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NFL Nation
Super Bowl LX will be the first time Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold and New England Patriots QB Drake Maye face each other as competitors, but Darnold’s familiarity with Maye dates back eight years.
Maye was a sophomore at Myers Park High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and his coach, Scott Chadwick, ran a football camp with Josh McCown, who was a backup QB with the New York Jets.
«The moment Josh and I saw him working out, we knew there was something different about the kid,» Chadwick said.
«Josh was with the Jets in 2018 and not around [Myers Park] that much during the season. As soon as our game was over, I’d get him on [streaming platform] Hudl. He’d watch late Friday nights. Most of the time he was watching he would be sitting there with … Sam Darnold.»
TreVeyon Henderson giving a prize he won to someone who might have needed it more to Kenneth Walker III overcoming blood clots in his lungs to Mike Vrabel’s silly sense of humor, these are the lasting memories for many of the people who know these Super Bowl-bound stars.
ESPN’s David Newton, Mike DiRocco, John Keim, Marc Raimondi, Kris Rhim, Katherine Terrell, Josh Weinfuss and Eric Woodyard contacted the high school coaches of 11 players and both head coaches to learn more about the personalities who will gather on the biggest stage in sports.
Jump to a player:
Maye | Walker | Henderson | Vrabel | Williams
Gonzalez | Kupp | Macdonald | Darnold
JSN | Thomas | Jones | Chaisson
Rejecting Mike Macdonald’s lunch request; breaking his coach’s sprinkler
Xarvia Smith, who coached New Centennial High School in Roswell, Georgia, wasn’t sure what to make of the phone call. Rising senior Mike Macdonald phoned him with an unusual request.
«Coach, my name is Mike Macdonald. I’m the team captain, and you and I need to go out to lunch together.»
To which Smith said he replied, «Mike, I will never go out to lunch with you. You are a kid, I am a coach, and don’t ever think about us going out to lunch together.
«Now, once you graduate, we can do all the lunches you want, but I will not do that.»
Cooper Kupp was a ‘different deal’
From the time Cooper Kupp entered high school, the NFL was on his radar.
And he was willing to do everything he needed to get there.
It didn’t matter that he was a 125-pound freshman at A.C. Davis High School in Yakima, Washington: Kupp was focused on the future. One day during his freshman year, while Kupp was recovering from a broken collarbone, he was waiting for his coach, Jay Dumas, outside the weight room with a question: What would it take to play wide receiver or running back at the University of Southern California?
«I thought to myself, ‘A lot of Wheaties and steroids,’ at the time,» Dumas said with a laugh. «I just kind of told him about the hard work and the work ethic that it would take to be able to make it.
Leonard Williams and his brothers rode skateboards throughout their childhood in California, Michigan, Arizona and Florida. They tried stunts, too, until Williams started blossoming as a football player in high school. At that point, per a 2015 ESPN predraft story, Williams’ oldest brother Nate forbade Williams from doing any more stunts because of the injury risk.
Denver Broncos quarterback Jarrett Stidham in the AFC Championship Game, it sealed his team’s ticket to the Super Bowl. But that’s not the first time an interception had changed the course of his career.
The summer before Gonzalez’s junior year of high school, he was a junior varsity player who had played offense all his life. Gonzalez transferred to The Colony [Texas] High School, where he met head coach Rudy Rangel.
Some of the members of the team were in a local 7-on-7 tournament that day, and Rangel urged him to play some cornerback, just to see what he could do.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba needed a ride, ‘Pookie’ found a way
Rodney Webb, head coach of the Rockwall [Texas] High School football team, isn’t exactly sure where Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s nickname came from, but it still makes him smile. Webb and those who have known Smith-Njigba since he was an adolescent call him Pookie — a family nickname since his childhood, and one his brother used in a video aired on the night the Seahawks selected him with the 20th pick in the 2023 draft.
Drake Thomas
Wallace Clark was an assistant coach at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, North Carolina, when a ball boy caught his eye. That ball boy, Drake Thomas, has emerged as a key player for the Seahawks.
«He was a seventh- or eighth-grader down on the field helping out as a ball boy,» Clark recalled. «Some of them kind of run on, run off the field. But he was pretty in tune with everything, following through with every aspect the referee was asking him to do, running the ball on and off the field, chasing the ball down.
Ernest Jones IV looks every bit the part of his position at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds.
But his high school coach, Franklin Stephens, still sees him as lanky, 175-pound kid who showed up at Ware County High School in Waycross, Georgia, as a freshman.
Stephens had a conversation with Jones’ mother, Porsche Johnson, prior to his junior year. If he was going to be the collegiate linebacker Stephens knew he would be, he needed to gain weight.
K’Lavon Chaisson wasn’t sure if he wanted to attend an LSU football camp for high school players in 2015. He was going to be a rising junior at North Shore High School in Houston and hadn’t played varsity football. But he decided to go.
And it was soon evident he made the right move as the defensive end opened the eyes of LSU coach Les Miles.
«He automatically went into the group with all 5-stars, and he was a no-star at this point,» said Shaun Wynn, an assistant coach at North Shore.
«He’s going one-on-one pass rush [against] some of the top recruits on the offensive line, and I mean K’Lavon is doing them up and making them look bad. … To see him doing those kids up like that I was like, ‘Holy s— he’s really good.’ There was one five-star recruit and he was making this kid look stupid. I’m thinking this kid already has the frame, and now you see the movement with it. [I’m thinking], ‘Yeah, he’s going to play on Sundays one day.'»
That’s the same message delivered two years earlier by Willie Gaston, who was Chaisson’s freshman basketball coach and was then a varsity assistant football coach. Gaston, who played four games with the Baltimore Ravens in 2007, told him: «If you play football, you’ll play on Sundays.»
Meanwhile, after the drills ended at the LSU camp, Wynn said then-Tigers defensive coordinator Kevin Steele approached them.
«He said Coach Miles wanted to see him in his office after they were done,» Wynn said. Within 90 minutes after the camp ended, Chaisson — who hadn’t played football as a sophomore — walked away with quite a prize.
«They saw enough and said, ‘You’re the guy we want to go with,'» said Wynn, who was in the room with North Shore head coach Garrett Cross. «They offered him that day.
«Had a talk with Miles, he said, ‘We want you to be an LSU Tiger and we’re offering you a scholarship.'»
Eventually Chaisson committed to the Tigers.
«He made the commitment,» Wynn said, «and it paid off.» — Keim
