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"Everybody dreams about something like that happening."
At first, Scott didn't know the ball was in his hands. He went after the quarterback, like a defensive end is supposed to, but he didn't realize he'd stripped the ball away until he was running towards the end zone. The 6'6 Walt Whitman senior lineman forced and recovered a fumble, then ran nearly 20 yards for a touchdown. The crowd erupted. Coaches on the sidelines threw their hands up in the air. Teammates met him at the goal line to celebrate.
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A senior at Whitman, Scott hopes to play college football next year.
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"Before a game, everybody dreams about something like that happening," says Scott, a resident of NCCF's Greentree Adolescent Program (GAP). "You literally daydream about it."
At school on Monday, friends asked Scott if he'd seen the Washington Post. He hadn't. "They showed me the paper--my name was on the All-Met Watch list," he says. The prestigious honor is reserved for local high school players with the best performances of the week. "Sometimes I wonder if what I did was my skills or just a luck thing. But later that night I got two sacks and one tackle, so I guess I was just playing hard for my last game."
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When friends ask Scott where he lives, he tells them he's in the group home. His peers at Whitman know about the group home on Greentree Road in Bethesda. They know there are 15-20 students at their school who don't go home to their parents at night. "I'm not ashamed of it," Scott says. "Where I live doesn't really change me."
Then they ask why he lives there. "Bad decisions," he'll say. He'll tell them about the mistakes he made at his old high school. The burglary charges, the forgery, his time on house arrest. Some people don't believe him. He's nicely dressed and well-spoken. "Proper," he calls it. He likes reading Shakespeare. He doesn't seem like a kid who was remanded to a high-intensity group home after spending time in a youth detention center. "Shut up, you didn't do all that stuff," friends say.
He has a better way of handling his anger now, he says. Football. His aggression comes out on the line of scrimmage. He can't pinpoint why he's angry in that moment--it's not like he's consciously thinking about the times his mother used her money to buy drugs instead of feeding him. Or the fact that he's never met his father. But that's somewhere inside of him.
"We lived in a car for awhile," says Scott, now 18. "I think it was red. Or green. It would change a lot. But those are the only two I remember--the red one and the green one. We parked on the side of the road and that would be our house. We didn't eat a lot, so I gave my little brother most of my food. I didn't know what I was doing. I was young and he was a baby--I just felt like he was my responsibility."
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Scott recovered a fumble and scored his first touchdown
earlier this month. Photo by Chris Hanessian
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He was four or five years old, living in Rockville's Lincoln Park neighborhood. Soon his mother moved into a trailer, where he remembers his uncle coming into his house to use the bathroom and a SWAT team running in after him. "I was underneath the table with my brother and we were crying. They flipped the couch and found a package of cocaine. That's when they noticed I was hungry. That's when they took us away."
He barely spoke to anybody in his first two foster homes. "I would nod or shake my head," he says. "I guess that's why a lot of people didn't want me." His third foster home was his last. A single woman, now married, adopted Scott when he was seven and moved him into her Montgomery County home. "I started growing when I moved in with her. She has pictures. She says it's like I sprouted--I got so tall that I hit the bunk bed. I think it's because I was happy," he says. When he was eight, he asked if he could call her "mom."
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There are letters of interest from college recruiters sitting in Scott's room at GAP. He plays basketball and volleyball, too, but his dream, like so many, is the NFL. Football is part of his plan to make his brothers and sisters proud, to help take care of them. His birth mother, who recently contacted him on Facebook, has nine other children. Some live with their fathers; he is the only one who was adopted. "They're not at the greatest place right now," he says. He wants them to see him on TV one day. "Everybody deserves a second chance, or a third or fourth, to prove to themselves that they're not what they were made out to be."
He has one brother's name tattooed on his chest--the brother he lived in the car with--and a shooting star etched in ink on his arm. The letters on his fingers spell FAME. On his neck, he has the red and yellow Superman symbol. "It's not just an 'S'--it's a symbol for hope," he says. People ask him why he won't get his tattoos removed or covered up. "If I get them covered up, I'll lose the meaning," Scott says. "All of my tattoos are reminders."
* Scott resides in NCCF's Greentree Adolescent Program (GAP), a community living environment in Bethesda, Maryland. He continues to be resilient and responsive to the high intensity structure GAP provides and is expected to attend college next year. Learn more about GAP.
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