boys than he loses, but inevitably some are lost.

The pastor at Coach Ed’s church runs a prison ministry and recalled a recent sermon in which he told prisoners that people can always doubt words but cannot doubt a person’s actions. The phrase sounded familiar to the prisoners, who started talking and realized that they had all heard it from Coach Ed during football practice.

“There must have been 20 of them, and I let him talk me into going up there and seeing them,” Coach Ed says.

“I had tears in my eyes. They were all saying, ‘Coach do you remember me?’ And they were all apologizing to me for the things they had done and for not listening to me. I told them they didn’t have to apologize to me because they were living with their mistakes.”

Some mistakes are harder to live with, he says.

At Coach Ed’s house in a room painted Sunset Tiger orange, his military medals and community-service awards hang near trophies, plaques and team photos from almost every Tiger season. There are homemade certificates for every player who has made it to a college team or to the NFL.

A plaque on one wall lists names in small, simple black letters. Coach Ed says those are the boys he lost to street violence.

“A lot of these boys died because of gangs. Some of them were just kids when all of that was happening,” he says.

“I worry for these boys. Some of them don’t have a choice. They just have so much that stacks up against them, and I worry about where they’re going to be in a couple years. I just try to give them something positive, to show them they’re worth something.”

At the beginning of this season, the team held a ceremony to retire the jersey of TyJuan Woodard, 14, who was accidentally killed by a 13-year-old friend in May.

TyJuan, who had run away from home, was shot in the chest while he sat on a couch. The boy who shot him told police that he got scared, covered TyJuan with a blanket and ran. It was hours before someone else found TyJuan and called police.

TyJuan’s three brothers all play for Coach Ed now. His father has taken up volunteering as an assistant coach, trying to reach boys like his son.

“I told them the best way they can honor their brother is to play. He wouldn’t want it any other way,” says Tasha Mardis, TyJuan’s mother. “Every year they’re here, we see so many good things from them.”

Sitting on the splintered wooden bleachers, Mardis watches her youngest son fall as another player hits him low. She stops to yell some encouraging words, “You’re OK. Shake it off, baby. You’re OK.”

LOOKING AHEAD

The boys play their hearts out for Coach Ed.

While he sits in his tattered chair, the boys clamor for seats on a nearby bench made out of spare wood, milk crates and cinder blocks. They ask if he remembers that time they ran so many yards for a touchdown, or that time they landed wrong on their knees because they didn’t listen to his advice.

Coach Ed says this is where he will start spending more of his time as the assistant coaches take over.

For a few years now, the younger coaches have been leading the youngest squad of boys and the junior varsity team. Next year, they’ll take over coaching the varsity team.

Some parents worry that the boys won’t get the same lessons and be held to the same standard under the new coaches, but Coach Ed said he won’t disappear from the boys’ lives.

“I’ll be right here. I’ll be yelling and cheering and spending my weekends in heaven,” he said.

He’ll also start discussions with the Thrasher Boys and Girls Club to use some of its property for football practice if the fair expansion encroaches on Sunset Park.

The club is about 10 blocks from the park, so the distance wouldn’t be a problem. But the Boys and Girls Club doesn’t have a striped football field or a scoreboard, and no one has peppered its trees with mottos of encouragement and life lessons.

Coach Ed knows it would be a different experience for the boys, who all think of the park as home. But he says he wants to focus on other things unless the expansion becomes a reality — other things like the Tigers’ winning season.

The varsity boys had a nearly perfect 16-1 record this season.

On Nov. 17, almost 600 people — including many ex-players — were on hand to watch the last regular season game after a local radio station announced Coach Ed’s retirement.

“At halftime we were down 6-0, and by the end of the game, we had gained on them and won 20-6,” he says, noting that the other team was coached by an ex-Tiger.

Boys and parents gathered around Coach Ed, who was dressed in his usual head-totoe Tiger orange, and hoisted him off the ground. They carried him across the field and along a line of handshakes.

“That is something I always wanted to happen,” he says. “What a way to end my last regular season game as a coach. Whether I’m coach or not, the Tigers are still gonna play ... somewhere. And I guarantee they’re going to be the boys with the most heart.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/09/2012

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