They may not yet have a mascot, but they'll play their first game Friday.
PURE—Progressing Under Restraints and Extremes—is a nonprofit boarding school in Memphis focusing on at-risk youth in the area. Up until about a month ago, it wasn't planning to field a football team for the 2020 season.
Its athletes were to do what they’d been doing since PURE opened in 2011—attend class and tutoring before suiting up for a local high school football team on Friday nights. Think of it as similar to how home-schooled athletes in many communities join their local public school’s teams.
Instead, founder and executive director Melvin Cole will lead the 27-member team as the first head coach in program history. The team plays its first game Friday night against area standout Christian Brothers.
Most of the debut roster, including junior quarterback and Power 5 recruit Tevin Carter, is made up of players who were attending public schools not slated to play football this fall. Shelby County Schools, the public school system in Memphis, canceled its fall seasons due to COVID-19. Their private school counterparts in the area are already several weeks into their 2020 seasons.
About a month ago, Cole completed the process of qualifying PURE as a private day school with Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association and two days later led a tryout in the area that drew numbers into the triple digits. The kids had to be withdrawn from their previous schools while uniform concepts, a coaching staff, athletic trainers and even some additional water coolers were being handled on the back end.
"Here we are," said Tina Kelly, PURE's director of marketing. "We've got a team! Coach had an idea and everybody jumped on board and supported it and we did what we had to do to make sure everything got done from our board to our volunteers and staff.
"We'll be excited to see them run out with their uniforms and helmets on...the sleepless nights will be worth it."
Half of the players are living at the boarding school, but the group is figuring it out as it goes along with the same goal in mind: to give this group a chance. Playing football is a chance to impress college coaches on the field for potential scholarships, but it’s also quite literally a chance in life via education and structure.
"We had some kids sleeping on the porch, some kids that were already highly gang-active, some kids that were basically homeless," Cole said. "Our kids here in Memphis are living in double the national average in poverty and food hardship so that deemed a lot of our kids ‘at-risk’ in the beginning. Poverty creates poor opportunities, so the kids look at gangs or drugs and crime as opportunity to eat or make a living or make money.
"Basically inner-city kids aren’t playing and all the county and private schools are playing. We’ve already had three high school football players in the city murdered in this time of no high school football, so football is a huge deal and focal point in our city."
There were four kids in the program in early September and now more than 40 have agreed to suit up for PURE this fall at some point, with some still navigating the transfer process.
PURE is accredited in the state as a branch of Home Life Academy, which features NCAA accreditation. Students help maintain certain areas of campus, from cutting grass to learning how to grow crops with a new garden that recently got an irrigation system, outside of traditional course work.
It's a far cry from the public school systems left behind, according to the team's best-known player.
"It’s a big, big difference," said Carter, who holds more than a dozen FBS scholarship offers. "There’s one-on-one teaching, they make sure you understand stuff before you move on. In public school, if the majority of the class got it, the teacher just moves on. Here, we’ve got kids in different grades so we have four different subjects to study together.
"The days are fun. At first it was hard. I wasn’t used to it because I was in the public school system. We work out in the morning, then we go to school, then back to football practice and then after that we probably do a little something like watch football."
Cole's debut as the head coach Friday night is as full circle as it gets. His athletic talent got him that Division I scholarship yet his off-the-field life was often on the wrong side of the fence.
"I’m just like these kids," he said. "I grew up with a grandma that was a heroin addict, I became a teenage father at the age of 14 and got involved in dealing drugs and gangs but I still had a passion for football. I straddled that fence and ultimately earned a college scholarship at Bowling Green State University in Urban Meyer’s last recruiting class.
"Going into my sophomore year, I was in a shootout and ended up getting shot in the head, which ended my career. I was back in the streets and selling drugs."
In 2008 Cole faced felony drug charges and spent time in prison, where he says he made "a pact with God" about surviving that time in order to help others in similar situations avoid the same fate.
PURE was founded just three years later, right in his native Memphis.
"I directly look like these kids, used to be these kids," he said. "My message to them is, ‘Hey if you don’t listen to me then you’ll soon go where I’ve been. And it’s not a guarantee that you’ll return.' I’m a direct, 24/7 example of how it can go wrong real fast and also how you can recover if you have some fight and grit to go with it.
"What our organization does is take kids in year-round, 365 days living on campus. We volunteer with the kid and their parents. We focus on education. Our curriculum is heavily agriculture- and STEM-driven."
Cole's star quarterback could see himself on a bad path before linking up with the organization.
"I think I’d probably be somewhere doing something crazy," Carter says of life without PURE "Like coach says, I was a knucklehead, so I’d probably still have that same attitude. Disrespecting my mom, grandparents and all that. Probably be kicked out the house right now.
"I really appreciate it because coach taught me character. I didn’t really grow up on all that. I was just a kid thinking I was good at football. Coach showed me I really wasn’t. Going out to see the kids from different cities and states at all those camps—it humbled me at a younger age."
Since, the 6-foot-3, 200-pound junior has had a different focus. Plenty of top programs like Auburn, Florida State and Baylor, have come calling and more could be on the way. He is now healthy after missing most of the 2019 season due to a torn ACL, too, something several programs have inquired about.
Until a few weeks ago, Carter was going to work on posting more video workouts to prove his physical progression, Now he’ll be able to suit up and get in that all-important game tape beginning tonight.
"That’s why I’m really trying to get back on the field, to show the schools that I can bounce back from an injury and be the same Tevin,” he said.
PURE currently has three games scheduled for the near future and could soon add more.
The team may still not feature an official mascot by then, but it'll be a collection of former public school rivals coming together to put their talent on tape.
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