Longform

Down to the Wire

In the wake of Freddie Gray, can Frederick Douglass football find redemption?

by Jacqueline Kantor

Dec 29, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

Photo: Amanda Berg

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”Frederick Douglass

It is late September, early evening. The field where the 2015 Frederick Douglass High School Mighty Ducks football team plays has a scoreboard, but no lights, and a lined turf, but no trainers or Gatorade jugs filled with water on the sideline.

To the left of the field is Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, where National Guard tanks sat for nearly a week last spring after Freddie Gray, 25, was arrested a little more than a mile from the Douglass campus. His death from injuries sustained while in police custody led to protests around the city and helped fuel the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Demonstrations turned violent on April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral. A crowd of nearly 100, many initially assumed to be Douglass students, clashed with police at Mondawmin, a three-level shopping mall next to a transit center serving 10 different bus lines. Looters sacked many of the mall’s shops. Douglass was closed the next day. The city of Baltimore went into a state of emergency for more than a week.

To the right of the field, the skyline of the central business district bisects the field goal uprights. Banners along the field’s fence read “Work Hard. Play Smart. Win” in dark blue and orange, the Douglass colors. Parents, siblings, girlfriends and past and future players form a small crowd in the bleachers. A police helicopter circles from the back of the school, around Mondawmin and toward downtown, just as it does a few times each day, just because. Gray clouds hang in the distance.

Three players show up on the field for practice with white helmets instead of orange — “Did you not get the memo?” an assistant coach asks — and the team lines up in rows on the turf for stretches. One, two, three claps and “WOOO!” because even here, on a field in west Baltimore among players born in the late ’90s, wrestling’s Ric Flair still made his mark.

The stretches are loose and the count is off. A junior quarterback yells out to his teammates, “We should stop talking, we should focus.”

An assistant coach replies, “Well, you’re the one who threw 19 interceptions on Friday.”

It wasn’t 19 interceptions. It was three. But for a team with state title ambitions early in the season, the scrappy, disjointed loss against rival Edmonson-Westside exposed the team’s faults. Off-field troubles are beginning to affect on-field composure, and the Ducks are beginning to crack. The players are still trying to distance themselves from the reputation Douglass has carried since the riots. This season is a chance at redemption, and a chance to rewrite the school’s story in Baltimore in 2015.

After a tumultuous spring, the summer hadn’t been much better — three months after Gray’s death, July of 2015 marked Baltimore’s deadliest month in three decades. Nineteen of those 45 murders took place within three miles of the Douglass campus. By November, despite the attention and promises lavished on the city since April, the per-capita homicide rate for 2015 would be the highest in Baltimore history.

No player on that team is untouched by violence in Baltimore. They lost friends and fathers in shootings. They saw brothers and aunts imprisoned. For them, this team was supposed to be a refuge, and for their school and neighborhood, a symbol of hope.

Most of the Ducks were born here, in a city ranked the worst in the nation in social mobility for young black males. This field is meant to be a place of opportunity in a city that desperately needs it. A place to make a name, a place to escape, a place to identify. Above all, a home.

But the turmoil they sought to block out when on the field was now inextricably tied to the 2015 season.

Over the course of the season, a team that Baltimore loved to hate — because of Coach Elwood Townsend’s self-admitted arrogance, because of the way the Mighty Ducks trounced city and county opponents over the past two years — tried to avoid becoming just more collateral damage.

Coach Townsend, a Baltimore native, is a compact man with a round face and a trimmed beard. He graduated from high school in southeast Baltimore and attended schools in Wyoming and North Carolina during service in the Air Force before returning home to coach junior varsity in nearby Anne Arundel County. He took over Douglass’ JV program in 2008, and became head coach a year later. He inherited a varsity squad that had gone more than a decade without a winning season and turned it into a state finalist in less than five years.

Townsend accepts no excuses — especially not from his players. He is gruff but ends his statements with an unsuspecting lilt. He calls his squad to huddle near the sideline as practice ends.

“Y’all got to figure out what you want. Right now, we’ve got 45 different athletes with 45 different problems,” he says, and though it is not a question, his inflection leaves the sentence open-ended. It comes off as if he is asking if his players are capable, more than telling them what they need to do.

“I understand that stuff happens. Life happens. But this should be your outlet, your place. This is my safe haven. I’m in the school. I see that shit.”

Townsend announces he is going to institute a swear jar and says the spoils will go to the season’s MVP. The players laugh it off; they will still curse like teenage boys do, though never as much as the junior varsity coaches.

Northwestern University has just inquired about Malik Holloway, a three-sport athlete and defensive end, and Townsend lets the rest of the team know. Malik, a 6′2, 205-pound, sinewy and soft-spoken junior, is one of Townsend’s emerging stars. Boston College, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia have also expressed some interest, as well as Monmouth, Old Dominion, Delaware and Towson. He’d likely play outside linebacker in college. Yet Malik is not ranked on 247Sports or similar websites, and Baltimore City Public Schools are vastly underrepresented in recruiting databases. Only four of 151 players from Maryland on 247Sports are from BCPS. In his seven years as coach, Townsend has sent only two players to Division I programs, but neither to a Power Five conference.

Townsend sees Malik, 16, as a muted leader on and off the turf, a “quiet assassin” who is not too emotional and as an “animal with raw talent” when challenged. Placement for Malik at a top program would be another show of Townsend’s prowess, and a sign of Douglass’ recent progress.

Three losses in the past two years has solidified the team as a one of the best in the city, and Townsend is looking to bring the Mighty Ducks back to the state final at M&T Bank Stadium for the third year in a row. But this is his first year under a new principal, a former coach at a rival school with plenty of old buddies he probably wouldn’t mind putting in the top spot at Douglass.

Townsend knows that. And he knows he needs to prove that he can maintain control amidst the helicopters, the media attention, the upcoming Freddie Gray trials and the aftermath of violence that gutted his players’ neighborhoods physically and emotionally.

The approaching storm has darkened most of the sky by the time Townsend dismisses his team. The mood is lighter among the players, but even then, two weeks into the 2015 campaign, Townsend knows that everything is a bit more tenuous than in any season prior.

Getting to “the Bank,” as they call it, is never easy. Through the next six weeks, Townsend and the Mighty Ducks will need to trudge through the muck left in the wake of a turbulent year in hopes of making it back to the biggest stage in Maryland football.

Everyone was sick of reading about the riots by the time September rolled around. Could Douglass do anything without someone bringing up Mondawmin? It was as if everything the school had worked for — a three-year turnaround through a federal grant, a revamping of the facilities and extracurricular activities — was erased by a protest that happened to take place directly across from the school’s entrance.

But then, during the second week of practice, Douglass and the Mighty Ducks found another reason to pop up in the news.

Townsend was off school grounds when an assistant coach called him to let him know that one of this players, Sean Johnson, a junior running back and linebacker, beat up a younger teammate in the school cafeteria.

“OK,” Townsend said, relatively unperturbed at first. Teenage boys fight. Football is school-sanctioned violence, and sometimes it spills over into the hallways.

“No, you don’t understand,” the assistant coach said. “He beat him up real bad.”

Bad enough that the victim was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Bad enough that school was let out early and a Foxtrot helicopter was sent to oversee the dismissal. Bad enough that Johnson would be charged with attempted murder.

Someone recorded a clip of the fight. It’s unfocused and shot from two angles, but it’s a harrowing 21 seconds.

“No, you don’t understand. He beat him up real bad.”

Johnson comes up on his teammate’s left as the video opens. The players are in Douglass’ spacious, recently revamped cafeteria. The bottom half of the walls are bright orange, like the rest of the Douglass hallways, and flags of various nationalities hang from the ceiling.

A group of students sit at one of the folding cafeteria tables in the background as the video begins. Johnson enters the frame and holds the victim by the shoulder with his left hand then slams him to the ground with his right.

The first vantage point of the camera is from the other side of the table, and it shows Johnson throw five punches to the upper chest and face. He steadies himself after the fifth blow, and whoever is holding the camera moves from behind the bench to the floor.

Johnson then pummels the victim five more times in the face, then reels back and stomps on his jaw with his right foot before the camera cuts out.

A school police officer later said after staff intervened and cleared out the area that that the victim “was having a seizure while lying in a pool of his own blood.” Johnson was charged with attempted murder, the victim sustained a broken nose, facial lacerations and a concussion, and required require reconstructive facial surgery.

The reason for the fight? Johnson had thought his teammate stole the visor off his football helmet. A visor. The district cancelled a week of practice out of concern for the safety of the players, and that Friday’s game against Dunbar was scratched. It was slated to be one of the best matchups in the city that season, and a chance for Douglass to gain needed points in the playoff chase.

Nine days after the fight, on the day of the Edmondson game, Townsend received official notice that the incident had prompted a school investigation into the program. Suddenly, this was the new identity of Douglass football in 2015, an entire roster now defined by one kid’s anger.

The video soon appeared on national outlets and was heavily circulated in Baltimore, played over and over again on the evening news as broadcasters fretted and shook their heads. It was a disappointing representation of a school with a storied history in the city, and one that undermined any recent progress.

Douglass was founded in 1883, the second oldest historically integrated high school in the United States, the first public school in Maryland (and only third in the country) to award diplomas to black students. Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned abolitionist leader, gave the commencement address himself for the class of 1894.

For five decades, it was the only high school in the city for African Americans. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall graduated from the school in 1925. So did Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr., a civil rights activist and the chief lobbyist for the NAACP, band leader Cab Calloway and other esteemed alumni: The first African American police commissioner in Baltimore. The first African American Congressmen from Maryland. The organizer of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP.

Douglass established itself as a place of achievement and pride in a city that struggled openly and deeply. Still, crime, corruption and drugs overtook the surrounding community with the kind of ferocity that tends to only inflict the most forgotten of metro areas. Even Douglass was overwhelmed.

Today, the school motto is “continuing the tradition with pride, dignity and excellence.” But in the neighborhoods around the campus and where students live, chronic poverty is the tradition.

Malik’s mother and stepfather, Nichole Crowder and Randy Newkirk, used to live in one of the roughest neighborhoods in south Baltimore. It was bad. They attended funerals of kids killed in gun violence. Two of Nichole’s brothers were murdered.

Five years ago, they moved to a spacious multi-story home further west, a quiet neighborhood with large front yards that Randy calls the “country” in comparison to their old streets. The four youngest of Nichole’s seven children — Malik, Brian, a senior at Douglass, and two sisters in elementary and middle school — live in the home. On a Monday evening earlier this fall, Nichole sits at the long, wooden table that takes up much of the space in the dining room. She wears a white T-shirt spray-painted with “15,” Malik’s number, in hot pink and orange. On the far side of the room is a tiered shelf that looks like it might soon crunch under the weight of the medals and trophies for Malik, Brian and their older sister, Tierra, who plays volleyball at Indiana State.

Randy, a man as portly as Malik is sinewy, wears a Ravens’ Ray Lewis jersey. He scrolls through his phone while his wife talks, but stops to listen to her describe a typical street in Baltimore.

“You’ve got a Chinese food shop, then a fried chicken place, then a liquor store on every block,” she says. “And then down the street, you’ve got the church that’s trying to save us.”

Randy nods his head in agreement and laughs loudly.

“That was a good one,” he says.

The Baltimore that an outsider often imagines when they hear mention of the city, the Baltimore one associates with The Wire and The Corner — that is a Baltimore dominated by its vices.

One morning Nichole called Randy on her way to work as she drove down North Avenue, where boarded up row homes are plastered with black and white signs that read “We must stop killing each other.”

“It’s 6:15 in the morning and I’m driving down the street and I’m like, you know what? I can’t even get a cup of coffee. Or a cup of tea out here at 6 a.m. in the morning. But I passed six liquor stores,” she told him. There was a line outside one of the liquor stores, wrapped around the block, and the sun hadn’t fully risen.

“And you wonder why so much crime?” she adds.

Urban blight around Douglass took a toll on the school. A decade ago, the graduation rate dropped down to only 25 percent. Barely two-thirds of teachers were certified, more than a fourth of the students were absent daily, and in 2005 fully half of the freshman class dropped out by June. A 2008 HBO documentary, Hard Times at Douglass High, put the faltering institution in the national spotlight for the first time.

But they still tried. In 2010, the city took advantage School Improvement Grant from the Department of Education to drastically overhaul the way things worked at Douglass. The “turnaround” included a new principal and replacing half the staff.

Meanwhile, the reputation of Douglass football also suffered. The Mighty Ducks alternated between middling and dismal until Townsend took over in 2009. In 2010, the team went 8-3 for the first winning season since 1998, and their hard-earned success seemed to mimic that of the school.

Baltimore City hired a successful former owner and operator of daycare centers in Georgia, Antonio Hurt, as the new principal. His first year was also Townsend’s second (and last) losing season with the program. The next year, Douglass lost four games by a combined 14 points to go 7-4.

Murals with Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela and Louis Armstrong were painted on the hallways of the school, and dark blue duck footprints were pasted on the floors, leading students toward the classroom and away from truancy. A statue of Frederick Douglass was placed in between the twin metal detectors at the school’s main entrance and quotes from Douglass were painted on the white walls; one reads, “Man does not plan to fail, he just fails to plan,” in gray and white. In 2013, with one year left in the federal grant, the school achieved its academic target for the first time in 18 years. Attendance was up to 80 percent. The school was lauded as a success story by the Department of Education.

Townsend’s squad was undefeated going into playoffs that season and upset the top seed in Class 1A in the state semifinals. Douglass lost 25-0 to a team from western Maryland, but having a chance to play until December, and to do so on the Ravens’ home turf, was an accomplishment.

In April 2014, Hurt pled guilty to defrauding the federal government of nearly $2 million

The trajectory of the football program fit nicely with the resurgence of Douglass. A football team drew potential athletes and kids looking for a strong sense of school spirit from all over the city. Everything was on the up, a welcome change for a school once considered the worst of the worst in a notoriously struggling school system.

But in April 2014, Hurt pled guilty to defrauding the federal government of nearly $2 million in his previous position in Georgia. He had used funds meant for the underprivileged to lease luxury cars and buy jewelry, and was sentenced to two years and one month in federal prison.

Parents and students were shocked. People like Randy and Nichole associated the turnaround at their children’s school with Hurt more than the federal money. He made sure that prom tickets were free for students who passed state tests, hosted banquets for honor roll students with free food and T-shirts, and filled the seats at Back to School Nights. The man that helped bring standards and purpose back to a declining school was gone. The Mighty Ducks again made it to the state finals, and again fell to the same team from western Maryland.

This time, the accomplishment did not seem so gratifying.

Elwood Townsend’s office is in the basement of the school, accessible through a winding staircase by the side entrance or a few steps in the back of the building. There’s a large equipment closet on the left side that creates a narrow hallway to enter the room, which is big enough for a mismatched assortment of chairs and table on the right side, with a fridge in the back and on the far wall, a washer and dryer.

It smells like a mix of mothballs and dried sweat. Townsend keeps the shelves on the left full of equipment like the orange helmets with the navy tape stripes that his staff added by hand before the first game of the season.

“If I don’t care for them, who does?”Elwood Townsend

On the bulletin board on the right side, photos from previous seasons are displayed alongside printouts commemorating Douglass playoff wins. Pasted on patterned construction paper in a whimsical font, at first one would assume a student or art teacher crafted the decorations on the board.

But it was Townsend.

The same guy that was ejected for some “choice words” in the second game of the season, the guy who admits quickly that others will call him arrogant, the guy who ends his first interview by reminding a writer “I say what I feel and mean what I say” — is also a coach who decorates the small wall space in his office with bright colors. He knows which of his players won’t have food on the table when they get home and keeps Doritos and Gatorade from the office ready as necessary. He takes a player to get a haircut if he notices that no one else has.

“If I don’t care for them, who does?” he says.

“A lot of them are rebellious to my role at the start, but once they see you have a genuine interest in them, that you’re not just trying to parade them around, use them for your football team … I just want to make sure they know I have their best interest in mind.”

He is a stickler for detail. If you can tuck your shirt in for school, why can’t you tuck your shirt in for the game? If you want to play football on Friday night, why can’t you run laps at Tuesday practice? Townsend believes the key to success is if you can do small things consistently and without exceptions.

“You can’t make excuses,” Townsend said. “You don’t have to be a thug because your mom or dad isn’t in your life.”

Townsend guesses that a little more than half of his players are without both parents in the home, He knows there are kids with worse situations than others, and part of his job is to figure out who is struggling, and why.

The value of football here is that it is a diversion as much as anything else, a reason to not get in trouble. The week that Douglass did not practice after the fight, a junior varsity player found himself in a significant legal jam.

One coach says he was caught with a gun, but Townsend can neither confirm nor deny the claim. The student became one more player that could have benefitted from more time on the field and less time off school grounds, says assistant coach Dewan Clay.

“Football saves these kids. That’s how it works in Baltimore,” he says. At least that’s the way it is supposed to work.

There’s a senior defensive end that says he wants to be a police officer one day. He will be one of a few players without a family member to accompany him when he receives a certificate of participation and poses for photos at halftime of his senior game.

At one practice, he steps to the sideline to talk about his time with the Mighty Ducks.

“I’ve been here two years, and there’s been too much going on,” he says.

He’s tired of reviewing the same play for the last 25 minutes, of reporters poking around on his campus, of watching things fall apart.

“This is where I find my peace.”

DOUGLASS AT BEL AIR, OCT. 224-13, W

Junior Ke’Andre Cole-Robinson steps in as quarterback and goes 12 of 19 for 240 yards and two touchdowns. Malik has a 39-yard interception return for a touchdown and three sacks. Now he is up to 36 tackles and 13 sacks for the season. The Mighty Ducks are 3-1.

Townsend raised eyebrows with moves like scheduling a game at suburban powerhouse Bel Air in Harford County for the fourth game of the season. The Mighty Ducks spent almost an hour heading up I-95 N to play a heavily favored squad from a larger, wealthier and whiter school.

The Bobcats were undefeated, and as a longtime member of class 4A draw from a student body of more than 1,400. Douglass barely hits 1,000 students. The Bel Air quarterback had scored five touchdowns in a win the week before, while Douglass, after opening the season with two wins before the cancelled game, had suffered its first loss to Edmonson-Westside, 14-8, a team they beat by 43 points in 2014.

Plus, it was Bel Air homecoming, pouring rain and everyone was still a bit on edge, particularly given a trip out of the city so soon after the fight. But the Mighty Ducks were up by two touchdowns at the half, and held on to give Bel Air its only loss of the regular season, winning 24-13.

“Could they write a story about us without it starting with violent assault?”

They are going to take it easy today, Clay says at practice on the Monday after the win. He’s up in the top row of bleachers at the Douglass field, watching as the junior varsity coach makes two players do 25-minutes of crab walking around the track.

Assistant coach Justin Tolbert, a hulking, talkative guy who likes discussing Netflix series and UFOs, arrives from his day job. He sits down next to Clay in the bleachers.

“Did you see what the Bel Air athletic director said about us?” Clay asks him. He searches for something on his phone. It’s a text from the AD to Townsend that he shared with the rest of the staff.

After a brief rundown of injury updates from the Bobcats’ side, the athletic director comments on Douglass’ representation Friday night.

“I want to compliment the program, given everything going on in the school and portrayed in the media,” he wrote, adding that he would speak highly of the Mighty Ducks and their staff to anyone who asked about scheduling the team in the future. It’s nice, but also sad to see that it even needs to be mentioned.

But now someone is reviewing the Baltimore Sun write-up of the game. The fight between Sean Johnson and his teammate is mentioned within the first sentence.

“Could they write a story about us without it starting with violent assault?” a coach asks.

Townsend doesn’t say much the whole practice except to ask a pair of players why they took their helmets off. They close out with a set of full-field sprints. A junior named Gary does something that ticks Townsend off, and he sends the tackle off the field as his teammates complete their final sets of 100s.

After practice that evening, Malik calls the Bel Air win the one of the best things that’s happened to him this year — besides making the honor roll and National Honor Society. The worst thing this year? The fight. And the worst thing in his 16 years? That’s easy. The deaths. He has known 10 people — Nichole’s two brothers, closest friends, people he grew up with — killed in violence. A few months ago, a close friend was coming out of a club in east Baltimore and shot down. The guy was 20.

“I stay out of harm’s way,” he says. “I stay out of trouble.”

“It makes us stronger,” he says of the common experiences his teammates share, the violence that they see but do not seek. “It motivates us more. Even through all this violence, we’re still winning. We’re still striving to be the greatest.”

DOUGLASS VS. MARTIME ACADEMY, OCT. 952-0 W

Malik has two sacks and four total tackles (two for a loss) to lead the team. Dariun Miller goes 2 for 3 for 105 yards and two touchdowns, and Cole-Robinson has one touchdown pass of 27 yards. The Mighty Ducks improve to 4-1

At one of the first practices of the season, Townsend started with a warning to his players. “The streets are undefeated on the scoreboard, and you are at zero. The only way out of the streets is death or in jail.”

Four days after the Mighty Ducks routed Maritime Academy during homecoming and three days before they take on City College, it is almost 4 p.m. and time for Townsend to check progress reports. If he can get his kids to practice, he can get them to graduation, and from there, hopefully to higher education or anything but the streets he warns about.

He sits in his office in the only chair on the right side, the only seat in the room that provides a first look at who is walking through the door. A player walks in to hand him a printed out report, and Townsend notes that he’s missed a practice this week already.

“It’s like, one practice a week, and there you looking plum dumb,” he says, without looking up from the sheet. “Maybe I grew up in an era where we don’t miss football practices … what is that, two Fs on the progress report?”

13 of Townsend’s 15 seniors from the class of 2014 went on to college.

There are a bunch of jerseys in the washer and another bunch strewn around the office, along with empty green Gatorade cups. The assistant coaches wait in the mismatched chairs by the shelves, snacking on the chips stored next to Townsend’s makeshift desk.

At the beginning of the year, the coaching staff goes out to dinner to divide the varsity team into groups. Each coach has a crew of about eight players that they are responsible for, keeping tabs on grades, attendance, commitment and so on. They make sure that their charges are kept busy and their time is fully booked year round. Playing winter and spring sports is less of a suggestion and more of a requirement.

Only 57 percent of Douglass students graduate in four years, and only 20 percent go on to college. But 13 of Townsend’s 15 seniors from the class of 2014 continued their education. Of the two that did not, one had a child and went straight to work, and the other joined the military.

Another player comes in halfway through changing into his practice gear.

“Don’t come in my office again with no shirt like that, like this is a strip club,” he tells him. The same kid is struggling to make an early-morning class; Townsend tells him to either catch a different bus or get up earlier.

“What are you going to say to your college coach when you’re late to the 8:30 a.m. class on the other side of campus?” he asks.

DOUGLASS AT CITY COLLEGE, OCT. 1536-0, W

The Mighty Ducks lead by 14 at half and score a touchdown in each of the remaining quarters. Cole-Robinson goes 4 for 7 for 95 yards and a touchdown, and Deandre House brings in an 80-yard kickoff return for a touchdown. Malik leads the defense with 11 tackles (two for loss) and one sack, and his 20-yard reception is the first touchdown. The Mighty Ducks improve to 5-1.

Over at City College in northeast Baltimore, where the Mighty Ducks spent the fourth Friday in October, nearly 99 percent of the student body goes on to higher education. The school is the only one in Baltimore City to offer the International Baccalaureate Programme.

City College’s football team isn’t up to par with their academic performance this year, and it wasn’t the toughest win, but it’s an important one given the Mighty Ducks’ new classification. Douglass used to be in class 1A, the smallest classification in Maryland, until 2015, when the Mighty Ducks were bumped up to 3A, the second largest.

The turnaround at Douglass and subsequent jump in attendance now puts the Mighty Ducks in a division with more suburban schools and less city and rural teams. Beating a 3A team like City will help in point standings that determine postseason playoffs. It helped though, Townsend noted, that the Black Knights coach had benched all of his seniors for some indiscretion.

Still, they’ll take it. So little comes easy.

DOUGLASS VS. POLY, OCT. 2314-6 W

Miller starts and throws 10 completions on 15 attempts for 173 yards and two touchdowns, one of which is caught by Malik. Malik also collects 12 tackles to tie his game record for the season and adds two sacks. The Mighty Ducks improve to 6-1.

The win against Poly pushes Douglass to third in the points standing in the 3A North region. Only the top four teams in each region will make playoffs, and the missed game against Dunbar puts the Mighty Ducks at a disadvantage. They are game behind everyone else in the playoff race. Only three other Baltimore City schools (out of 18 eligible) are ranked as high or higher in their respective divisions.

DOUGLASS VS. DIGITAL HARBOR, OCT. 30 6-0, W

A sloppy showing, but Jaquan Oakley’s 11-yard touchdown with less than two minutes remaining in the first half is enough for the win. Malik has eight tackles and two sacks, and recovers a Digital Harbor fumble that leads to the touchdown on the next drive. With one regular season game to play, Douglass improves to 7-1.

It is the day before Halloween, 57 degrees and sunny, and the Mighty Ducks are wearing the jerseys printed with “pride,” “dignity” or “excellence” on the back instead of last names. They walk down the field in two columns holding hands, and prep to face Digital Harbor by dancing in a huddle to whatever the assistant coach blasts from his phone’s speakers.

“I be feeling like the man when I walk through,” they sing.

“None of them know their schoolwork, but they can repeat this verbatim,” coach Tolbert says, shaking his head.

No one starts the clock on the scoreboard after the first whistle and no one seems to notice. Digital Harbor is 1-7 at this point, and the Mighty Ducks should have taken an early lead, but Townsend’s unhappy from the start.

He replaces a sophomore guard early in the first quarter because he has not blocked a soul all night.

Sophomore linebacker Andre Owens sacks the Digital Harbor quarterback. It took you an hour to get there.

Douglass gets the ball at the 19 and the ball goes way past wide receiver Deandre House.

Deandre, what are you doing?

You can’t jog on your routes.

You’ve got to get hot.

Deandre, you’re blowing my high, son.

It is the last home game of the season, and at halftime, Townsend runs up to the microphone at the top of the bleachers to announce his seniors as they receive a certificate of participation and roses. There is no P.A. announcer, and so this is another of Townsend’s multiple roles during the course of one game. The marching band in the right of the stands, all 23 students strong, plays Drake’s “Trophies.”

Among all the spectators, Randy Newkirk is easy to find; look for the largest and loudest fan on the sideline. He sat up top in the bleachers for the first half, but then moves down to the fence along the track.

Randy has a large white T-shirt decorated in graffiti style spray paint, the type of shirt you buy on the boardwalk and bring inside a shop to get customized, just like the one Nichole wears at home. His shirt is covered in No. 15s — Malik’s number — of varying sizes in bright orange and pink. His hat is spray painted in the same style. The most muted part of his outfit are the tan Crocs on his feet.

“Let’s go. Turn that shit up,” he yells after Malik knocks the ball out of the quarterback’s hands. “Eat. Eat. Eat.”

Malik’s biological father was imprisoned nine years ago and still has time left to serve.

“A lot of stupid stuff,” he says of what sent his father to prison. Some of it was to help the family, he adds. Some of it was just trouble.

Randy came into Malik’s life 11 years ago, back when the kid was less of an athlete and more of a mini menace, the type of kid who whirled through the neighborhood with endless uncontrolled animation.

“I first met his mother when he was 5, and I said ‘He has to turn that energy into something,’” Randy said.

So Randy, a former player for Douglass, introduced Malik and his brother Brian to sports and quickly found them a team for every season.

Football, basketball, baseball and repeat, for as many years as possible.

“Just to put something into them to keep them busy,” Randy says.

Randy would load Malik, Brian and six or seven other neighborhood boys — enough for a full team — into his Chevy Caprice and drive them to park in west Baltimore with the “mangiest” field in the city. The grass was so high it was nearly impossible to practice ground balls.

He coached youth league teams with players from the neighborhood for years. Football and baseball were the staples, and basketball was added in middle school. Randy knew the value of getting his sons, and their peers, invested in something early on.

“It helps a lot of kids,” he said. “You never know what a person is going home to.”

DOUGLASS AT MERGENTHALER VOCATIONAL-TECHNICAL (MERVO), Nov. 612-6 (OT), L

Mervo led by six at the half, and Tyreek Henderson tied up the game on a 15-yard reception in the third quarter. Malik has six tackles and two sacks. The loss drops Douglass down to the fourth and final spot in points standings, but they still qualify for a first-round playoff game against defending state champ Franklin on the road the following Friday. The dream of a state title is still possible. Douglass finishes the regular season at 7-2.

It took nearly the entire season for the school to come to the conclusion that Sean Johnson, the junior now charged as an adult with first-and second-degree attempted murder, had been left off the eligibility sheet required by Baltimore City schools to keep track of which players are in good standing to participate in sports. To be eligible, each player is required to participate in 10 practice days, have a recent physical and present a report card that proves passing grades.

Johnson was eligible, Townsend says, and he wasn’t intentionally left off the sheet. But his name was not included.

On Monday, Nov. 9, four days before the Mighty Ducks were scheduled to take on Franklin in the first round of playoffs, Baltimore City Public Schools contacted the executive director of the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association to announce they were withdrawing Douglass from the state regional tournament. By 8:30 a.m., Townsend was called in to speak in front of a committee of representatives from the city to determine whether or not he had left Johnson off the sheet intentionally to allow an ineligible player to participate. The committee voted 7-1 that Townsend was not ill-intended, and enforced no penalty.

But that didn’t change the fate of the Mighty Ducks. The team would have to forfeit the first two games that Johnson played. Their record went from 7-2 to 5-4, and Douglass dropped from 69.6 points to 54.5 in the regional standings, far out of playoff contention. A season that had started with so much hope and promise was over.

The decision was made public at 11:30 a.m., but Townsend’s players knew before he could tell them himself. The Baltimore Sun had reported the story and the news quickly spread through Twitter. Townsend called a team meeting of parents and players at the school that afternoon.

There were tears and raised voices. The parents, who had gotten used to packing up and heading to the home of the Ravens in December, were just as disappointed as their sons, if not more. Some guys didn’t care, Townsend admits. It’s just another loss.

But the seniors were devastated; they had played their final high school game without even knowing it.

It is early December, early evening, but the sky is already fully dark. Townsend shows up to a practice for the Baltimore All-Stars few minutes after 6 p.m. wearing a ski hat to ward off the chill in Elkridge, a suburb about 10 miles from the Douglass campus and right outside the borders of Baltimore County. Three Douglass seniors made the roster for the 20th annual Baltimore Touchdown Club’s All-Star Classic game between the Baltimore and the Metro All-Stars.

This is now Townsend’s only coaching job.

About three months ago, in an interview after the second game but before Sean Johnson sent his teammate to the hospital, Townsend had called himself a realist.

“All good things come to an end, you don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “We want to hold up the pride and dignity and excellence we have. Keep riding while we’ve still got some air left in the tires.”

He knew then that his job would be under more scrutiny with a new administration; he did not know the season would devolve the way it had.

“It was an unfortunate situation,” he says “It is my program. I take the blame.”

Shortly after the season unceremoniously ended, Townsend posted on Facebook that he and his coaches all planned, at the time, to return to the Mighty Ducks for the next season. But on Nov. 22, Townsend Tweeted out the following: “Hello! Effective immediately I have resigned as Head Football Coach at Frederick Douglass HS. It’s been an amazing ride! I love you all!”

In an interview shortly after with the Baltimore Sun, Townsend told reporter Katherine Dunn: “Myself and the administration, mainly the principal (Kelvin Bridgers), we don’t see eye-to-eye on the overall direction of the program, so I thought it was just best if I resigned and looked into other opportunities. We agreed to disagree about the future of Douglass football… The kids weathered the storm as much as we could…”

Later, he would allude to the fact that he felt he would rather resign than get pushed out.

His wasn’t the best team out there, he admits. Maybe they got a little cocky, having gone to the state finals twice in a row, and let it get to their head. If they had won that last game against Mervo, even with the forfeits, they still would have qualified for the playoffs.

“We did well considering the obstacles,” he says: transitioning to a new principal, the riots, the Freddie Gray trials on the horizon, the fight, the cancellation of the biggest game of the year …

“All good things come to an end,” he says again, this time with certainty.

A former coach once pointed out to him that most kids in Baltimore choose their football program based on the name and the status. But over the past few seasons at Douglass, it’s been about Townsend just as much as the team. In December, Townsend was hired to coach Reginald F. Lewis, a small 1A school in the city that finished 4-6 and has not won a playoff game in the school’s 13 years. He’s looking forward to building up another program.

“We did well considering the obstacles … All good things come to an end”ELWOOD TOWNSEND

He hopes to establish the same kind of reputation at Lewis, one equally strong in playoff performance and leadership. And he hopes his players, the ones he knocked for not hustling in drills or the ones who he let stay over his house when things were bad at home — he hopes that they knew that he cared a coach, but also for something more.

The cramped office at the bottom of the building is nearly cleared out. Townsend took the pictures of this teams and staff, but he left the colorful construction paper decorations.

“They can always go in there,” he says, smiling, as he walks to take his spot on the field to coach the all-stars. “And they’ll know the ghost of Elwood Townsend is still around.”

Malik collected 77 tackles for the season, 21 for a loss, and 25 sacks, good for 213 negative yards. According to his coaches, he ranked second in the state in that category.

He joins his parents at their dining room table after getting back from school soon after learning of the forfeit. He wears socks with the Maryland flag pattern and bright red sneakers to match, and his jaw is swollen from getting a tooth pulled earlier that day.

His parents are reviewing the Facebook group for Mighty Ducks parents and coaches. One mother posted her own take immediately after everyone heard about the withdrawal from playoffs.

“They are just waiting for one of our boys to act out over this so they can say I told you so but not today or any other day,” she wrote. “Praying for our boys and coaches. They have had a bull’s eye on our back from day one. We will show them otherwise. We will still walk with our heads held high and keep striving for better days for our school.”

Another assistant coach posted the name and number of a contact at the Baltimore ACLU.

Malik is subdued about the whole situation, while his parents are both seething. Nichole is particularly peeved. She is adamant: her children’s Baltimore is worse than the one she remembers. So to take this away, of all things, is especially cutting.

“We had already gone to the stadium twice and they were salty about that anyway,” she says. “They screwed us, you waited. All. Of. Those. Weeks,” she adds, hitting the table between each word. “Why did you wait all this time? It doesn’t sound right. It’s all mixed up. Even if Townsend did know … the school, the state, the city, whoever waited until the morning of to make a decision, and they knew we wouldn’t have time to fight it.”

How do you explain the situation to an outsider, to someone who has no idea of the importance of Douglass football to this community and these kids? How do you express the gravity of this loss?

“Wow,” Randy says. He repeats it again a few times. Douglass is used to assumptions, not understanding, from those outside the community.

When Freddie Gray dies, when the murder rates rise, when suddenly the rest of the country realizes the state of another city — that’s when Baltimore matters, when the black lives matter. Yet that is every day for Nichole and Randy’s children, for Townsend’s players.

“The devastation,” Randy says. “I just think, you know, it’s unfair. It’s unfair what the media is doing to them.”

And at that point, Nichole interjects. “Cause you can’t judge a book from its cover,” she says. “Everything in that school is not bad. I’m just so upset that’s it’s taking away from the kids.”

There’s a conversation Nichole had with her son Brian that reminds her of what is gained by the Douglass football team, and what has just been lost.

“He told me, ‘I wish the Ravens would win, because it makes the city a little better. It makes it a little calmer. Because everyone had something to cheer for.’”

“People were getting along better. People were talking; you know what I’m saying? You were having conversations in the street with people you didn’t even know. People were talking and communicating cause everybody had one agenda, which was going to the Super Bowl, and it made everyone happy.”

It works the same for high school playoffs, she says. For the last two years, the Mighty Ducks have played all the way to December, collecting hand warmers and rain gear for the fans depending on the weather. A common goal unites and encourages. They had grown accustomed to looking forward to a Saturday spent in the purple seats at “The Bank,” willing the Mighty Ducks to make history for the city and the school.

“Now, we just sitting around looking, trying to figure out how this happened,” Randy says.

Malik’s parents wouldn’t mind if he chose to play elsewhere as a senior. Nichole asks her sons to avoid wearing their Douglass shirts in the mall; she doesn’t want someone to unfairly associate them with the violence in and outside the building this past year. Private school coaches from all over the state have contacted Townsend about Malik, he says. Going to one of those schools might make it easier to get a scholarship.

But Malik, a self-described “mama’s boy” who wants to be an EMT, a kid who is currently enamored with his girlfriend, action movies and any mixtape he can download off Spinrilla, is not interested in any other options for his senior year. He wants to graduate from Douglass.

He does not want to leave, despite it all, despite everything.

It is home. And that matters.

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