The Underdogs of Southeast

His only goal as he fielded the kickoff was not getting leveled before his first step.

Reggie Johnson's team, the Southeast High School Knights, had just given up another touchdown. The Grain Valley Eagles led, 27-0. And the second quarter had just started.

As Johnson caught the kickoff, he could already see blue Eagles uniforms pounding down the field toward him. He was a head shorter than most of the opposing team. The Southeast junior, with closely cut black hair, stands around 5 feet 6 inches tall.

Johnson broke to the left and ran. Three Eagles players converged on the same spot to meet him at the 30-yard line. He knew he was going down. Hit them hard, he thought. Don't get any negative yards.

Johnson ducked his head so he could lead with his helmet. He propelled himself forward, his feet momentarily leaving the ground. He looked like a bullet on impact, and the group collapsed together. The return finished just shy of 20 yards.

Johnson left the field and pulled off his helmet. Brown dirt crumbled from his dull-red jersey. The Knights' coach, Jay Lewman, patted him on the shoulder.

Ask any kid on the Knights why he plays, and you'll almost always get the same answer: "I like to hit."

"You get a chance to make contact with another guy, and you don't get in trouble," says Antoine Day, a 17-year-old senior, a team captain and sometime quarterback.

The good hits provided consolation during a rough season. The Knights began their year with a forfeit and three losses before chalking up a win over Westport High School in October.

The Knights are victims of school district restructuring and community apathy that have created inequities in sports programs. Inner-city schools such as Southeast that once boasted strong football teams and little else can now barely field enough players. Good football players can simply transfer to better schools.

Southeast lost many of its athletes when the Kansas City, Missouri, School District relocated the school's students to the Manual Career & Tech Center on Truman Road. The charter school uses an African-centered education program for kindergarten through 12th grade. Many of Southeast's football players transferred to more traditional schools.

The Knights went into games fighting for respect as much as to win. "Our chances are very slim," Cleon Foreman, an 18-year-old senior and one of the team captains, said before the game. "I know that, player for player, we're probably evenly matched with Grain Valley. But they got busloads of people, and we're going to get tired."

Looking at the two sides of the field, it was clear that Foreman was right. Southeast fielded 18 players for this game, requiring many of them to play both offense and defense without a break. Grain Valley had close to 60. There were so many blue jerseys lining the opposing sideline that, from the Southeast side, you couldn't even see the Grain Valley cheerleaders, except when one was suddenly tossed in the air.

The difference in the crowd was startling. Grain Valley's side of the stands was full of people who came to see the 8-0 team. Behind Foreman, there was a handful of cheerleaders who lacked pompoms. About 15 people sat on the Southeast side, most of them Grain Valley kids who thought it would be fun to sit in the opposition's bleachers. Six were with the cheerleading program. For most of the game, there were no parents. "We're fighting them," Foreman said, studying the field. "We're doing way better than I thought we would."

While he talked, the Eagles scored another touchdown.

With nine days until the Grain Valley game, the Knights knelt before Lewman on a patch of worn ground behind the Manual Career & Tech Center. The spot is less than half the size of a normal football field, surrounded by a baseball-style backstop.

"How many of you know about the battle of Thermopolis," Lewman asked them, "where 300 Spartans held off thousands of Persians?" The 61-year-old coach wore a biker-rally T-shirt. There was a bulge in one white gym sock where he kept a can of chewing tobacco, and every so often he spat, lips puckered between the bars of a Fu Manchu mustache.

A few players looked to one another for explanation. There were some confused mutters before someone said, "He's talking about that movie 300." A murmur of recognition prompted the coach to continue.

"Yeah, that's right," said Lewman, who works as a guidance counselor at Westport High School. "Well, that's what you got to do. There's not a man among you I wouldn't go to war for. Some of you probably don't believe that, but it's true. Because if you're finishing out this season, you're showing me that you're ready to be men."