The ride home from Florida was quiet.

Two losses in one night.

No championship.

No closure.

Just silence.

But the toughest part wasn’t the loss. It was what came next.

High school.

I had no idea where I wanted to go. St. Charles Catholic? Maybe. My cousin graduated from there, and I liked the idea of riding my bike to school. St. Augustine? That was my mom’s dream for her firstborn son. West St. John and Lutcher crossed my mind too, but nothing felt certain. Everything was just a thought.

Then one day, a message scrolled across the bottom of the TV from the St. John Parish School Board:

“All incoming freshmen interested in football, report to East St. John for practice and weight training.”

So my father drove me to ESJ. I walked to the gym, but the door was locked. A janitor nearby looked up from sweeping and asked:

“You here for football practice?”

“Yes, sir.”

He shook his head.

“They canceled it. Them boys from Garyville stole the weights.”

I turned around, walked back to the car, and told my dad:

“I can’t go here.”

That was it for East St. John. But I still had no direction. No plan.

Then my cousin Jeff Patterson showed up one day and told my mom:

“I want to take him for a ride.”

We hit Airline Highway. Passed the turn to New Sarpy where his mom lived. We kept going.

“Where we going?” I asked.

He smiled.

“To a real high school.”

We crossed train tracks and rolled through a beautiful neighborhood called Armond. I had never seen houses like that. Then we pulled into Destrehan High.

The first person I met was Coach Tim Rebowe, him and Jeff were classmates. He noticed my shirt.

DIZZY DEAN WORLD SERIES

“Oh, he plays baseball too?” he said. “He HAS to come here.”

Next stop: the weight room. That’s where I met Coach Chipper Simon. We eventually handled the transfer stuff, but I had to sit out my freshman year. When sophomore football season came, I was ready. I had something to prove.

Then finally, baseball season hit and with it, the game against East St. John had arrived.

I was amped to face my old teammates from the World Series squad. But that day?

I made 21 errors at shortstop.
The worst game of my career.
The last time I ever played the infield.

From then on, I was a center fielder.

I was embarrassed. But I didn’t cry. Throughout the game guys were encouraging me telling me to calm down. My cousin Terreke Grover told me to keep my head up when he was standing as a base runner on 2nd base. When the game ended, those same East St. John boys circled around me and showed me love and respect. That moment stayed with me.

That East St. John team?
They went 28-0 and won the state championship.
I wasn’t surprised. They were built for it.

Some of the players from that championship squad had deep FORD roots:

From the first FORD All-Stars team:

Leroy Williams “Poppa”
Garyville Pirates

Darrell Nicholas
Garyville Pirates

Courtney Mitchell
Garyville Pirates

Andrew Taylor “Dooley”
Reserve Phils

From our Florida World Series team:

Anderson Armond “Snowball”
LaPlace A’s

Lendell Smith “Dusty”           LaPlace A’s

Terreke Grover “RAG”
Reserve Phils

Richard Martin “Tricky Dick”
LaPlace A’s

Mandry Smith “Manny”
LaPlace A’s

Calvin Miles Jr. “CAL”
Reserve Phils

Calvin Lee “Flip Flop”
(2nd championship team)
Garyville Pirates

Ron Bardell
Garyville Pirates (didn’t play All-Stars but was very instrumental to that 2nd state championship and the Pirates)

Other FORD alumni made their mark too:

Romell Anthony “RO” won two state titles at John Curtis.
Randy Rex Brown and Troy Blue Gerard, older FORD players, were part of Curtis’s first championship team.
Jermaine Rousell — the only Black player on his St. Charles Catholic squad — represented FORD there.
Nick Mitchell, Durwin Mealey, and I took our talents to Destrehan.

We didn’t win a title, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

Baseball prepared me for football.
The discipline. The grind. The competition.
All of it traced back to one place:

Woodland Schools Grounds
The LaPlace Dodgers
The LaPlace A’s
The FORD ALL-STARS

And then, it was gone.

After East St. John’s second championship in 1992, the FORD era faded several years later. The parks we grew up on in LaPlace, Reserve and Garyville, once alive with the sounds of gloves popping and coaches yelling, grew silent. Abandoned. Forgotten.

And then the city wanted to “unify.”
But I couldn’t help but wonder:
If it wasn’t broken… why fix it? At a time when there was no recreation for us to join, and play with the whites, now they wanted to put us all together. But why?

Those parks gave us more than games. They gave us identity. Community. A standard.

FORD wasn’t just a place.
It was a culture.
A brotherhood.
A launchpad for greatness.

To every coach who taught us…
To every parent who sacrificed…
To every teammate who battled beside us…

Thank you.

FORD gave us more than baseball.
FORD gave us a foundation.

FORD FOREVER.

#ThankYouCoaches #Destrehan #ESJ #JohnCurtis #LaPlaceLegends #BaseballRoots #FootballDreams #Episode17 #Finale

DM9,llc
F.O.R.D All- Stars Alumni & Fans

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