A rapper, a five-star and a dynasty: Take a peek inside Miami high school football in 2021
Throughout the season, the Miami Herald will bring you different stories about high school football in Miami — the culture, the players, the coaches, the people and the history — to explain why football means so much to this city.
In Miami Gardens on the first day of high school football practice in 2021, it’s a little before 12:40 p.m., and the players from the Miami Gardens Monsignor Pace football team grouse while they walk through the South Florida sun and out to the practice field for the first walk-through of a season with state championship aspirations.
When they cross the threshold into their stadium, Shemar Stewart pauses for a moment. He’s decked out from head to toe in Texas A&M Aggies gear — the school name on his shirt and a logo on his shorts; he even has a pair of maroon-and-white shoes to match — and watches everyone take their places first. He’s a five-star recruit — the top-ranked player in the region, according to the 247Sports.com composite rankings — and his past few months of mayhem are mercifully over. He took about a dozen college trips in June and spent the final weekend of July in College Station, Texas — a final hurrah before he could back to focusing on his senior season at Pace.
“It was great,” he says. At this point, he is a man of few words when it comes to recruiting.
He takes his place in the middle of the defensive line and stands across from Juwan Dowels, the Spartans’ 25-year-old defensive coordinator. It was just a few years ago Dowels was a star cornerback at Plantation American Heritage, and now he’s one of the men in charge of getting the most out of a 6-foot-5, 260-pound phenom
The first on-field workout of the season lasts all of 25 minutes. At 1:04 p.m., two trainers walk across the field and interrupt Dowels. There’s lightning in the area and the team has to get off the field.
Last year, Monsignor Pace went just 1-4. Florida weather is undefeated.
A few dozen players huddle into a classroom with defensive line coach Moe Marquez supervising while they fill out participation waivers. Coaches like him are some of the most important men in high school football — the ones who worry about their players’ recruitments.
Tied to his bag is still the credential from his and Stewart’s trip to Texas A&M and he recounts their weekend. While he was there, an Aggies coach recognizes him. Before he got to Monsignor Pace, Marquez was a coach for the Fort Lauderdale Hurricanes — a juggernaut in Pop Warner Little Scholars — and they happened to pummel this coach’s team.
It’s South Florida. Even pee-wee teams have a reputation.
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In Little Haiti, a small peephole — no larger than a single brick removed from the wall — looks from a coach’s office out to Miami Edison’s practice field and a coach peers through it to see the most pristine high school field in the inner city. A few seconds pass and he goes back to sorting through players’ physicals, and sifting through boxes of T-shirts to make sure his offense is all in red and the defense in black.
The field is immaculate turf, with Adidas logos at either 25-yard line and a sign in one end zone touting itself as being made from 1.8 million recycled water bottles. It’s a perk of having Luther Campbell, better known as “Uncle Luke” or “Coach Luke” in his new profession, as your coach.
The rapper-turned-philanthropist spent almost a decade looking for an opportunity like the one he has found at Edison. It started when he, by accident, wound up on the coaching staff at Miami Central in 2008 and was part of a state championship in 2010. Now it’s his fourth season leading the Red Raiders — although he’s only technically the associate head coach because of a Miami-Dade County Public Schools rule requiring head coaches to work full-time at the school — and he tells his players, “It’s state or bust,” after they made it to the doorstep of the final four in 2020.
His players tend to laugh when people ask about their coach’s reputation. He was the face of the 2 Live Crew, who had a hit song called “Me So Horny,” won a censorship case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and a free-speech case in the Supreme Court of the United States, and used his career earnings to transform football in Liberty City by founding the Liberty City Warriors, one of the most successful youth teams in the country.
“Everywhere we go, all the colleges know who he is,” said Nathaniel Joseph, a junior wide receiver with nearly 30 scholarship offers. “It’s just amazing. They respect him so much
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In West Little River, the current standard-bearer for Miami high school football practices only a few hundred yards away from a cow pasture on a patchy grass field with a goalpost in one end zone bent a solid 5 or 10 degrees to the right.
Central spent decades in the shadow of rival Miami Northwestern before finally breaking through to win its first state title in 2010. Since then, the Rockets have won six more and go into 2021 trying to win a third in a row. They were the only public school team to win last year after Northwestern, the city’s traditional powerhouse, lost in the second round of the playoffs in their quest to win four in a row.
Coach Roland Smith helped guide the Bulls to a championship in 2016 and now he’s doing the same with their biggest rival, with five more state titles since 2013. He bounces from drill to drill while Central practices. He oversees the Rockets’ defense, which has at least a dozen future FBS players, and tries to get a read on his offense. So much of its success will fall on the 5-10, 160-pound shoulders of quarterback Keyone Jenkins, who’s barely old enough to have a learner’s permit, but already has a state championship after throwing for three touchdowns in the Class 6A title game as a sophomore last year.
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In South Florida, football players are a primary export. In the 2021 NFL Draft, 37 players were plucked from the state and 17 hailed from the Miami metropolitan area — more than all but four other states sent to the league. The Alabama Crimson Tide won the 2021 national championship with three starters from there and the Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers started four.
In Miami, the sport is its own beast. When Northwestern and Central meet, they fill Nathaniel “Traz” Powell Stadium to the brim with alumni, who place bets on teenagers and scream to tell coaches — ones who have almost always won at least a state championship or two — they have no idea what they’re doing. When a middling team gets blown out by a perennial powerhouse, even the loser will have at least a few future college players.
In Miami, the players, coaches and people seldom come from the most famous parts of the county. The schools, stadiums and games are usually in places tourists would never go visit. All throughout the season, the Miami Herald will tell their stories and dive behind the scenes of what makes Miami an unparalleled football town.
The annual procession of Miamians to the the next level starts every year on nameless fields, where underpaid coaches and teenagers who have dreamed of the NFL since childhood spend the dying days of summer trying to become the city’s next batch of legends.
This story was originally published August 10, 2021 at 4:38 PM.
