Back home in Louisiana, DeVonta Smith will try to erase the pain of a championship loss while a proud community watches

AMITE CITY, La. — Plaques and pictures celebrating football state championships in 2018 and 2021 dot the walls of Zephaniah Powell’s office inside the small field house next to the football field tucked behind the main school building at Amite High Magnet School. They are points of pride for this small-town football coach in a state where his sport is king.

Coaches, though, are sometimes haunted by losses just as much as — if not more than — they revel in their victories, and there’s a game from more than eight years ago that still occupies a part of Powell’s mind with no statute of limitations in sight.

The Amite Warriors fell to Lutcher High, 40-36, on Dec. 10, 2016, in the Class AAA state championship at the Superdome in New Orleans.

Powell still remembers watching the way DeVonta Smith fell to the field in agony after the game ended. Smith had a broken toe and didn’t practice all week leading up to the game. “He said, ‘Coach, just turn me loose,’” Powell told The Inquirer this week. “And he played his guts out.” Smith scored a few touchdowns in the defeat, including a 93-yard kickoff return.

It is one of Powell’s biggest coaching regrets, maybe the biggest.

“That’s one that we know that we didn’t do enough as coaches,” Powell said. “To see that kid literally give every single thing he had, that haunts me. He should have a high school state championship ring, along with his two [college] national championships.”

On Sunday, Smith could win his first Super Bowl ring with the Eagles, back home in Louisiana, back in the place where all football seasons end in the Bayou State. It would be a monumental moment for Smith, for the small community that raised him, for Powell, but it would also emphasize the thing missing from Smith’s football resumé.

Powell is not alone in how that day lingers in the mind. While Smith is usually one to let things go pretty quickly, that 2016 title game lives on.

“I think about that probably more than anything just because those guys that I was playing with, we were playing together since little league,” Smith said Monday night. “It was the connection. Our parents went to school together. It was a brotherhood that you would never get nowhere else.”

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It’s been almost eight years since Smith has been a full-time resident of Amite (pronounced ay-meet), population 4,000-plus, and he doesn’t get home all that often, at least probably not as much as his mother, Christina Smith-Sylve, would like. For about three weeks every offseason, when he’s not working out in Florida, Smith returns to the Tangipahoa Parish for some quiet family time and to enjoy red beans and rice and jambalaya cooked by his mother and his aunts.

It is a place he loves, but when asked last week if there were a lot things happening there ahead of the Super Bowl, Smith admitted: “Don’t nothing happen in Amite.”

It is an unassuming town where I-55 and Highway 16 meet. A railroad interrupts the main intersection of Oak Street and Central Avenue, where a few blocks away Amite Magnet High makes up a large chunk of the small neighborhood in the southeast corner of the city, just west of the Tangipahoa River, some houses nearby speckled with boarded windows.

While he doesn’t get home frequently, Smith said Amite — where a packed community center watched him win the Heisman Trophy after the 2020 season — has shaped him in so many ways.

“I always carry Amite with me,” Smith said. “Everything that I do is a reflection of my family, a reflection of Amite, where I come from.”

After Smith was drafted 10th overall by the Eagles in 2021, he bought his mother a home in nearby Independence, where she still lives and works as a social worker.

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks, Smith-Sylve said, knowing that family didn’t have to travel far to the Super Bowl and to have Smith home, even if he’s tied up with his teammates in New Orleans all week. A normal family crew will be at the Superdome on Sunday, including Smith-Sylve; Smith’s father, Kelvin Dickerson; Smith’s younger brother, Christian; Smith’s fiancée, Mya Danielle; and the couple’s daughter, Kyse. There will be one special guest, though, Smith-Sylve said: Smith’s 65-year-old grandfather, Sidney, who because of health issues has never seen his grandson play an NFL game in person.

“I just want him to get that ring, and I’m sure he’s going to try to give it 100% and bring it home,” Smith-Sylve told The Inquirer. “I’m very proud as a mother just to see her son grow and flourish into the young man he has. It’s amazing just to see it before my eyes. I’m very proud of DeVonta in how he’s grown, and now being a father and seeing him with his daughter is just amazing.”

Smith-Sylve grew up in Amite, where the town’s largest employer is the school district and where the population has mildly declined over the last 40 years. It’s home, and it’s where she’s made her life helping families in crisis with her social work. She’s a wise elder of sorts, too, when it comes to Powell’s football program. Smith may no longer be around, but his mother has been a resource to families navigating the complicated world of college recruiting.

“We know everybody here in our town, so just being able to go through it and share my experiences and what I had to go through as a parent with a student-athlete, not just the positive but the negative as well,” she said. “Trying to not let the distractions and the noise from the outside interfere with what you’re trying to accomplish and where you’re trying to go.”

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Shortly after Amite hired Powell in 2015, he saw Smith doing push-ups in the hallway one day. It was the first time he met Smith, he said, and so he didn’t say anything right away. But Powell called Smith into his office later that day to ask what the push-ups were all about.

“He said, ‘Coach, I only weigh a hundred and so many pounds, I got to try to get bigger,’” Powell said. “‘Every time I see my reflection, I have to do push-ups. I’m not doing it on purpose, but if I catch a glimpse of myself, I have to do push-ups.’”

Mirrors, rain puddles, windows, a reflection on a car, it didn’t matter. If Smith saw himself, he dropped to the ground and cranked out 10 push-ups.

The kid they later called “Slim Reaper,” who at that time was known around town as “Tay-Tay,” was skinny, and everyone knew it.

When former Alabama coach Nick Saban came to Amite to visit Smith, Powell said Saban pulled him to the side on their way to the weight room and asked him of Smith: “How big really is he?” There was no hiding what Saban was about to see in person for the first time. Saban, Powell said, expressed concern about the lanky receiver. It was an opinion shared by plenty.

Eagles wide receivers coach Aaron Moorehead coached the receivers at Texas A&M while Smith was a rising star at Amite, tall enough at 6-foot-1 but just 150 pounds when drenched in the sweat that covers a body from the thick Louisiana air. Moorehead loved recruiting in the area for the food and made a habit of stopping at Mike’s Catfish Inn in Amite whenever he stopped in to see Smith.

Amite had the smallest weight room Moorehead had ever seen. It was tucked under the stadium bleachers and the Amite football players lifted old, rusted weights.

“I don’t know that I’ve seen a group of guys work as hard as those guys worked lifting weights,” Moorehead said. “It took me back to it’s not about how the weights look, it’s about who’s pushing the weights.”

Smith was one of them.

“I was shocked at how thin he was,” Moorehead said. “But you put the tape on and you saw how tough he was. Then I saw him work out and it took some of the fear away. But there was always a little bit of, like, he’s 150 pounds, how is this going to work in the SEC? You just had to trust your gut.”

Saban eventually did, and the rest is pretty much history. Smith caught the walk-off, winning touchdown in the 2017 national title game as a freshman, was a two-time first-team All-SEC selection, and reeled in every award there was to win as a senior, including a second national championship in a 52-24 Alabama blowout over Ohio State that featured some send-off from Smith: 12 catches, 215 yards, and three touchdowns.

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The days when Smith-Sylve would watch as her son took cones and ropes to the park with his teammates to work on drills as a diminutive eighth grader in Amite had paid off.

“When I saw that change in him, I knew he was ready,” Smith-Sylve said. “Once he got into high school, it just progressed. He started playing harder and working out more and it just took off from there.”

Before the NFC championship game, Nick Sirianni asked his players to close their eyes and think about their best moment or best play.

Smith closed his eyes and thought back to that high school playoff run in his senior year. It was the state semifinal vs. Kaplan High School, and Amite had taken a late lead. But Kaplan was driving, inside the Amite 10-yard line, as time ticked away. Kaplan had a bruising running back, but he was stopped short of the goal line on a handoff and there was a bit of a scrum and he was still on his feet.

“DeVonta, being as headsy as he was, went in, found the football, stripped it, and we recovered it and ended the ballgame,” Powell said.

Maybe in an alternate universe, Smith is not a $75 million wide receiver and is instead a shutdown cornerback. He had all the skills, Powell said, and Amite used him at corner, safety, and even outside linebacker despite his size.

“He was equally as talented playing defense as he was on offense,” Powell said. “A lot of times we could literally put him on another team’s best receiver or best tight end and he could literally take them away.”

Amite had plenty of talent, but Smith was the standard-bearer. He set the example that everyone followed.

“When you know your best is coming in to give their best, the other kids, it just elevates their play,” Powell said.

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Eight years later, Smith’s legacy still lives on at the high school. Amite has had NFL players before, but none like Smith. Powell doesn’t need to tell any of his players about the kid who came from their town and won the Heisman Trophy and two national championships at Alabama. The one who has more than 4,000 yards and 28 total touchdowns — regular and postseason — through four NFL seasons, who could become the fourth player ever to complete the trifecta: win a national championship in college, a Heisman Trophy, and a Super Bowl. His company would be Tony Dorsett, Charles Woodson, and Marcus Allen. From Amite to the history books.

“The community is so close and so closely tight,” Powell said. “They know him. I can say it, and I do, but I don’t have to. They want to be the next Tay-Tay.”

Powell said he knew the first time he saw Smith practice that he was special. He could see it in the way he moved. He knew Smith would play in the NFL, and said maybe the only thing that surpassed his expectations was Smith’s Heisman after the 2020 season.

The run-blocking Smith has had to show off as the Eagles dominated with Saquon Barkley on the ground this year? Moorehead, hired by the Eagles in 2020, saw it on tape at Alabama when the Eagles did their draft prep. Powell saw that years earlier. He hopes to see plenty more of it Sunday, too.

“You watch the John Wick movies, right?” Powell asked. “Keanu Reeves, his nickname, they call him the ‘Baby Yaga.’ That’s the Boogeyman. You got to keep the Boogeyman on the sideline. Keep him on the sideline by running the football.”

Powell, of course, was talking about Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

“In the end, guess what?” Powell said of a game in which Smith blocks all night. “They win it and he’s still going to get sized for the Super Bowl ring.”

Powell woke up one August Sunday in 2022 and planned to go do yard work. Eight months after his Warriors won a state title, the second for Amite under Powell, a new season neared. But Powell’s tongue that morning “felt like it weighed one thousand pounds.” He couldn’t articulate his thoughts. He couldn’t put on his pants. He was having a ministroke and doctors later found a heart condition that required a pacemaker.

Among the text messages that landed in Powell’s inbox were a few from an unknown number that wanted to know how Powell was feeling and to let the coach know he was in the texter’s thoughts.

Who’s this?

It’s Tay-Tay.

“He checked on me,” Powell said of Smith, who was in his second training camp with the Eagles.

When Powell’s son, Simeon, suffered a torn patellar tendon, the first person who called him, Powell said, was Smith.

“He’s always been about that,” Powell said.

They were small gestures, but emblematic of a guy who hasn’t forgotten, and won’t forget, his roots.

“He showed us how to be men and that’s what you ask for out of a coach, not just for it to be about football but about life also,” Smith said. “Being from a small community like that, the things you had to go through, the love throughout the city, and just being able to show the kids younger than me that there is a way out, there’s a way to carry yourself and do things the right way. No dream is too big.”

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Smith has played at the Superdome twice since 2016, once as a freshman at Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and once in the NFL. Earlier this season, the Eagles rallied late for a Week 3 win over the Saints in a game Smith didn’t finish after suffering a concussion. Neither of those games holds the magnitude of Sunday, when Smith will try to show the kids in Amite that they can win a Super Bowl. It is as far-fetched as dreams get.

“It’s like a fairy tale,” Powell said. “You look at him now and he has a little one that looks just like him, a fiancée, a degree from the University of Alabama. His life is set.

“You got to kind of forgive me a little bit,” Powell continued as tears welled in his eyes. “He’s a great kid. He’s a great young man.”

Asked why he was getting emotional, Powell said it was because of how “humble” Smith is.

“A lot of people that have that ability, they could be arrogant or self-absorbing, but not him,” Powell said. “He never asked me for anything. Never asked for the ball. Willing blocker. Finished top 10 in his graduating class.

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“If DeVonta doesn’t do anything else, for me, just to say I was able to coach that kid and have a relationship with the young man and still talk to him every now and again, that means the world to me. He doesn’t have to win. I want him to win, trust me. But he’s already won in my eyes.”

Powell won’t be at the Superdome on Sunday. The green Eagles jerseys with Smith’s name on the back will fill the living room inside his home. He will hope the result is different from Smith’s last championship game inside the building.

It would be a full-circle moment. The kind of thing that could erase the pain and heal the wounds. But Powell isn’t sure it would. Time can’t heal everything, and so he replied “I don’t know” when asked if he could finally let 2016 go if Smith spends Sunday evening with the Lombardi Trophy about 75 miles from his high school.

“Here in our program, a state championship and playing on Poydras Street, that’s pretty much the end-all, be-all as far as football in our community, like the Friday Night Lights,” Powell said. “For us, it’s not just getting there. Don’t just get there. Don’t come this far just to come this far. The finish line is right there, let’s step over the finish line and make sure we cross the finish line 10 yards through.

“So I don’t know. I feel that we didn’t do enough because that kid, he deserved it, and his teammates, that team, they deserved it.”