‘When they believed in me, I started believing in myself.’ HS player goes from tragedy to signing day.
Hopewell High football coach Jamelle Byrd said he’s going to be fighting back tears when senior defensive tackle Vy’Shonn Lawrence signs his national letter-of-intent with Elizabeth City State on Wednesday.
“Out of all the people signing,” Byrd said, “this, by far, will be the best signing I’ve been a part of because I know what he went through and I’ve seen him work every day to get to this point, and I don’t think he ever wavered in his belief that he would get to sign.”
But all of that is kind of jumping ahead in the story.
To understand Vy’Shonn Lawrence’s journey, to understand why Byrd gets so emotional talking about it, you have go back to the middle of Lawrence’s freshman year.
Three years ago, in early 2017, Lawrence had just finished his first football season at Riverside High School in Williamston, N.C.
He was literally a big deal because he was 6-foot-2 and more than 300 pounds playing 1A football against guys sometimes half his size.
He was happy.
But his life changed in an instant.
In the early spring of 2017, Lawrence’s mother, Myra Brown, suffered a heart attack, which relatives say came out of nowhere, that took her life at 47. So Lawrence went, out of nowhere, from being a budding football star at Williamston High School to moving four hours east to Charlotte and Hopewell High.
He moved in with his father, Shon Lawrence. His parents got divorced when he was young.
He said the transition was tough.
“I wasn’t motivated,” he said. “I wasn’t focused. I was still dealing with (his mother’s death) and being forced to be somewhere I didn’t want to be.”
But he said the transition at school was tougher.
Williamston is a small town of about 5,500. Hopewell has nearly 2,000 students walking the hall. And he missed his mother so bad. He missed his adult sister, Brittany Brown, whom he left behind in Williamston.
“Me and my sister were real close,” Lawrence said. “It was hard leaving her.”
Then as a sophomore at Hopewell, Lawrence didn’t play much.
“He fell into a slump for real,” Byrd said. “The teachers and staff at Hopewell told me he didn’t take his mother’s death well, like most 16 years old wouldn’t.”
Byrd was hired in January 2018, the second semester of Lawrence’s sophomore year. He met Lawrence at one of the first team meetings, blown away and intrigued by his size.
“He wasn’t that talkative at first,” Byrd said. “He was quiet. reserved, but when I found out more about his story from the teachers and the people in the building that knew him, it helped me understand the way he was. For me, it was trying to bring him out of his shell. He was in a dark place mentally and the thing I noticed was that, no matter what, he showed up for workouts every day. He didn’t say a whole lot but he was always one of the first guys there and one of the last to leave.”
Byrd saw the desire and tried to tap into it. He and Lawrence established a good relationship, but Lawrence was still, to use Byrd’s term, “in a slump.”
The coach kept pushing, kept telling Lawrence that a guy his size could play college ball and how a college degree could change his life. And by June, Byrd said he saw Lawrence get out of his slump.
But also in June came a tough setback. Lawrence had gotten behind in his work though all of this and he was ruled academically ineligible.
“He was crushed,” Byrd said, “and (he) even cried because I felt like football was the thing that was keeping him sane at this point in his life.”
Determined to return to the team, Lawrence worked with Byrd on a plan to make up assignments and regain eligibility.
He hit that goal and by August he was back, and then he had to work to get back into shape.
Finally, by October of his junior year, down 50 pounds, Lawrence was hitting his stride. In a game against Hough, Byrd marveled at how he was handling double-teams, setting up teammates to make tackles and making it hard for teams to run against Hopewell.
As a senior, Lawrence, now 6-foot-2 and 340 pounds, continued that strong play. He made 24 tackles, including nine tackles for a loss to go with two sacks and a forced fumble.
In January, he got an offer from Elizabeth City State. Elizabeth City is about an hour’s drive from Williamston, the town where Lawrence grew up.
“When coach Byrd and the other coaches came through and started talking to me,” Lawrence said, “I started taking it more seriously because they pushed me and motivated me, and because they saw something in me, I started to see it myself. When they believed in me, I started believing in myself.”
When Byrd was in high school at West Mecklenburg 15 years ago, he remember his coach, Rocky White, showing him that same kind of love. White would tell him there’s much more to life than the street, Tuckaseegee Road, that the school sat on; that earning a college degree could take Byrd places he could only imagine.
Now, in his dream job, Byrd is trying to give back what was given to him.
“(Lawrence) just needed to know somebody backed him and saw something in him,” Byrd said, “and I think he did everything else after that. I’m so proud of this dude. Our big saying around here is ‘Trust the process,’ and he’s the epitome of what that means. He could’ve made every excuse in the world not do something, being what happened to him at 16 years old.”
So when Lawrence leans in to sign Wednesday, Byrd knows he’s going to get emotional.
“I am going to try to hold it together,” Byrd said. “I had a moment at the (team) banquet when my voice cracked a little bit. Man, I’m just happy seeing guys get what they work for and deserve.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 5:07 PM.
