Sean Kirst: At Brighton Academy, Alfonzo Whitehurst’s gutsiest coaching move was sharing his own story

A month ago, Alfonzo Whitehurst reached a make-or-break moment with the girls modified flag football team he coached this spring at the Brighton Academy middle school. The squad, full of speed and talent, had lost three of its first four games. The players were restless and drifting. Several girls, out of frustration, abruptly quit.

Al — which is what I’ve always called him, though to so many young people in Syracuse he’s eternally “Coach Fonz” — has coached scholastic sports, on many levels. With his flag team at Brighton, where he teaches, he was far less worried about wins and losses than about the enduring lesson he wants kids to take out of any season:

“At the end of the day,” he tells them, “don’t give up.”

To Al, that’s no cliche. It’s autobiography. With assistant coach Ed Mitchell, he called a team meeting five weeks ago built around what Mitchell described as a “mental health day.” Instead of practicing, the team talked and listened. Al told the girls about his mother, Carla Whitehurst, who was attacked and killed when he was only 4.

He had never gone into detail about that loss with any team he coached, and he explained his reasoning that night with a Facebook post honoring his mom, 27 years after her death.

I’ve known Al for a quarter-century. When I reached out quietly to note the power of that post, he invited me to stop by and watch the rejuvenated Lady Wolves — as his players proudly call themselves — in action.

So I caught up with Al, Mitchell and their young team on a couple of beautiful summer evenings a week ago. Last Thursday, the Wolves rode a five-game winning streak into a regular season home finale against Cicero-North Syracuse on Roosevelt Field, the historic Brighton Avenue gridiron with as rich a heritage as any football field in the region.

A day later, the Wolves ended the season in a citywide flag round-robin modified tournament with a quick series of shortened games at the Corcoran High stadium. If this column had a Disney storyline, it would describe how Brighton closed out the year with a string of dramatic victories.

That didn’t happen. It had little to do with why Al now sees this season as such a success.

The CNS game — an electrifying affair — featured Wolfpack quarterback Khyler Canery busting off impossible reverse-direction runs and Serenity Scott, Luzdrielyz Davila and other Wolves playing go-hard-to-the-ball defense, while CNS quarterback Mia Sherman was connecting on perfect deep strikes to Tahlia Jones, Kelcey Mussington, and Kaliyah Dunaway.

Yet the vintage scoreboard at Roosevelt stopped working a long time ago. Both teams kept their own running scores in a game in which there was a whole lot of scoring and multiple decisions about whether to go for one or two-point conversations after each touchdown, which — with no centralized scoring table — made it a little tricky to keep up.

At the end, CNS Coach Joe Marzullo and his staff had his team winning 28-27, and Whitehurst and Mitchell had Brighton ahead by 29-27. As for me, a flag novice, I had it 27-27.

The best part: Nobody thought twice about it. The coaches all hugged in the middle of the field and both teams went off to happy celebrations. You could sense in the way the Brighton kids huddled around Al that they saw the game, emotionally, as season’s end. A day later, worn out, they struggled a bit in the round-robin tourney, young players weary under a relentless June sun.

To Al, what mattered most: Afterward, as they prepared to board the bus, the girls expressed sadness about letting go.

“I’ll never forget this team,” said Canery, a seventh grader, a sentiment echoed by many of her teammates.

They speak with appreciation of the transformation. Several players told me they started the season with “bad attitudes,” though Al puts it a little differently: He said that he and Mitchell had to “teach them it was ok to be a kid.” What that means, he explained, is that many of his players assumed serious adult responsibilities at a young age — such as caring every day for younger siblings, from wakeup to bedtime.

In neighborhoods of economic struggle, these are children shaped by grownup worries. They carried that mindset into this brand-new sport, since flag is only in its second year at Brighton. Tina Schwartzmeyer, a Brighton administrator and an experienced flag coach, said many girls — with little window to make errors in real life — are extraordinarily hard on themselves for any mistake in this sport they’re just learning.

Al and Mitchell tried to tell them it’s OK to relax, OK to be vulnerable enough to learn…

And OK to listen when a caring grownup tells you what to do.

As a coach, said Corcoran athletic supervisor Courtney Jennings, Al’s particular strength “is teaching trust” — because when it matters, as Al emphasizes, no one makes it far alone.

That would become the measuring stick for what began as an unexpectedly difficult season. A year ago, Al’s Brighton flag team was 11-2. Everything clicked. With this year’s squad, Al and Mitchell — who also serves as boys varsity basketball coach at Corcoran — felt from day one they just weren’t getting through.

Al thought it out. If he wanted the girls to drop their shields and trust him, maybe the best approach was demonstrating how that works, through his own story.

I knew this was no easy choice for Al. My wife Nora taught him at the old Elmwood Elementary School. When Al was in the third grade, Nora invited him to play in the Southside American Little League, where Nora and I both served as volunteers.

We had the good fortune to watch everything that happened next. I don’t think any child in the league embraced the entire atmosphere with more passion than Al, who always showed up early and stayed late, who loved every minute of wearing his uniform, who would do anything to help — from selling juice boxes to joining in to line the field.

During that time, we came to understand the magnitude of what Al and his siblings had endured, which is why it stopped me a few weeks ago when Al — now an educator of profound insight — put up this post on Facebook on the anniversary of losing his mom, only a few days before Mother’s Day.

He told them how it was 27 years to the day since “I lost my mother due to an act of violence in Syracuse.” He explained his own emotional process, how he took the pain of this indescribably painful wound and turned it into the center of his daily purpose: The way he lives his life, as he often says, becomes the only way he can introduce the rest of us to his mom.

In Alfonzo’s words, directly from his post, recalling that great loss:

As time has passed on, I used it as my life’s purpose. I wanted to be the voice for those in similar situations … knowing many of them might be in the same situation. One moment you’re the “parent” of your siblings, cousins. The next you’re back to being told how to be a kid again.

We discussed three questions today: Why do you do what you do? What is hard work to you? What does life mean to you? We had tears shed, laughter, and coaches getting choked up. Most importantly we shared a moment of complete team vulnerability. I told them I understood…

One thing must be clear, though; everything has to be done with genuine intentions and respect. Although now that I’m 31, it’s taught me how it’s important to show gratitude while creating and taking advantage of every opportunity put in front of me. That’s why and how I’ve made it to where I am today. I used my “why” every time things became uncomfortable.

 So Ma: I appreciate you for allowing me to use you as a guidance to bring my team closer. We had our best practice so far this year. Love you, Ma.

Carla Whitehurst, Al’s mother, was murdered in 1999, in Syracuse. The killer was never apprehended. Al was so little he has only one fleeting memory — if he closes his eyes, he feels it as much as sees it — of being with his mother on a front porch, just after church.

For Al and his siblings, that childhood trauma would ignite a hard journey involving many homes and relocations, an odyssey that finally brought Al to high school in Baldwinsville. He prospered there, thanks to selfless friends and mentors he never forgets. Al went on to Utica College, where he played football, built lifetime connections and earned a graduate degree in education.

In other words: This guy we knew as a child in Little League is now an adult of extraordinary insight and achievement. I have written before about the way he sees the world, and his presence in our lives is a continuing gift: A reflection he shared with me not long ago about city children and journalism directly affected a major career decision of my own, and became the core of a TedX talk I did two months ago.

He’s a friend and a fine teacher, offering lessons with every step, which is why I messaged him after I saw that Facebook post. He told me how he had been thinking about the anniversary of his mother’s death, how he considered missing practice for one day to spend that time at his mom’s grave.

Instead, he contemplated the real meaning of a tribute, and he considered the nature of this team of strong-willed kids — so smart, so skilled and often so resistant to Al’s enjoy-this-but-give-it-every-ounce-of-what-you-have approach, because he believes that is rehearsal for what carries you in life.

Al and Mitchell gathered the girls in the Brighton gym. Many players said they were in tears as he told them about his mom.

“The team flipped,” said Canery, Brighton’s quarterback, describing — in that moment — how the squad pulled together.

“It just kind of inspired us to work harder,” said Armani Watkins, a wideout of relentless intensity. She moved to Syracuse from Pennsylvania, while in third grade. The adjustment wasn’t easy, she said, and she pushed forward by dedicating each day to her late grandmother, Barbara Neal, a woman who meant so much in the child’s life — meaning Watkins instantly understood how Al is driven by similar gratitude for his mom.

Like many of the Brighton players, Watkins was introduced to football when a McKinley-Brighton Elementary School teacher named Bailey Herr, the “all-time quarterback” in recess games of touch football beloved by the boys, made a point of saying to the girls: This is for you, too.

Given that chance, they fell in love with a sport they had been told since toddling they would never get to play. Once flag arrived at Brighton, they were eager to join.

The next threshold was allowing themselves to learn, to become part of something Al calls “bigger than themselves.” Luz Davila, so passionate about playing defense for Brighton, said it was “easy to get mad and get frustrated” at the start, though Al’s story helped change everything through one bedrock impression, made clear to Davila and teammate Secret Alexander:

“It showed he really cared for us.”

The squad came together and began to win, though that wasn’t really why the players felt so sad to see the season end. What they’ll miss is joining together on the bus to sing a “Lady Wolves” song they composed themselves, complete with howls, or the busy group text they call — for football reasons — “no pennies or no dimes.”

Somehow — in a universal revelation many of us can recall, from our own teen years — they understand there is something special and fleeting about the seventh and eighth grades, some last sunlight beam of true childhood, before everything gets a little more complicated in high school.

To embrace that feeling, together, is all that Al and Mitchell wanted.

The Wolves promise hang onto to what Al summarized during the tournament, with one sentence. While a couple of girls paused to comfort and support each other after a play fell apart, the referees were already lining up the ball for the next play.

“I love your empathy,” Al called out to his players, “but you’ve got to keep going.”

It was his best lesson and life story, offered in 10 words.

The flag football roster of the 2026 Brighton Academy Lady Wolves, as provided by Coach Whitehurst:

(19) Ameriyanna Myers, (22) Makka Juma, (23) Fatumo Osman, (3) Khyler Canery, (20) Jayla McCutchen, (11) Khadija Musa, (5) Serenity Scott, (13) Ameriana Quellins, (6) Secret Alexander, (15) Armani Watkins, (10) Jahieliz Ayala, (8) Luzdrielyz Davila, (7) Zeanna Pinet, (12) Ja’Leesiya Hall, (17) Kiki Garcia, (18) Alana Taylor