Well before he was a Super Bowl darling, before he finished as the runner-up for NFL MVP as the New England Patriots quarterback, Drake Maye was a high school kid who’d lost a cherished rite of passage — his senior season — to the pandemic.
No homecoming game. No Senior Night. No hugs goodbye.
Let’s start with how his junior year ended. Go to November 29, 2019. We were all a little more innocent then. Friday night. Thanksgiving weekend. Maye and the Myers Park High football team had put up one of the most remarkable seasons in North Carolina history. The Mustangs, led by Maye and a cast of other Division I recruits like receiver Muhsin Muhammad (son of the Panthers legend by the same name), had outscored their opponents 618-95 going into that night. And they did that while showing mercy; they only scored 12 fourth-quarter points all year.
On that late November night, though, Myers Park traveled to Richmond County for a state quarterfinal game. Richmond Senior is one of those North Carolina programs where the entire county revolves around Friday nights, a rural powerhouse with seven state championships. Nine thousand people attended the playoff game.
They watched as Maye and Myers Park opened a 21-13 halftime lead.
Coach Scott Chadwick had worked for six years to return Myers Park’s program to prominence, and to put himself in position to win the first state championship of his storied prep football coaching career. He’d lost two state title games in Maryland. But here, he had Maye.
Maye transferred to Myers Park before his sophomore season from Hough in Huntersville, where he was already sort of a legend, as Observer sports writer Scott Fowler wrote in a helluva story last week.
The Maye-Chadwick connection began because of something called the Quarterback Factory, a program that identifies and trains promising quarterbacks. Chadwick was the Charlotte area coordinator for the factory. The spring of Drake’s freshman year, Maye’s father told Chadwick that he’d signed a lease in Myers Park.
“Oh, OK,” Chadwick remembers saying, like he’d hit a scratchoff jackpot.
Chadwick is, unlike some head coaches, an offensive coordinator who calls plays. He and Maye became inseparable. They had a similar sense of humor — clean Dad jokes, football jokes — and a passion for the game and its motions. Chadwick remembers times when Maye came to his house to talk through gameplans, and sometimes the teenager would doze off on Chadwick’s couch.
Maye started in his sophomore year, and Myers Park went 13-2. They beat Richmond soundly in the state quarterfinals, then lost to Vance High (now Chambers) in the state semifinals. To Chadwick, that was fine. He knew the best, with Maye, was to come.
The 2019 season proved him right. Maye only had to play in one fourth quarter that year, in a rivalry game against Butler. He had oddly selfless motivations for a teenager. He wanted to play well and roll up big leads, Chadwick says, because he wanted to give his backups a chance to play.
“He made such a conscious effort when he was in high school; he knew that 90 percent of the kids he was playing with, this would be the peak for them,” Chadwick told me last week. “He knew most of these guys were not going to play on Saturdays, and certainly not play on Sundays. So he wanted it to make it the best possible experience for them.”
Drake’s generosity is the result of an intentional upbringing, as many other stories noted over the past week. (The Charlotte Ledger’s feature had a terrific anecdote about how Maye’s mother, Aimee, once made a second-grade Drake write an apology letter to his brother for bragging about how many touchdowns he’d scored.)
Occasionally, albeit not often, the world delivered Maye a harder dose of humility.
That brings us back to November 29, 2019.
Richmond Senior, led by future UNC running back Caleb Hood, erased Myers Park’s lead that night. It does no good to blame a win or loss on referees, but Myers Park’s faithful will remember a play where Maye fell over the goal line only to be called down at the 1. And they’ll remember how his teammate said, “His whole body is over the line!” and how a ref flagged the player for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, forcing the Mustangs back into a fourth-and-goal from the 15.
Myers Park got flagged for six holding penalties that night, twice as many as they’d committed in any game all year. But their biggest issue was they couldn’t stop Hood. He threw for more than 200 yards, ran for 112, and scored four touchdowns.
A few weeks after that game, our mutual pal Ryan McGee, who works for ESPN, and I took Chadwick out to lunch at Midwood Smokehouse. He was still reaching for understanding. “The most painful loss I’ve ever had,” Chadwick says to this day.
Still, Chadwick left that barbecue lunch an optimist: He had one more year with Maye.
That winter and spring, Maye decided to decommit from Alabama and commit to UNC. Chadwick told his young quarterback that he needed to call famed coach Nick Saban himself. (“I’m not doing that for you,” Chadwick remembers saying.)
He did, and on March 6, 2020, Maye committed to Carolina.
It would be about his last official act as a Myers Park football player because, one week later, the pandemic shut everything down.
It might be petty to lament a lost football season, given everything COVID took. But you’ve got to hear this.
For fall 2020, Chadwick lined up what one prep sports expert called “the best opening three weeks of any high school football team in North Carolina’s history.”
The Mustangs were scheduled to open the year in the Charlotte Kickoff Classic against perennial power Mallard Creek. The next weekend, they were to host Texas’ Trinity Christian — whose coach the previous year was NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, and whose star quarterback was Shedeur Sanders. The Maye vs. Sanders matchup was set to be the first time a North Carolina team hosted an ESPN game.
Then, on Labor Day weekend, the Panthers arranged for Myers Park to play Rock Hill’s South Pointe, which has produced numerous Division I players, at Bank of America Stadium. That would be followed by a home game against Hough, Maye’s old school and also a state title contender.
All canceled.
The only football interactions Chadwick had with his players that fall was when he sat in the stands at a 7-on-7 league in Weddington, which a bunch of them used to stay sharp. Chadwick wasn’t allowed to coach them. So Maye’s father, Mark, took that title. Each week, though, Mark visited Chadwick’s house to go over a game plan. Otherwise, in games, Drake basically coached the team.
Eventually the state moved the fall 2020 football season to spring 2021. By then, Maye and all of his Division I teammates had enrolled in their colleges to take part in spring workouts. That winter, University of Maryland football coach Mike Locksley called Chadwick and asked him to be an assistant. He took the job.
“If COVID doesn’t happen, I’m still the head coach at Myers Park,” Chadwick told me last week.
Chadwick still talks to Maye regularly. He also stays in contact with many of the Myers Park families from that era. Some of them will gather Sunday at Angry Ales to watch the Super Bowl together.
Chadwick lives in the Triangle now. This past fall he led the Clayton Comets to a state championship game. He loves the job and the community, but he still calls that missed 2020 season one of his most difficult losses.
Maye does, too, Chadwick says.
“Not having his senior year at Myers Park, I know he’ll never get over that. He’s told me that,” Chadwick told me. “He loved playing at Myers Park. He loved the way he was supported there. He loved the way the students supported him.
“He loved those Friday nights at Myers Park.”
Chadwick has one suggestion for Charlotte viewers at home: turn up the sound early in the broadcast. He can’t say why, but he’ll certainly be listening closely. (Sportico reported yesterday that NBC re-recorded Maye’s player intro. We’ll see.)
Chadwick won’t be at the Super Bowl. Not because he doesn’t want to be, but because it’s clear across the country in San Francisco, and he has a big week ahead himself.
He has to be up at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning to chaperone Clayton High’s senior trip. They’re going to Disney World.