“I’m devastated at this point,” said Tyson, 43, who started the business with his mother in 2021. “I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ ”
As the crashed sedan sat in the middle of an infant playroom — thankfully, no children were present — officers informed Tyson the wreck came amid a police pursuit of a suspected carjacker.
Tyson, a 16-year veteran football coach at Bell High, thought of his team. The Griffins had been gearing up for a 7-on-7 tournament the next day, and Tyson knew he’d have to cancel it. He texted the news to his players and was met by a wave of support from athletes and their families.
Two days later he was back on the field for practice, sizing up his roster ahead of the 2023 season. For his players, it was just the latest example of a coach known for going beyond the call of duty, using his business challenges as an opportunity to teach his team about adversity.
The locker room lessons Tyson has shared have become an indistinguishable part of the team’s culture, evoked in mottos and mantras by every player.
“He told us to be the reason,” senior running back James Stephens said. “It’s hung up all around our locker room. Be the reason that we win this year; be the reason that we do things the right way.”
Another of Tyson’s life lessons, relayed by junior receiver Jayden Watts: “If you want to buy stuff without looking at the price, you got to work without looking at the clock.”
It’s those lessons on hard work, resilience, composure, good grades, and being on time that have attracted several players to join the team at Bell (7-2), which plays Anacostia on Thursday in the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association Stripes conference semifinals.
Tyson — who had spent a year during the pandemic scouting locations, organizing finances and securing licenses to open two locations of Discovery Learning Academy — often heeds his own lessons. Seeing shattered glass and smelling burnt rubber around his building put a dent in all of his hard work; compared with football, it was a somewhat familiar feeling.
Bell is one of the most consistent football teams in the District, Tyson maintains. But it has repeatedly fallen just short of earning its way into the DCIAA’s upper Stars division, which in the past required teams to win consecutive titles to be promoted.
Last year it fell to Coolidge in the Gravy Bowl with a promotion on the line.
“We went through years and years and years of just coming up second to everybody else,” Tyson said. “ … We watched two teams, Eastern and Roosevelt, go on to the Stars without us, so that was demoralizing for our program.”
There were the four Gravy Bowl losses in a row starting in 2014. Then there was the heartbreaking, final-second Hail Mary pass by Roosevelt in 2017 that dashed Bell’s glory. The Griffins finally earned their first Gravy Bowl title in 2018 but failed to make the finals the next year. They won again in 2021 over Coolidge then lost in last year’s rematch.
Tyson thought he had enough and announced after the game he was retiring as coach.
But leaving his team behind, it turns out, is more difficult than repairing a six-foot hole in a wall.
“To be honest, when he announced it to us in the locker room, I cried,” sophomore Chris Palmer said, adding that he considered leaving the team. “It was my first year with him, and he gave me a really good experience.”
Tyson reversed course — partly because he realized there wasn’t a viable option for his replacement and partly because of all the people who asked him to reconsider.
“I changed my mind on that,” Tyson said. “I did learn a valuable lesson, which is when you lose that game and it’s so draining and it’s so exhausting and you put so much work into it, you know, I need to slow down and not make that type of decision on that day. I need to breathe and think about it.”
Tyson said this year he will not consider retirement until after the season is over. But he’s also more conscious than ever about passing on what he’s learned as a coach and a business owner to train a team of leaders for whenever that decision comes.
“I am praying I get another year with Coach Tyson, I’m praying,” said Deaundre Jones-Williams, 29, who is a receivers coach and special teams coordinator. “I feel like there’s a lot that I still have to learn from him, but there’s also a lot that I’ve also picked up as far as running a team.”
Tyson works year-round to organize study halls, behavioral education and lessons on Black entrepreneurship. Last summer, he enrolled the team in a course on fostering healthy relationships with women sponsored by Becky’s Fund, a local domestic violence prevention organization.
He’s also open about the challenges of owning a business while balancing his coaching responsibilities — pursuits that get him awake early and keep him occupied until 9 p.m.
“We see how much time he puts in and how he’s great at both, so it inspires us that I can have a business and also do something else,” senior defensive end Josh Hancock said.
“He’s taught me and other teammates how to be a man,” senior Khalil Malloy said. “He speaks a lot about adversity. It’s like his favorite word. ‘You have to fight through adversity. Teachers are going to give you adversity. People at work are going to give me adversity.’ ”
This is an especially busy month for Tyson, as he completes final inspections and permits to reopen his daycare center and tries to guide the Griffins through the playoffs. Thanks to a league rule change that allows teams to earn promotion with two Gravy Bowl wins within three years, Bell has another chance to move up.
“I’ve always felt like I owed something to Bell for changing my life,” said Tyson, who transferred to the school as a student in 1996, where the extra attention he received helped him turn his failing report card into honor roll grades.
“ … Some people could say that all those years we lost, we maximized our potential. And then some people could say that we just failed. For us, it’s more of what happens after you fail. What happens when you’re losing and it seems like you can never win.
“That’s one of the legacies I would like to leave with this program, is that, as many times as we failed, we’ve gotten back up.”