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Sports Seriously, USA TODAY
Grant Newsome saw himself walking across the NFL Draft stage one day. He envisioned shaking the commissioner’s hand and receiving a jersey with a No. 1 on it. His life had seemed almost a natural progression to that point.
From an early age, he demonstrated a proficiency at sports. He was on an elite travel baseball team that played all over the East Coast and faced some of the best competition in the country.
When Newsome switched to football in high school, the transition was relatively seamless, and he had the genes. His father, Leon, once committed to play for Lou Holtz at Notre Dame.
When Newsome reached Michigan, he played on the offensive line as a freshman and started five games at left tackle his sophomore year.
“If you’re good enough to come here and start, especially early in your career, you go play in the NFL,” said Newsome, now 26 and Michigan’s tight ends coach. “There’s no, kind of, alternative.”
Newsome likely was on that path to the NFL when a career-crushing injury quickly escalated to doctors hoping they could save his leg through surgery.
His parents, Leon and Kim, educated at Princeton and at life, had seemingly prepared him for every challenge. But this one was particularly rough.
“Not all stories have a happy ending …” Newsome repeatedly wrote in a statement Michigan released when, almost two years after his injury, Newsome retired.
Nearly five years after Newsome wrote those words, though, he does have that ending, even as it continues to be written. His is a story of personal triumph, and helping others find strength through misfortune — particularly his parents, who reared three boys with heavy doses of academics and athletics, but also careful nurturing.
In that pivotal moment of Newsome’s career, roles reversed: The parents found strength in the child.
“He’s a tough kid,” said Leon, who shifted from high school and collegiate football star to a long career with the Secret Service and now the position of chief security officer for the NBA. “Tougher than I ever imagined.
“I think he has reinforced the thought that the two (sports and life) are so intertwined that you have to have a plan for both if you want to be successful. It takes a lot of work and sometimes some adversity to be successful at both.”
Parenting can work the same way. The story of Grant Newsome is also one of how good parents make mistakes, and can learn from them.
Here are some of the tools the Newsomes say help their family excel at sports and life, even when neither go exactly as planned.
Education first, despite athletic prowess
Leon played youth football while growing up in Baltimore, but also spent hours throwing a baseball against a spray-painted strike zone on his elementary school wall.
His fifth-grade teacher saw Leon needed to be challenged more and connected him to Bill Greene, an administrator at The Gilman School. Greene was responsible for bringing many African American students to Gilman, an all-boys independent school, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Leon’s father died when he was six and his mother, Sarah, got him to all his practices and made sure he had the opportunity to attend Gilman, which was also a powerhouse for athletics. Leon starred at baseball, basketball and football there.
“I was a big and primarily played a 4 or 5, although I’d like to think I could step outside and shoot 3 pointers!” Leon told USA TODAY Sports through email.
As a 6-6, 225-pound linebacker and tight end, he made official visits to Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, Virginia and Princeton. He picked Notre Dame but later decided to go to Princeton. A mentor, Calvin Hill, helped convince him an education there would remain with him long after football and, if he was good enough to go pro, teams would find him.
Leon was an all-Ivy League honorable mention at defensive end as a junior and missed a slew of his games as a senior due to injuries. But, he had his degree from Princeton, where he met Kim.
After they married, they moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where Kim followed in her father’s footsteps and became a teacher and administrator at an all-girls school in McLean, Virginia. She played tennis in high school but wasn’t on track for an athletic scholarship.
“I am a very competitive person and my family’s all really competitive,” she said, “I had that kind of coursing through my veins as we thought about our kids.
“Our boys, since pretty early on, demonstrated the athleticism that they get from their dad. I kind of always looked through the lens of, ‘Wow, this can create additional opportunities for them.’ ”
Kim laughed when recalling how her kids used to hate it when she responded to their complaints about school with: “Well, sorry, this is your job. School is your job. I go to work; I do a good job. We expect you to go to work and do a good job, and if you need support, then we’ll get you the support to do your best.”
Grant said he never felt pressured by his parents to play sports or get good grades, though he did feel pressure due to his parents’ accomplishments.
But getting straight A’s seemed normal to him, as did playing baseball and basketball at an extraordinarily high level.
Stay cool under pressure: ‘There’s no crying in baseball’
Leon was mostly cool and composed on the sideline when he coached his boys in youth sports. Throwing equipment or showing negative feelings wasn’t allowed, and the same went for the players.
“Even when our kids were young, the one rule we had is that ‘there’s no crying in baseball,’ he said. “Yes, Jimmy Dugan’s quote from ‘A League of Their Own.’ Sports were to be fun and, yes, competitive, but not stressful to the point where you couldn’t control you emotions or it became unenjoyable.”
Grant started playing baseball around 5 years old. By fifth grade, he played on the Loudon South Eagles with a number of guys who wound up playing Division 1 baseball, including J.J. Bukauskas, who pitched for North Carolina and was picked in the first round of the 2017 MLB draft.
Grant, who pitched and played first and third base, thought he was on a path to D-1 baseball, too. But in eighth grade, he felt he did well enough at the Eagles’ first annual tryout to skip the second, going against his dad’s suggestion. He’ll never forget Leon’s matter-of-fact delivery telling him he got cut.
“There was no, ‘Well, you tried your best,’ ” Grant said. “The thing that I kind of left with was, ‘Wow, you’ve let him down.’
“I wanted to do well because I didn’t want to let both my parents — but really, my dad — down because I knew how much he was investing in me, how much he cared, and there’s that desire that I’m gonna do this for myself but I also want to do this for him. Not because he’s demanding it or because he’s telling me I need to do it for him, but it’s just because you’re a kid looking up to your father.”
Leon’s next question hung over him: “What do you want to do?” It was one that would forcefully revisit him later in his life.
“I think our challenge as parents, and something that I don’t think we necessarily got right all of the time, especially with Grant, was just the balance of not pushing too much on them too soon,” Kim said.
Grant found another local baseball team for eighth grade, but when he moved on the next year to boarding school at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he had a surprise announcement: “I’m not playing baseball.”
The eight-hour drives, the hotel expenses and the long weekends had led to some burnout.
Grant tried something completely new that spring: lacrosse.
It didn’t stick, but it was a touchstone moment in Grant’s sporting life, in part because his parents let him own the decision.
“I wanted to be my own person and not just be Grant Newsome the baseball player,” he said.
Find purpose in the journey, not the result
As a high school freshman, Grant was already 6-3 and 260 pounds. He was recruited to play freshman football.
He had never played the game beyond flag football but had offers from Rutgers and Penn State by the end of his sophomore year.
Being away from home, Grant managed the official visits and calls with help from then-Lawrenceville football coach Danny O’Dea and guidance counselors. Yet, when it came time to make a final choice, he went to his mom, who advised him to choose the school he wanted if football went away.
The Newsomes became fixtures at Michigan games, especially when Grant was starting for his top-5 team as a sophomore.
They were in Ann Arbor on Oct. 1, 2016, when he rolled left and was hit low by a Wisconsin defender.
He walked off the field (so his mom wouldn’t worry) but had significant tingling in his toes. Doctors told him he had to go to the hospital as a precaution.
Leon, Kim and their younger sons, Garrett and Gaines, watched the rest of the game from the hospital waiting room, getting shushed by nurses for cheering after a Michigan interception.
No one knew yet that emergency surgery was imminent.
“They started calling specialists into the hospital on their day off,” Leon said. “And to hear the doctor say they were going to do everything to save his leg as he was wheeled into the operating room — I don’t know where my mind went.
“I think I felt somewhat responsible, as any parent would, that I could not be there to prevent the injury and not have your child go through the surgeries, pain and the lasting scars to remind them and everyone of what happened.”
Grant had widespread injuries. His popliteal artery, the main vascular supply to the knee and lower leg, was damaged beyond repair. Grant received an arterial graft, taking a vein out of his left leg to give him a new popliteal artery in his right. He spent 38 days in the hospital, with one of his parents almost always with him, and endured six surgeries. When he got out, he had to learn to stand and walk again.
It was another period of self-discovery.
The previous summer, Grant had met a teenager, Larry Prout Jr., through Team Impact, which is an organization that pairs college sports teams and kids with illnesses and disabilities.
Prout, who has been in and out of the hospital his whole life with spina bifida, became a lasting friend.
That friendship helped Grant gain perspective during rehab and appreciate each small improvement and the strength the journey provided.
“You can look at a guy like Larry, who deserves none of this,” Grant said. “There was nothing he did or could have done to prevent any of this, but still he attacks every day with such enthusiasm and just a great mindset.”
Over the next nearly two years, Grant tried to get back to the field. He found purpose to keep moving forward. That he didn’t make it all the way back almost didn’t seem to matter.
When asked how she raised a child with the ability to find perspective in difficult moments and push forward, Kim said, “the truth is, I don’t really know.”
“I think we all as parents would like to hope that we have given our children the life lessons and the experiences to build resilience, but until that is tested in some sort of profound way, you’re never exactly sure how it’s gonna go in those moments,” Kim said, still getting emotional. “I think some of it’s nature and some of it’s nurture.
“And a lot of it was us and our family kind of closing ranks around him in the hospital, centering him, helping him stay focused on what he wanted, which was to get back onto the field.”
Learn, grow and make necessary changes
The Newsomes remained consistent with their core messages of valuing education and owning your decisions, but made small adjustments raising Garrett, now 21 and a pitcher at William & Mary, and Gaines, 14, who plays as a freshman on his varsity baseball team in New Jersey near Princeton.
Both have endured injuries and had to scale back their training over the years. Garrett played on a strong travel baseball team, but Kim said she and Leon were much more mindful of balance in his life than they were with Grant.
“He didn’t get to hang out with his friends who were on the baseball team. He missed birthday parties,” Kim said of Grant. “I think it backfired a little bit on us.”
Leon still makes it to a fair number of his sons’ games but has noticed changes in himself, including the way he acts at games.
“I think you make all your mistakes with your first child,” he said. “I think I was more intense with Grant.
“I didn’t always have a steady demeanor. I think through trial and error, and seeing a little bit of myself in others who were not model citizens around youth sports or in the workplace — I learned what behavior I didn’t want to emulate.”
He is especially proud of how Grant has handled the unexpected end of a childhood dream.
Since the injury, Grant has married his then-girlfriend, Caroline. And while he never walked across the NFL draft stage, he found what he said is his career calling.
“Not every story has the happy ending that you envision,” Grant said. “But every story does have purpose.”
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ youth teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now loving life as sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler.
