LAKEWOOD — Jermaine Stafford can walk the talk. Sprint it, actually.
Lutheran’s first-year head coach was a sprinting wunderkind in the 1990s. He set at Benjamin Franklin High School in Rochester, New York, and ran track and played wideout at Michigan State. His speed led him to the Olympics, where he was a 400-meter relay alternate for the Team USA at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Then came the unraveling — real-life troubles that ended his competitive career, but also led Stafford to a fresh path and a new calling in coaching.
“I was very immature as a young athlete, because all I knew was sports,” Stafford said. “As much as I brag about having great coaches, they weren’t always tapping into the person that I was becoming. And not because they didn’t want to. It’s because I was being a knucklehead.
“I was making dumb decisions, especially my junior year at Michigan State, where I didn’t take things seriously. I couldn’t get rid of my childhood friends. I wanted an entourage. I’d go home and wanted to be around the streets. I wasn’t actually living the life of the athlete that I was becoming.”
At that time, Stafford was getting into trouble with his old friends in New York. Some of them sold drugs, some of them were in gangs. And despite Stafford’s potential on the track and the gridiron — he would eventually go on to a brief NFL stint on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ practice squad — he couldn’t escape the pull of the friends he surrounded himself with until it was too late.
Stafford, a Kentucky native who won a 400-meter high school track title in that state as an eighth grader, spent most of his formidable years in inner-city Rochester, where poverty was rampant, and violence was omnipresent. When he was 13, he was shot in the bicep one day when he was playing basketball at the park and he was caught in the crossfire of a shootout. The ripple effect of being raised in that environment was tough to escape, even after he went to Michigan State, but he would still come back to Rochester for the summers.
“I had one close call where I wasn’t arrested, but I was detained,” Stafford recalled. “It was a scare factor for me where I started to change. But, ultimately, it took me away from athletics because nobody would touch me. People knew I had this entourage around me, and I just wasn’t waking up.
“It was like a where everyone loved Pacman, but as soon as he plays (on Sunday), everybody goes, ‘Will we see him at practice on Monday? What’s he going to do this weekend?’ And I had that perception around me.”
A different track
At the turn of the century, Stafford got the wake-up call that altered his life.
One of his close friends was murdered in Rochester, a loss that Stafford says “changed everything for me.” At 21, he got his first coaching job, working with sprinters in the Flower City Track Club in Rochester, the same club where he first emerged as a star.
“From that point on, that’s when I buckled down,” Stafford said. “I started to work on my dreams of being a coach. … (My mindset was), ‘I’m going to take advantage of the things that I built in my name.’ I knew I had a resume. I knew I could walk into a place and talk about what I was as a track athlete, or the opportunities I had as a football player. I played for Nick Saban at Michigan State. I had all that going for me.
“So I sat down, and just like you would do with a PR firm, I put a plan together and said, ‘Let’s clean up.'”
That zag led Stafford into a lifetime of coaching.
Before he coached at Fairview. He served as Lutheran’s sprint coach for 12 years, with a stint at Valor Christian in between, before getting the Lions’ head job in January. Stafford has big shoes to fill following the retirement of , who stepped away due to health issues after establishing the Lions as a perennial force.
During Horan’s tenure, Lutheran won seven boys state titles and one girls state title, and would’ve surely won another boys and girls crown with loaded teams in 2020 had the state meet not been canceled due to the pandemic.
In Stafford’s first year as a Lutheran assistant in 2013, he guided to Class 2A titles in the 100- and 200-meters. The next year, the start of Lutheran’s championship run, the Lions boys qualified five sprinters in the 200-meter finals. For Darwin Horan, those two success stories were clear proof of Stafford’s ability to translate his own world-class speed to the youth he coached.
“We’ve won a lot of titles since ’14, but we’re such a sprint-dominated school. Our distance teams have traditionally been mediocre, but our sprint teams have been wicked, and Jermaine deserves a lot of credit for that,” Horan said. “When we had five kids of the nine finalists (in the 200 in 2014), I looked at that and went, ‘OK, he must be a pretty good coach. Every kid I’ve got in the 200 is in the final.'”
‘We’re looking to create life habits’
Stafford has a tall task ahead of him to get the Lions back to that level of dominance.
Because of the 1.5-enrollment multiplier rule for private schools Lutheran track and field will move up to Class 5A for the next two-year cycle beginning in 2027. The Lions were young this season, with about 70 underclassmen in a 110-kid program, and qualified 15 athletes for this weekend’s CHSAA state track and field meet.
One of those is senior sprinter , a Colorado School of Mines commit who has worked with Stafford for several years. He’s heard stories about Stafford’s storied track background and about what it was like to play football for Saban. And Stafford’s expertise in starts has drastically improved Sola’s performance out of the blocks.
But Sola says more importantly, Stafford “has really helped me grow as a person off the track.”
“He’s really helped me in my faith in Christ,” Sola said. “And no matter the outcome on the track, his experiences in the sport and in life has pushed (me and my teammates) to become the best people we can.”
With the move up to Colorado’s biggest classification, Stafford says his goal is “not to be able to compare with other 5A teams, but just to continue to build a program with those numbers and see what ultimately happens.” Stafford, who is also the facility director and a performance coach for the training center desires success for his program, but his ultimate ambition is much broader than that.
The 51-year-old hopes every athlete in his program graduates with the maturity that he lacked as a phenom sprinter all those years ago. Stafford is still physically cut and looks like he could get out on the track and beat most of this weekend’s sprinters at Jeffco Stadium. But what he wants his Lions to realize most are the life lessons he learned the hard way.
“We want to set our kids up to do something that’s 40 years long, not just four years long (like a college scholarship would be),” Stafford said. “That’s my vision with Lutheran. We’re looking to create life habits where it’s going to be more than just a sport, it’s a lifestyle, and what they take from our program is going to help them succeed in life.”
