He was a former top recruit sleeping in a barn. Then Johnson C. Smith offered a way back

An iPhone alarm crackled a quiet morning to life. Quavaris Crouch sat up.

It was the winter of 2022 in Lansing, Michigan. Crouch, for another day, had found himself in “a little barn,” nestled behind a house owned by someone he hadn’t known long. He woke up to a job that didn’t pay much, a knee that required rehab, a college transcript that needed work, a life purpose begging for rediscovery.

“I was seeing my dreams go back in the sky,” Crouch says, recounting the scene in his life from two years ago. It’s a sweltering Friday afternoon in late July in the Johnson C. Smith football offices, and Crouch is offering the details to a story about hope and perseverance and redemption. The story just happens to be his own.

Six years ago, in 2018, Crouch had a linear path to those dreams. The Charlotte native had just won a high school football state championship and was the No. 1 high school football prospect in the country — a five-star running back and linebacker. He later earned a full-ride scholarship to Tennessee. To many, including perhaps to Crouch himself, he had straight shot to the NFL.

Then life, as it does, made the path less clear. He struggled in classes and dropped out of college. That led to him sleeping on a friend’s couch, relocating to a backyard, finding a job, finding God, all before ultimately leading him back here, to Charlotte — back where he grew up, where he can now forge forward. The former No. 1 recruit is now at Division II program Johnson C. Smith, which kicks off its football season at 7 p.m. Sunday on the road at Tuskegee University. The game will be broadcast on ESPNU.

But back to that morning, in that backyard barn. Back to that scene that to many would describe an end but to Crouch befit a beginning. Back to him choosing not to snooze his iPhone alarm and turn over — but to instead lift himself up, stretch his arms and pull his dreams back down to Earth.

Quavaris Crouch and Iron Man football

To understand how Crouch got in that position, there’s something you must understand about him. His Harding University High School coach, Sam Greiner, put it best:

“He always put a lot of weight on his shoulders.”

Greiner could tell that about him as a high school freshman and sophomore. Maybe it was his rare but fierce loyalty. Maybe it was his quiet nature. Crouch, after all, wasn’t a talker. He let his sheer size and gladiator persona do the intimidating for him. Maybe he got that from idolizing Eric Dickerson as a kid. Maybe he got that from emulating Adrian Peterson, the massive running back and the reason why a 10-year-old Crouch bobbed his head a certain way as he ran free, his imagination taking him from those Tuesdays at Nations Ford Elementary in jean shorts to the promised land. (“He was a man,” Greiner said. “No, not just a man, I’m talking a monster among boys. ... They didn’t believe how big he was until he really saw him and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this dude’s 6-foot-2, 220, pure steel. And faster than me!’”)

Greiner could even notice it when Crouch was a high school junior, the year Harding, with a mere 30 players, won a 4A state championship. It was the school’s first title in 60-plus years and the school’s only one since integration. The Charlotte Observer called that season “magical.” Greiner still calls it a “miracle.” Crouch himself would later call it a “Cinderella story” — one where “God had his hand over us the whole time.” But at the time, Crouch wasn’t jubilant. He was relieved for the team’s seniors, Grenier remembered, and mostly let them have the championship spotlight.

After that junior year, Crouch was the No. 1 recruit in the country on Rivals.com. He committed to Tennessee, where he got some playing time early as a linebacker. Two years after he arrived, though, head coach Jeremy Pruitt was fired. Much of Pruitt’s staff left, too. Crouch hit the transfer portal in Jan. 2021. That’s when he found Michigan State. And Lansing is where he found his most success as a college football player. As a Spartan, Crouch played in 10 games, finishing with 75 tackles and two sacks. He missed the last part of the year with a knee injury.

After that season, though, everything would change. The world would feel heavier than it ever had before.

Crouch’s life in Lansing

The next few months are an understandable blur for Crouch. So much happened. So little of it felt real.

After he was sidelined from football at the end of that 2022 season, Crouch “lost focus.” He didn’t earn good enough grades to be eligible to play the next semester. With no scholarship check coming, he couldn’t afford to stay in an apartment, so Crouch stayed in a friend’s living room. He was coming off minor “clean-up” surgery in his knee, and he couldn’t restrengthen his body using team facilities. He was “at a real sad point,” he said, and didn’t know where to turn.

That’s when he reconnected with God, he said. And his reconnection led him to Trinity Church up in East Lansing. One day, as he was lingering up near the altar — seeking shelter and peace at a time when both weren’t guarantees — Crouch said someone invited him to a Bible study led by a guy named Emmanuel Boateng. Crouch and Boateng, who was a native of Ghana and a professional soccer player, would immediately connect, and their connection would grow, even if it “wasn’t always peaches and cream” between them. Boateng saw Crouch’s potential, so he nudged him back into the gym, pushed him back toward the sky.

Through Boateng, Crouch joined STREETS 517 Ministries. The program had Crouch serving lunches to kids and talking to them about God and mental health. He did all this while living the backyard of Boateng’s home and taking classes at Lansing Community College.

“You know how you can see God through people?” Crouch said, describing Boateng. “He didn’t even know me, and he let me stay in his backyard. He had a little barn kind of apartment. And he let me stay up there and helped me find a job.”

“It was God’s way of healing me, taking care of me, in a foreign land,” Crouch continued. “So that’s why our relationship is super strong. He brought me back to my foundation.”

Brought him back home, too.

Finding home

Word circulated when Crouch was looking for a new football home. Crouch even returned back to Charlotte after Biff Poggi called wondering if the community college classes Crouch was taking would make him eligible for the 2023 Division I season.

It didn’t work out with the 49ers, ultimately. But there was a coach at Johnson C. Smith who was there to step in. He was actually there the whole time.

Maurice Flowers, the head coach at JCSU, is a near-lifelong Charlottean and a JCSU alum. He’s been plugged into the community so long that he knows Crouch’s family, his uncles, his brothers. Flowers knew of what was going on with Crouch up north — and when Crouch came back, by virtue of Division II schools not having as stringent academic eligibility requirements as Division I schools do, Flowers offered him a shot at redemption.

“Hearing his story, I can’t say he’s the only one I’ve heard like that,” Flowers said. The coach understood the player trying to make it on his own in Lansing initially. He knew what Crouch wanted to avoid. Ah, you had all that and you didn’t make it. But by coming home, by accepting a helping hand, more could be done. “That’s really what life is about,” Flowers continued. “How can you help the next person get better in their life? Or give their next person an opportunity? Because most of the time, when people are talented ... all they need is an opportunity.”

Flowers and Crouch, it turns out, offer opportunity aplenty. Thanks to JCSU, Crouch, 23, lives in a dorm now and is playing football again. He’s the team’s starting running back with two years of eligibility, his dreams back within reach. And thanks in part to Crouch, JCSU has a new belief, something that has grown under Flowers’ leadership. After eight consecutive losing seasons, the Golden Bulls finally notched a winning one in 2023, in Flowers’ second year of his tenure.

“He gives us incredible credibility,” Johnson C. Smith running backs coach Mike Craft said of Crouch. “And the other big thing is: He doesn’t act like it. He’s as humble as anybody I’ve ever coached.”

It’s just like working with kids in Lansing, back when his dreams were afloat:

Crouch is helping his new team, yes — but they’re also saving him.

“Here’s a young man who knew there’s a plan for his life, and he refuses to be stopped,” Flowers said. “Because you look at every step of the way, there is a place where he could’ve stopped. When he got word that he wasn’t going to be eligible in Charlotte, he could’ve stopped right there. He didn’t. He had several times to stop out in Michigan. But he didn’t. What you’re seeing, really, is a story of a perseverance.

“And the story’s not over. It’s not over.”