A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021
said “Rest in peace.”
Kevin knew what it took to stay
alive as a Black man in the na-
tion’s capital. He knew how hard
it could be.
But nothing from all those
years of violence and suffering
would prepare him for what he
would see less than half an hour
after he heard Crystal wail on the
phone, when Kevin arrived at
Children’s National Hospital.
“I’m here for Davon McNeal,”
he said to the medical reception-
ist.every da y.
That was Kevin’s first real ex-
perience with grief, and it fes-
tered inside him until it found an
outlet: rage. He became em-
broiled in a neighborhood feud to
get back at the teenager who
killed his friend. He bought a gun,
and, two years later, he was
caug ht with it and jailed. After he
graduated high school, Kevin quit
his overnight job at CVS and sold
drugs. His friends were dying in
street fights. It felt like he was
going broke buying T-shirts thatPHOTOS BY TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST
Coach Kevin McGill talks to his young team at a g ame in August, a l ittle over a year after one of his players, Davon McNeal, was killed by a stray bullet.together signaled that his coach
cared about him in a way he
wished his own father did.
Their relationship may have
saved Kevin’s life. In 2009, Kevin
was 22 when he was at a f uneral
for one of his friends and learned
that another one had been killed.
He realized in that moment he,
too, would die soon if he didn’t
change. He turned to Danny, who
reminded Kevin of what he had
told him when he was 10: His
choices will determine the out-
come of his life. A year later, Kevin
was coaching alongside Danny.
Three years after that, he was an
ordained minister and leading a
team of 12-year-olds.
“You gotta follow me on Insta-
gram,” Kevin said to the three
players behind him, staring at
them through the driver’s mirror
as they scrolled through their
phones. “I follow all y’all back
because I got to make sure you
aren’t doing anything wild on
there.”
The boys nodded, distracted by
a TikTok video.
Kevin continued to address the
back seat, telling the boys to
change their Instagram profile
picture to a football image and
add “sports athlete” to their bio.
“It’s called social media eti-
quette,” Kevin said to the boys for
the third time without a response.
“You can lose a scholarship be-
cause of what you put on there.”
Most days last season, Kevin
drove across Southeast Washing-
ton and parts of Prince George’s
County to pick up players. He
repeated the same route after
practice, rarely arriving home be-
fore 9:30 p.m. That was on top of
his day job as a personal trainer at
the Navy Yard and in addition to
the nights he drove the boys to
play laser tag or back to his apart-
ment for pizza. He occasionally
invited players to stay with him
for a week at a t ime if they weren’t
doing well in school, and he knew
they needed extra support.
“I like getting them in the car,”
Kevin explained. “You can find
out everything once they get in
the car .”
Kevin was particularly focused
on getting through to Xavione
Brown, a magnetic personality
who was one of Davon’s closest
friends. The coach feared that a
popular boy like him would be an
easy target for feuding neighbor-
hood groups. Kevin also knew
that Xavione, whom he called Zay,
was even more surrounded by
gunfire than the coach was as a
boy. Za y’s father was caught in a
crossfire four years earlier and
paralyzed from the waist down.
Davon had brought ease, hu-
mor and lightness to Zay’s life.
The two of them liked to meet at
the playground, shoot hoops onThe receptionist told him he’d
have to wait to see Davon until
someone could escort him to a
back room. Kevin paced under
the fluorescent light. His co-
coach arrived, then his city coun-
cil member, then his pastor. He
hoisted his body over the counter
and tried to peer through the
doors leading to the child.
He grew frustrated with wait-
ing. So when he saw the doors
slide open, Kevin flew through
them. Sprinting down the hall-
way with security on his tail, he
saw Crystal moaning and con-
vulsing in the doorway of a small
room. They locked eyes.
“Let him in,” she said to the
officers, looking at the coach who
had grown to love her son as his
own. “That’s his father.”
The of ficers fell back, and Kev-
in ran into the room. There he saw
his boy, punctured by tubes and
covered in blood. The floor was
red, the beeping incessant. Davon
was dead.
Kevin kissed his running back
on the forehead, left the room and
collapsed onto the sterilized floor.The Black Knight
Ten months later, Kevin
climbed into the driver’s seat of a
black van. Three of his players,
still swea ty from one of their first
practices of spring season, clam-
bered into the rows behind him.
They stepped on piles of dirty
football jerseys and bent cones,
mixing their locker room stench
with the stale Lysol odor in the
air.
Kevin turned the key that Fri-
day, blared 93.9 and started the
hour-and-a-half-long journey to
drop each child at home.
Since Davon died, Kevin and
the boys had spent most nights,
before and after practice, in that
van. Crystal purchased it with
money from clothes she sold in
Davon ’s memory and had its back
door decorated with a life-size
cutout of her son in his jersey
bearing the number 3. On the
side, she added in thick letters the
team’s nickname for Davon: “the
Black Knight.”
The Black Knight became a
moving memorial for Davon and
the space where Kevin was most
focused on his fight to prevent
another tragedy. The coach used
it to safely shuttle his boys around
town, the way he had with Davon,
and to teach life lessons that they
could carry with them when they
exited the van doors and stepped
out into a world that puts Black
men in danger.
His own childhood football
coach, Daniel Thomas, drove him
to and from practice each week.
Kevin learned to trust the man he
called Danny in the car, where the
pure volume of time they spentpopping sounds that filled his
neighborhood streets. As he grew
older, he liked to be at his family’s
house. Last year, he wanted to see
Davon and his mom, Crystal Mc-
Neal — who, at that point, had
become family. But Crystal had
arranged to spend the day at an
anti-violence cookout near Cedar
Street SE, which is in a section of
Anacostia with a history of high
crime rates. Kevin decided to
make different plans.
“I’m not going there,” he
thought to himself. “They shoot
around there.”
Kevin first met Davon when he
was 9 years old and known in
Southeast for his talent on the
football field. He played with his
entire heart, and Kevin liked that.
It reminded him of himself.
A few weeks after Davon joined
the Metro Bengals, Kevin started
giving him rides to and from
practice. Most players would race
for the back seat, but Davon al-
ways climbed into the front. In
the car, the boy often talked about
where he and his friends would go
to college (Clemson) and their
favorite rapper (NBA Young Boy).
Kevin liked to catch Davon star-
ing out the window and ask, “You
a’ight?” before poking his arm
and sending him into a fit of
giggles.
Kevin became close with Crys-
tal, too, a violence interrupter
who mediated disputes between
some of the city’s most dangerous
criminals. The coach could see
her infl uence on Davon, who
wro te a speech for his sixth-grade
class about how to stop violence
in his community. Kevin thought
he was the perfect role model for
the rest of the players.
“I need you to be the leader of
the team son,” Kevin had texted
him earlier that summer, telling
him, “they look up to you.”
“Ok,” his player replied.
Davon would never get the
chance to fulfill that promise.
About an hour after they had
exchanged texts on July 4, Crystal
called Kevin. She was screaming.
“They shot Day Day!” she said.
“They shot Day Day in the head!”
Kevin, posing for pictures with
his cousins, froze with the phone
in his hand.
Sixteen years had passed since
he’d received a call like that one. A
junior at Ballou High School, he
was at home with a sprained
ankle when the phone rang. It
was his football teammate, who
told him that their best friend had
been shot. Kevin rushed to the
living room, turned on the news
and saw James Richardson — the
almighty running back known as
“J-Rock” — on a stretcher with his
arm hanging off it. He was killed
steps away from the cafeteria
where they had lunch togetherhow they react to negative things
and the potential consequences.
“You can get in really bad trou-
ble,” wrote one player who had
started the fight, “or you be a man
and walk away.”
But only six of the 27 players
handed in the assignment, and
now Kevin was lecturing the boys
huddled at his feet after their win.
“Y’all understand what I’m say-
ing?” he said. “Football be far
from my mind when I’m coaching
sometimes.”
He pointed to the stack of
homework.
“This is more important.”
Born and raised in Southeast
Washington, Kevin wanted the
boys to understand what was at
stake. At 34, he had already lost
two dozen friends to gun violence
and nearly been killed himself.
Of all the bodies he has seen
lying in caskets, however, the
most painful was 11-year-old
Davon McNeal, his star running
back on this team of boys he was
trying to teach to be men. At the
funeral, Kevin stood with his
players as they laid eyes on the
lifeless child. Kevin saw Zay, his
linebacker and one of Davon’s
closest friends, convulse in an-
guish.
Davon ’s killing emerged as one
of the most high-profile and
wrenching in a city already con-
sumed by grief. A s tray bullet
killed him on the Fourth of July
last year, as the death toll mount-
ed in D.C. during both the worst
public health crisis in a century
and amid violence that pushed
homicides to a 16-year high. Both
afflictions weighed heaviest on
Black communities east of the
Anacostia River, and the loss of
this 11-year-old star came to sym-
bolize that suffering.
For Kevin, the agony of losing
his player sharpened his purpose:
If he couldn’t save Davon, he
would dedicate his life to saving
the rest of the team. That meant it
was critical for him to reach the
boys before they went through
puberty and started high school.
At that point, as Kevin had experi-
enced, society starts to view Black
boys as threatening Black men.
Their lives, in Kevin’s mind,
would become choices that would
lead toward violence or away
from it.
The boys were about to become
teenagers. Kevin was running out
of time.
Fireworks and gunfire
Kevin never liked the Fourth of
July because, for him, it is hard to
tell the difference between fire-
works and gunshots. In high
schoo l, he always spent the holi-
day with a girl, far from the
COACH FROM A
Coaching his players through games and grief
MIDDLE: A young player’s cleats are painted to honor his
late teammate Davon McNeal, also known as “ Day Day.”
ABOVE: Coach Kevin wears dog tags with pictures of Davon
featuring the boy’s team nickname, “the Black Knight.”“Y’all understand what I’m saying?
Football be far from my mind when I’m
coaching sometimes.”
Coach Kevin McGill,
during a lecture to his players after a recent game