A 2019 shooting nearly killed Columbus’ former captain. His miracle return still inspires
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.
Courtney Holmes quietly seethed on Columbus’ bus as the team traveled back to Miami after an embarrassing loss to Davie University School in the eighth week of the 2019 season. The 35-point blowout sent the Explorers tumbling toward .500, and Holmes’ emotions were ready to explode. After all he had been through, he couldn’t believe his teammates were going to let a once-promising season go to waste.
He had only been out of the hospital for a few weeks. A stray bullet a few months earlier nearly killed him. The bullet traveled through his right buttock and hit his colon and liver. He had to be revived twice and then spent nearly two months at Jackson Memorial Hospital recovering. He was finally getting close to returning — it was a borderline miracle — and he didn’t want to return to a team like the one he saw in Davie.
Before the Explorers headed home, Holmes gathered them inside Columbus High School’s athletics building.
“He just was talking about brotherhood,” said senior athlete Bryson Stouffer, who started at fullback on the 2019 team. “ ’If I’m getting shot and still playing with you guys, there’s no reason why we can’t all play hard,’ so he was just kind of saying there’s no excuse. You’ve just got to stay together and play hard, and whatever happens happens.”
The next day, a handful of the Explorers’ star players still showed up late to practice, and it was the last straw. Coach Dave Dunn benched the group for the first half of their next game against Fort Lauderdale Dillard and Columbus, after getting shut out in the first half, lost by one to drop to .500.
Holmes’ message was different this time.
“He basically said, ‘We learned our lesson,’ ” Dunn recalled. “ ’We’ve worked too hard this year.’ ”
They finished 2019 with seven consecutive victories to win their first state title, then followed it with a perfect season in 2020, winning a tri-county championship after they opted out of the Florida High School Athletic Association’s state series because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They even began the 2021 season with a win against Benedictine in Savannah, Georgia.
With 15 consecutive victories, Columbus entered the 2021 high school football season with South Florida’s longest active winning and a chance to finally defend its Class 8A championship. Although Holmes and most of the other key players from 2019 are gone, the Explorers still carry the lessons from their midseason turnaround two years later.
“We really found a place where we were really at our low as a team, and we just came together and talked, and after that we never lost a game,” said Stouffer, who now starts at defensive end. “You’ve got to find your identity.”
The 2019 team was one of Columbus’ most talented ever. Star running back Henry Parrish, who was twice the Miami Herald’s Miami-Dade County Player of the Year for Classes 8A-6A and scored the championship-winning touchdown, now plays for the Ole Miss Rebels. All-American wide receiver Xzavier Henderson now plays for the Florida Gators. Star linemen Elijah Roberts, Jabari Ishmael and Ryan Rodriguez all now play for the Miami Hurricanes.
It was Dunn’s first season, though, and he was taking over a team that had lost a heart-breaker in the 8A championship in 2018. The expectation in Year 1 was to guide the Explorers back, and he almost lost them before the regular season even ended.
Parrish, Roberts and quarterback Brandon McDuffey, Dunn said, were among those he decided to temporarily bench in 2019.
“I remember I called our AD and I’m like, ‘Either we’re going to get our act together and we’ll be fine because we’re a talented team with some tough kids,’ ” Dunn said, “ ’or we might not win another game.’
“I really thought there was no in between.”
After the one-point loss, Dunn remembers Parrish saying he was “done screwing around.” He remembers George Roberts, the Miami defensive lineman’s father, saying, “Those kids needed that.” Columbus breezed past Coral Gables the next week, then Holmes returned for the regular-season finale in Delray Beach and the Explorers beat Atlantic by 20. The winning streak was underway and continued even after Parrish, Henderson, Roberts, Holmes and McDuffey all graduated in 2020.
Stouffer, quarterback Fernando Mendoza and wide receiver Shiloh Conway are the only remaining offensive players who were on varsity in 2019, and Mendoza and Conway are now the only returning starters on offense from last year.
The defense is more experienced. Defensive backs Cornelius Wright, Ken Moore and Ahmere Foster all played significant roles as underclassmen in 2019, and now form one of the state’s best secondaries. The one spot without much experience is linebacker and sophomore TJ Capers, who has yet to play significant regular-season snaps, is the No. 29 overall prospect in the Class of 2024, according to 247Sports.com.
“We had some experience for last year. We’ve got some experience for this year,” running back Denim Edwards said. “We just keep bringing it over every year. We have a foundation.”
This story was originally published August 26, 2021 at 2:54 PM.
