He carried his life in a grocery bag. His high school coach gave him a room — and hope
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Elijah Phillips slept on a bench in front of a Taco Bell after leaving Florida.
- High school coach Kenneth McClamrock and his wife Maggie took Elijah into their home.
- Elijah plans to attend Rowan‑Cabarrus Community College to train as a paramedic.
Sleeping on a bench in front of a Taco Bell wasn’t exactly how Elijah Phillips imagined his senior year of high school at Rocky River would start.
He tried to get a hotel room with some money he had saved, but the hotel wouldn’t rent to an 18-year-old. So, Phillips found himself on the street after leaving Florida, where he had been living with his father for eight months.
After seeing Phillips on his makeshift bed a few nights last fall, some of the restaurant employees brought him food at the end of their shifts.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t a new thing for the teenager.
“I’ve been in some troubling situations,” Phillips said. “I’ve been in (group) homes before. So sleeping outside is dangerous, yes, but I mean, I prayed about it, and I just did what I had to do, dangerous or not.”
‘He saved my future’
In August, down on his luck, Phillips couldn’t imagine where his life would be now: Living with his high school coach and becoming a “bonus son” to Maggie and Kenneth McClamrock — and a big brother to their 12-year-old twins, Kenneth James and Knox, with a plan to go to college to become an EMT.
Sitting in the school’s football office last month, Phillips recounted the day that he came to McClamrock, distraught and tired. He’d left Florida after fighting with his father. He said his mother was recovering from addiction. He couldn’t live with her.
He was at his wits’ end.
And he was carrying all of his belongings — a pair of underwear, two pairs of socks, some sweatpants, pajama bottoms and an Xbox controller — inside a royal blue Food Lion fabric grocery bag.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Phillips said. “I was just overwhelmed.”
McClamrock took him to his house and ordered pizza on the way. Phillips stayed one night and left. He said he didn’t want to be a burden. Eventually, the coach asked him to come back. Phillips has stayed there now for more than eight months.
So did Coach save his life?
“He saved my future,” Phillips said, looking up with a big smile. “I don’t believe my life would’ve ended, but in terms of just, like, genuinely changing the trajectory of me, of me being a productive human? Like yes, he generally saved my life in that aspect. Like, without him, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be talking to you guys. I wouldn’t have played (football) this season. I would have been moving furniture, bouncing from city to city, if not state to state, trying to make ends meet.
“But when he welcomed me in, Momma Maggie, Knox, KJ, it was all of them. And it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be here.”
More than just football coaches
High school football coaches can be so much more than just guys who blow the whistle on weekday afternoons and Friday nights.
They are part teacher, part therapist and sometimes, literally, a lifeline to the kids they coach, McClamrock said.
“I was talking to a college football coach about one of our former players,” McClamrock said. “It was a couple months ago. He said, ‘Did you know this kid was homeless?’ I said, ‘Coach, that’s half of our kids.’ A large majority of them have couch-surfed at some point in their lives, whether it’s them individually or whether it’s them, their mom, their siblings. I think the instability at the house is a lot more common just about everywhere than what a lot of people know.”
Nine years ago, then-Harding High School coach Samuel Greiner was taking a skinny reserve on his team to a different house every night. The teen was facing the type of issues McClamrock was describing.
Braheam Murphy told Greiner he was staying with friends. After a few weeks, Greiner figured out that Murphy was basically homeless and offered to let him move in.
With a solid home life, Murphy flourished, putting on weight and muscle and ultimately becoming the state championship MVP, at quarterback, when Harding won its first state championship in more than 50 years in December 2017. Murphy played college football at Army, graduated and is now working in Charlotte. He’s engaged to be married, and he is still very much in Greiner’s life.
‘Definitely a big change at home’
Last fall, at Garinger High School, then-Wildcats head coach Jupiter Wilson found himself in almost the exact same situation that Greiner — his good friend — had once faced.
In the middle of the 2025 season, three young men who had transferred from Concord High School to Garinger lost their mother suddenly. It was Oct. 25.
Wilson said the young men — whom The Observer is not naming out of respect for their privacy — had nowhere to go. Wilson took them home with him to his wife and 12-year-old daughter. After speaking to one of the boys’ relatives, Wilson discovered they were related to his high school principal.
If he wasn’t drawn in already, that really drew him in.
“It was supposed to be a situation where they were going to stay through football season and then maybe do a semester (in the spring) to get through,” Wilson said. “But one thing led to another and here we are.”
The oldest of the brothers will graduate this year and has moved out. The other two are sophomores. Wilson is planning to have them in his home for two more years. It’s meant a much larger grocery bill, some additional bills for medical expenses and necessities, but Wilson said he’s gotten a lot of help from the school community.
And nowadays, the two young men are just about inseparable from their coach and father figure.
“There’s been some changes that have happened for the boys in a positive way,” Wilson said, “of just going to school (on a regular basis) and you can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel for them. I knew when I got to school here, there were definitely going to be a lot of different circumstances to deal with, which, even outside of this situation, there definitely have been.
“But this is almost kind of a microcosm of what goes on day to day at that school.”
The ‘Mint Hill problem’ at Rocky River
At Rocky River, McClamrock said, there are many similar stories.
Rocky River is a Title I school, meaning most of the students are on free and reduced lunch and part of the largest federal education program in the nation, designed to help ensure that its students have similar educational opportunities as their peers.
McClamrock said no students at Rocky River are from Mint Hill, the Charlotte suburb where the school sits, and are bused at least 30 minutes from neighboring districts.
“Our kids come from (low-income) households,” he said. “You’re busing them across town. Most of them pass at least three high schools that are closer than us. These are kids with limited means and limited opportunities, and because of that, it makes it hard for parents to be involved here because those parents are living 30 minutes away. Most of our kids have never stepped foot on Rocky River’s campus before the first day of school. I don’t think the average person, even the average person with kids in school, can understand. I’ve taught for 22 years and Rocky River is a very unique place with very unique challenges.”
In football, for example, McClamrock said, if there’s a half day for school, his kids can’t go home, so he has to work out arrangements for them to hang out on campus, and eat, even if there are teacher or staff meetings.
And he said it’s basically a requirement that his coaches provide rides home for players, which often means stopping by the drive-thru to feed players who get free breakfast and lunch, but no dinner.
That money often comes out of the coaches’ pockets.
“We would not have an athletics program at Rocky River if coaches were not picking up kids and taking them home,” McClamrock said.
The Elijah Phillips story
McClamrock vividly remembers that day in August when Phillips came into his office distraught. And Phillips vividly remembers the day he knew he was ready to stay.
McClamrock’s wife, Maggie, made a dinner of pulled pork barbecue and rolls, and gave him some purple Propel to drink.
“It was good,” Phillips said. “It was really good. And after dinner, I had an actual bed. It felt great. I felt welcomed. I really felt like I was supposed to be there.”
At first, he stayed in the guest room, door closed. He didn’t want to be a burden.
“I was just making sure I wasn’t ever, like, overstepping a boundary, just stuff like that,” Phillips said. “But once I understood the house rules, it was never awkward.”
Phillips was 165 pounds when he moved in with the McClamrocks last September. He’s nearly 180 pounds now. He’s got a full-time job at a Cabarrus County ice cream parlor, where he got a raise in his first month. He bought a car for $750 and is learning to budget his money.
He plans to go to Rowan-Cabarrus Community College in the fall.
For the first time, maybe ever, Phillips has a real plan.
“Ultimately, I want to become a paramedic,” he said. “I want to help people, to affect people’s lives, and, you know, see smiles on people’s faces.”
The football ministry of the McClamrocks
Maggie McClamrock met her husband at Concord High School, and when Kenneth was a freshman in college, he came back to take her to senior prom. When she walked down the stairs at her house in her dress, he was a goner.
They will have been married for 23 years in June, and Maggie has gotten quite used to her husband’s philanthropy. He’s always opened his home, literally, to players like Phillips.
“When we first got married, I did not realize what I was getting into being a coach’s wife,” Maggie said. “Because it is very time-consuming. And in the beginning it was hard for me, but as time went on, I saw that this was a ministry for him. And after our boys were born, I started seeing football as a ministry for me as well, to be able to pour into these young men.”
The McClamrocks are a single-income household. Maggie homeschools the kids and Kenneth works at school and does multiple odd jobs in the offseason and summer.
None of this is easy.
The McClamrocks are heavily involved at their church; some of the church members helped buy clothes and shoes for Elijah when he moved in. And in the time he’s been with them, Kenneth McClamrock figures having a third son has increased the family budget by more than $4,000.
“Kenneth is the only provider in the home right now,” Maggie McClamrock said, “and yes there are some added financial strains, but that has never been anything that has made us be like, ‘We can’t have him here.’
“We’re going to make this work.”
In fact, the McClamrocks said they would not change a thing.
“This kid, Elijah, who’s now my bonus son, he’s the most amazing, likeable, loving kid you’ll ever meet,” Maggie McClamrock said. “He’s very respectful, very mature, very good around my kids. He’s so good with them. I’ve never felt uncomfortable with him around them. And that’s not something you can’t say about every kid.”
