Interesting piece by Kyle Newman from The Denver Post discussing several important points this week. Kyle Newman recently published this and I decided it was a great post for publishing here.
In Fountain-Fort Carson’s season opener last fall, Alexisius “Q” Jones Jr. took the first handoff and ripped through the left side of the line. The Trojans’ tailback deked one defender and then outran another en route to an effortless 33-yard touchdown.
That’s when Jones dropped to a knee and bowed his head in unbridled emotion as his teammates mobbed him.
The Dartmouth pledge wasn’t just celebrating the score. He was lost in the moment thinking of all he had been through to have a chance to show his talent. And he was setting the stage for a season that culminated in him winning the 2020 Denver Post Gold Helmet Award.
The Gold Helmet Award is presented annually to the state’s top football player, scholar-athlete and citizen, someone who embodies excellence on and off the field, as Jones does.
“He came out on fire, and when he took that first touch of his senior year to the house, our coaches went up to him and hugged him with tears in our eyes, because we knew what that guy’s gone through,” Fountain-Fort Carson football coach Jake Novotny said. “I’ve seen him go through dark times, and for him to burst out like that was sublime.
“This is a kid for whom football was taken away for a year and a half, and really in some sense, it was almost taken away from him forever.”
Showing his stuff
When the speedy 5-foot-11, 180-pound Jones came onto the scene as a sophomore, he already looked like a Gold Helmet candidate in the making. In nine games he racked up 1,406 rushing yards and 20 touchdowns, ranking among the state’s statistical leaders before breaking his left tibia and fibula against Regis Jesuit.
The injury cut Jones’ sophomore season short and had him feeling lost.
“I didn’t want to do anything, and I couldn’t attend school,” Jones said. “I just laid on the couch and felt sorry for myself. But when I got off crutches, and got back to walking and got back to school, I took advantage of that. I felt some momentum.”
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As Jones re-joined the team for summer workouts the following year, Novotny said the Trojans’ coaches noticed “he had a little bit of a hitch in his run.”
“It wasn’t something that was glaringly visible, but you could tell that he still favored his leg,” Novotny said. “As coaches we thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s him just working through his injury.'”
That didn’t turn out to be the case.
In Week 1 of Jones’ junior year — the most important season for players with aspirations to play Division I ball — he went down again, this time with a stress fracture in his left leg, which he assumed had been healed. When Jones got to the hospital, X-rays revealed the top screw of the rod in his surgically repaired leg was impeding the bone from re-connecting to the tissue. Hence the hitch in his run.
Surgery was needed to remove the screw and Jones healed in a couple of months. But it wasn’t soon enough to risk coming back for the end of his junior season. So, Jones and Novotny mapped out a plan for the following summer, with prospect camps designed to get Jones back on the radar of college coaches.
At the time, CU, CSU and Wyoming were all expressing interest. But none of them wanted to offer a scholarship until seeing Jones in person at camps — which never happened after the coronavirus pandemic shut down sports. When Jones finally got back on the field for a condensed CHSAA season last fall, he had just six regular-season games (plus the playoffs) to show he was healthy and still explosive.
The result? A state-leading 1,853 rushing yards on 9.9 yards per carry with 20 touchdowns and a pair of 300-plus rushing-yard games. His first touch in his first three games all went for TDs. Jones finished his career with 3,308 rushing yards and 38 touchdowns across the equivalent of two seasons of varsity action, with an eye-popping 231.6 rushing yards per game.
Making an impact
Prep coaches around the state certainly took notice. And so did Dartmouth, coming with a full-ride academic offer midway through the 2020 season.
“I’ve been in Colorado for 13 years, and that’s the best back I’ve coached against,” Ponderosa coach Jaron Cohen said.
Jones torched Cohen’s Mustangs for a season-high 332 yards and three touchdowns in the Class 4A quarterfinals last November, despite Ponderosa doing extensive game-planning to stop him.
“He completely went off,” Cohen said. “We had a free player on every play, and at some point we had to tackle the kid. We couldn’t. It was jump-cuts, and spins, stops-on-a-dime, sticking his hand to the ground and incredible balance and acceleration. He’s a total package as a running back.”
Cohen said he was also struck by Jones’ humility, something reflected in the tailback’s community service. Jones has volunteered for the Special Olympics, the local veteran’s fair and the team’s youth football camp, among other efforts. He also made himself a team leader.
“He would do things like give props to the O-line after a play, saying things like, ‘I don’t have these runs if I don’t have you guys,'” senior center Isaac Barker said. “But he would also hold guys accountable, whether it was weights, or running, or even if it was harping on the little things like getting enough rest, eating the right things, giving younger players rides home after practice.”
Jones’ maturity and commitment to his schoolwork — he graduated with a 3.89 GPA — comes from having to grow up quickly. As a kid, both of Jones’ parents were in and out of jail, with his father incarcerated for a decade of his childhood.
When his father, Lex, finally got out of prison, Jones was in the sixth grade and already getting into trouble with the authorities and doing poorly in school.
“The area I grew up in (in southern Colorado Springs), the people I was around — we were young hotheads and we wanted to do what we wanted, and we didn’t have much guidance,” Jones said. “It was a time in my life where I wanted to have fun and do what I wanted and I didn’t want to listen to anybody.”
But Lex vowed to straighten out his life along with his son’s. Lex and Jones moved to Fountain with the tailback’s sisters just before he went into seventh grade. Jones started playing football again, something he had dabbled in during elementary school. And father and son leaned on each other.
“I told him he had to do something different than me,” Lex said. “He got into football as a seventh-grader, and when he was going into eighth grade, he was ready to dominate…. I said, ‘Okay son, how do you feel?’ He said, ‘I love this dad, this is what I want to do.’
“So I said, ‘Okay, if this is what you want to do, you have to focus. That means your friends that do crazy stuff, you can’t do the crazy stuff with them.’… It was the turning point for both of us, because he helped me develop, to stay straight and narrow, and I helped him to stay straight and narrow.”
From that moment, Jones never looked back.
He fully committed himself to school, to football and to developing off-the-field habits that would cultivate success in both. Because of that, he became the first young man in his family to attend college — and someone capable of becoming a dominant player in the Ivy League.
“He’s poised for growth and a big career there,” Novotny said. “Had it not been for the unfortunate injury situation or the COVID pandemic, he probably would be a FBS Power 5 kid. But ultimately… he landed in the perfect spot for him. Dartmouth got a steal.”
Editor’s Note: Usually, the Gold Helmet Award is presented in December following the conclusion of the prep football season. The Denver Post delayed giving out this year’s award because Colorado had two football seasons in 2020-21 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For a complete list of past Denver Post Gold Helmet winners since 1951, click here.
