‘A little detour’: Louisburg College football players have more to play for than their futures
The light was fading and the sun had already dipped below the horizon Tuesday afternoon when Quinderra Spellman gathered his team around him. Players shivered in the frigid wind in their mismatched practice jerseys and cleats. This was the final on-campus practice for Louisburg College, and it’s not a program equipped to do it in cold weather.
This is the latest the Hurricanes have ever been playing, their 8-2 record earning them a spot in Saturday’s Red Grange Bowl outside Chicago, the National Junior College Athletic Association Division III championship game. Spellman offered a few words of encouragement and let a player lead the group in prayer before the team hustled down the hill toward the gym for the last time.
Louisburg, like the small Methodist two-year college that shares its name and sits just north of the tidy downtown, is a place you have to want to get to, bypassed by interstates, buffered from Raleigh’s northward sprawl by the placid fields and woods of Franklin County.
Nobody grew up dreaming of playing football at Louisburg College. Every football player has bigger aspirations than this. But for players who are out of options, who have nowhere else to go, it becomes a place of refuge. A place to get their grades up. A place to be seen. A place to atone for past mistakes that may have cost them an opportunity they took for granted.
“A lot of people think about junior-college football, they think about ‘Last Chance U,’ people cursing, yelling at each other, not heeding to leadership,” Spellman said. “This group is just like any other school, Division I, Division II. We do things just like the bigger levels do. These guys bought into the system, the culture, things that are going to help them grow in life beyond the game of football.”
‘TOOK A LITTLE DETOUR’
The players on this team took countless different paths to get here, whether they couldn’t keep up athletically or academically at a bigger college program — referred to as “bouncebacks” — or they didn’t have the grades out of high school and needed to rebuild, or build, their transcript. For some, their lives took them in directions they never expected. Others developed late, played at tiny schools or were injured in high school, overlooked in the recruiting process and hoping to be seen now.
But they are united in their belief that football has more to offer them, and they have more to offer football, and this is only the beginning of the rest of their lives. The season started with 35 returnees and 95 new players; there are 90 left at the finish. They came from all over the state and all over the country, Georgia and South Carolina, Mississippi and Minnesota, Maryland and Virginia.
Defensive linemen Cameron Wallace and Royquavious Williams both spent a season at bigger, scholarship junior colleges in Kansas and Mississippi before flourishing at Louisburg. Fullback Josue Riley had Division II offers growing up outside Minneapolis, but decided to play at Louisburg this season after his family moved to Pittsboro.
Joanue Morten-Berry enlisted in the Marine Corps out of high school, then drove a truck in Georgia before deciding to give football another try. He’s a 23-year-old freshman safety.
“I never really got the opportunity to play in college,” Morten-Berry said. “I don’t ever want to have that feeling of regret, that I could have done it.”
Right guard Robert Magwood had no excuses growing up in New Bern, with a supportive family and teachers who begged him to apply himself in class. He was headed to South Carolina State but didn’t get in, calling Spellman over the summer asking if there was still a spot. His goal now is to become a lawyer.
And Dylan Trevillian, the sophomore starter at quarterback, came from northern Virginia with a 2.0 grade-point average in high school. He doesn’t have any scholarship offers for next season yet, but he does now have the grades to play if he does: A 3.8 at Louisburg.
“I wasn’t grown up yet,” Trevillian said. “I really had to mature by coming here and getting my grades up.”
Everyone arrived looking to accomplish something for themselves. A few games into the season, it became apparent to everyone that they could do much more together.
“Everyone on this team has done their hardest, their best, to get to where they are,” Magwood said. “They just took a little detour to get to where they needed to go.”
A DIFFERENT KIND OF JUCO
Spellman, 37, arrived from North Carolina Wesleyan in 2022, where he had spent his entire career as a player and coach. The appeal of the job was two-fold: A mentor once told him he didn’t have to go all over the country to run his own program, and he didn’t have to uproot his family from Rocky Mount. He still makes the 30-minute commute on two-lane roads through the countryside.
Best known for a baseball program that has sent more than its share of players to the major leagues, let alone big-time college baseball, under longtime coach Russell Frazier, and a softball program that took an undefeated record into the NJCCA Division II World Series in 2023, Louisburg added football 20 years ago — like many small colleges, looking to juice enrollment and stem the tides of demographic change. Of Louisburg’s 400-some students, three-quarters are athletes. While baseball and softball have very nice stadiums, the football team plays at Louisburg High School.
The Hurricanes went three years without losing from 2016-18 but with only one NJCAA division, were never taken as seriously as the bigger schools. (N.C. State’s Larell Murchison spent two seasons in Louisburg en route to the NFL, but was only an honorable mention all-American.) They were never ranked higher than 15th. The split to two football divisions (I and III, there is no NJCAA Division II football) in 2021 opened the door to this postseason opportunity, a chance to compete against schools that are truly peers, even if there aren’t many anywhere nearby.
“To be honest, I didn’t hear about it until my last year of high school,” said Anthony Tandoh, a wide receiver from Charlotte.
There are a ton of two-year colleges in North Carolina, but only Louisburg plays football. And unlike the scholarship JUCOs in Kansas and Mississippi and Texas that offer football scholarships — the cutthroat world of the “Last Chance U” series — all financial aid at this level is need-based. Most of the schools in Division III are in Minnesota; Louisburg played two northeastern schools at a neutral site in Virginia, and both of its losses came to Division I schools with a combined record of 17-4.
If there was a pivotal moment in the season, one when all of this hung in the balance, it was a late September game against The Apprentice School, a Newport News vocational school originally founded to train shipbuilders. Down 17 in the second half, the Hurricanes had the ball on the goal line with a chance to win in the final seconds. Trevillian had tried and failed twice to sneak the ball across the goal line. Tight end Jabari Rone, all of 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds, offered his services. He punched it in as time expired for a 34-31 win.
“We’re resilient,” Magwood said. “We faced a lot of adversity this year, and I feel like we pushed through a lot of it to get to where we are. You can’t count us out. It’s just the whole last-chance thing. We have a lot of people who are just dogs and want to push through and get where they want to go. Everyone has a dream after this. They know this season, football can help them achieve their dream.”
The participants in the title game are determined by the NJCAA poll, and when the final edition came out on Nov. 25, it was assured that DuPage, the three-time defending D-III champion and annual host of this game, would be No. 1. The Hurricanes believed they deserved to remain No. 2, but couldn’t be certain.
When the poll was due to come out, Spellman gathered the team in a meeting and had everyone turn over their phones. They all waited for the results together.
“He put it up there, and we all saw it, and everybody went crazy,” Tandoh said. “It was a really good moment. It was one of those moments where we were like, we actually got a chance now. We’ve been talking about it, and now it’s here, now.”
A TROPHY AT THE END
They moved up all of their exams to Tuesday, practiced one last time on the hill, and picked up a final gift in Spellman’s office afterward: He used the last of his budget to buy personalized sweatsuits for everyone, travel gear for an unexpected coda to the season. They have to look good; the game is being streamed on ESPN+.
Then at 5 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the Hurricanes boarded Louisburg’s red-and-blue buses for the two-day trip to Chicago, overnighting in Indianapolis. On Saturday, on DuPage’s home turf, they’ll play what for many will be the final game of their football careers.
“This is the biggest game I’ve ever played in,” Trevillian said. “I’ve never made it to a state championship game. I have no experience in this kind of game, which is the same as a lot of guys. It’s going to be the biggest opportunity for 99 percent of the guys have had.”
For some, it’s one last chance to be seen. For others, it’s the last piece of solid ground before stepping into uncertain futures elsewhere. That’s junior-college football, always: The place where you can start over. That’s true regardless of what happens Saturday.
“We had more wins off the field than we had on those Saturday game days,” Spellman said. “People don’t understand.”
That opportunity is often the reward. Very rarely is there also the possibility of a trophy at the end.
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This story was originally published December 6, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘A little detour’: Louisburg College football players have more to play for than their futures."
