ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
Reference · The building
| School | The read entering 2026 |
|---|---|
| Goodrich | The measuring stick. Deep, physical, drilled to the inch, reloads annually, and does not especially care what your quarterback did last season. Sixteen years of Dan Prahl and eleven league titles. Week 8, at their place. They did not play Fenton last year, which was the schedule rather than a statement, and which means they are the one opponent with no first-hand read on him. |
| Fenton | A decent program holding an extraordinary quarterback. Two decades of finishing second or third and going out in a district game, then one season that permanently rewrote what this town expects in August. |
| Linden | Four and a half miles down Silver Lake Road and the only genuine dislike on the schedule. The parking lot fills an hour early. Week 3, at Linden, September 11 — early enough that nobody has figured anything out yet. |
| Flushing | Solid, physical, generally has a real running back, and has no interest whatsoever in playing anybody's shootout. The only Metro program with the front to rush four and mean it. |
| Holly | Streaky in a way nobody can schedule around. Beats somebody they should not, every single year, and no one can predict which Friday. Homecoming opponent, Week 7. |
| Clio | Week 1. Young last year, faster than the record suggested, and now running a new defensive coordinator's system that nobody in this league has seen. |
| Kearsley | Hard to play at Kearsley. Considerably easier to play everywhere else. 14–4 at home and 5–13 on the road across four years, which is a real thing and not a joke. |
| Swartz Creek | Bigger school, thinner roster, rebuilding in the honest sense of a word people stopped using honestly. |
| Corunna | Will run it forty-two times, hold the ball thirty minutes, and win 14–13 while the best quarterback on the field stands on a sideline being irrelevant. |
| Carman-Ainsworth | The most raw athleticism in the league most years and the fewest reps together, a problem that solves itself in October and never soon enough. |
This league produces good high school football, real rivalries, the occasional Division II or Division III player, and once in a long while somebody who ends up at an FBS program. It does not produce nationally evaluated quarterbacks. National quarterback evaluators do not spend Friday nights in Genesee County, have no reason to start, and nothing about that changes on its own.
Transactional to the bone. Sees football through winning, utility and control, and is not embarrassed by any of that. Ignored two text messages from a fourteen-year-old and answered the third one, because the third had forty-one pages of free scouting attached. Gave Nick a job because it cost nothing, then started him because he was better. Capable of a hard decision quickly and without sentiment, which is also why a sophomore got eight full practice periods against his returning starter this August.
He is nobody's life mentor and does not pretend to be. He is also not the villain of this, and every version of the story that makes him one is as wrong as the version that makes him the hero.
What he will not say out loud: his quarterback understands football better than he does. Setzke is a competent ninth-year head coach in a midsized Michigan league — not stupid, not a fraud, and not about to be out-argued in his own meeting room by a seventeen-year-old and admit it. When Nick is right it becomes "he saw it the way we coached it." When Nick is right about something nobody coached, the subject changes to effort.
Sixty-one, warm, patient, a good high school football coach and not a secret genius, which he will tell you before you can wonder. Spends practice on one knee in front of a kid, explaining. His real contribution is the unglamorous half nobody credits: how to break a huddle, how to correct a senior without sounding arrogant, how to survive a bad series, what to do with your hands after a three-and-out.
He is the mentor in this story. Any account that hands that role to Setzke has it wrong.
He has done the arithmetic Setzke refuses to do. Twenty-three years in, nothing left to protect, and old enough that being second-smartest in a room about one specific thing costs him nothing. He says it sideways, usually at a whiteboard, never as a headline, and he is the only adult in the program who lets Nick finish a sentence.
Does not do interviews and has never given one longer than two sentences in his life. Has to replace seven starters. His complete public position on the season is "We're young. We'll be better in October than August," which he has now said to three separate outlets without variation.
Coached Ben Haijcar from the eighth grade and opposed handing Nick the starting job back in April 2025 — on the record, in print, and in front of him. "Ben Haijcar had started nine games. The kid had been in this program since age thirteen… and there we sat, discussing giving his job to a boy out of the band who had never been hit once."
Nothing changed his mind. Nick won the job, which he considers a different event. He also says Nick is the best he has ever coached at reading a defence before the snap, and insists both sentences get printed together or neither does.
First to reach him on the field on October 17 and the reason he went to a hospital that night rather than Saturday morning — he told her it was his ribs. Pulled him herself, in the fourth quarter, without asking a coach and without waiting for a parent.
Insists on "no restrictions" over the word "cleared," because people hear those differently and only one of them is a promise. Entirely uninterested in the recruiting conversation. What genuinely concerns her is the contact he absorbs unnecessarily, which she frames as a year-two issue rather than a size issue.
Second season of organised football, third year inside the program. In the autumn of 2024 he was first chair trombone, on the track in a wool uniform at Fenton games, watching Ben Haijcar play quarterback from behind a sousaphone. In twenty-six years Perkins has had no better musician, and that holds on trombone and piano. Eleven months on, the school passing record belonged to him. Nobody at this school has fully processed either fact.
The year before the twelve games. January to December 2025 he was the unpaid student personnel assistant — personnel groupings, snap counts, scripts, clips, water. Ignored rather than bullied, and that distinction never blurs. Every senior in his huddle watched him do it. He knew the entire install in April because he had been printing it since January.
The body. A flat six feet and 155 pounds, a number that is not "slight" — it is a number that closes a recruiting board before anybody opens the film. He is not strong and wins no measurable. What he has instead is movement: elusiveness, change of direction, spatial awareness, proprioception, balance, and speed that stops being a fair conversation in this league. He is very hard to hit, and the one time somebody hit him clean he spent a night in Hurley.
The brain. The genuinely rare thing, and the one nobody outside the building can see. Not smart for a high school quarterback — running a level of pre- and post-snap processing the seniors around him cannot follow in conversation and his own coaches can only just track. He has learned to slow it down when he explains it, because in his first year he did not, and it did not go well.
The assimilation. Every person he now spends his days with belongs to a social world he was not part of two years ago and had no interest in joining. He is getting good at it. That is the thread to follow: the handshake is fluent now, he understands when silence is correct, and he has figured out which jokes to let pass. It is succeeding, and the price is that everyone who knew him beforehand can see the effort.
The quarterback before Nick was the quarterback, going back to when a coach picks the biggest kid who can throw it over everybody, which was Ben at nine years old and stayed Ben for eight years. Bigger, more experienced, and by every normal accounting the person this was supposed to be.
He is the one who handed Nick the ball in April and has never once pretended otherwise. He likes Nick and knows Nick is better and both of those being true at the same time is exactly why it stays awkward. Four interceptions last year, the most by a Fenton defensive back since 2018. Two Division III programs have contacted him about playing safety, which amounts to more genuine college contact than the quarterback has received.
The sentence he starts and abandons: it is still the only senior year he gets.
Fifteen years old and more physically gifted than Nick by a distance that is not arguable. Bigger, stronger, heavier ball, and he wins every single measurable a college program actually records. If a staff walked into this building with a spreadsheet they would leave with his name.
He got eight full practice periods with the ones this August and lost, and he says so without being asked. It stopped being close around period six, when the install got complicated. His own account: "He knew what everything was. Every time. I knew what my job was. That's a different thing."
Asked in a hallway whether he had followed something Mansour said in a meeting, he said "I will" — present tense corrected to future tense, voluntarily, at fifteen.
Best skill player on the team. Undersized, no overwhelming trait, but shifty, advanced at the line of scrimmage and impossible for Metro corners to stay attached to. Brash, cocky, socially the prototype jock. Not worried about a maths test, a college, or your feelings.
His read on Nick is flatly transactional and he will tell you so: the guy is accurate, the guy gets him the ball, that is the relationship. Asked whether Nick is a college player he says he does not think about it. Asked whether Nick has improved: "Not really. He was already like this" — which he intends as a fact rather than a compliment.
On the assistant year: "He was the guy with the papers. I said maybe four words to him that whole spring." He is not embarrassed by that and says everybody else is about to pretend they knew.
Has known Nick since they were small and has never been close to him. Reserved and soft-spoken with a bigger frame, lives on the boundary, walls off defenders, and finishes through contact. The bigger the moment, the quieter he stays.
Eleven years of football since the second grade, and the arithmetic of that has started to bother him out loud: either Nick is a freak, which is fine, or eleven years of doing it properly does not count for anything. He does not like either option. He also throws with Nick on Sunday afternoons by his own choice and has since June.
Tall, long, lanky, and probably the best combination of size and traits in the receiver room. Ran a verified 4.6 in the school's own testing — the only verified number anybody on this offence has. Caught twenty-two balls last year in a rotation and is now WR2 in an offence that runs enough three-receiver personnel to put him on the field nearly every snap.
Nick named him on television as the thing opponents are underrating. Told about it afterwards, West said "he said that?" and then said nothing else at all.
Short, stocky, elusive, and a huge dumbass. Can absolutely be an arsehole. Also does precisely what Nick tells him on a football field, every time, without arguing, which is more than several smarter people manage.
Loud online, loud in the group chat, publicly predicts forty points, and asked a student reporter whether a recorder picks up sound from a distance before walking several feet away to make one.
Starts opposite Ben. Forty-one tackles last year, a number he volunteers, and which mostly means people ran at him. He is not a good teammate and has never seriously attempted to be one.
He was among the loudest voices in the group of parents and players who thought starting a band kid over Ben Haijcar was a joke, and he has never revised the opinion — he has only stopped saying it where adults can hear. He says it elsewhere constantly.
A positionless kid who settled at tight end. Sincerely kind, religious, a little slow, a meathead in the harmless sense. Not a prospect and knows it. Does the unglamorous work and has never once complained about doing it.
Organises an optional team prayer nobody is required to attend, and quietly counts who comes.
Enormous and very good. He and Nick were friendly in their freshman year despite Kobe belonging comfortably to the jock world. Still a little sceptical of the whole thing, partly because Ben is his best friend, and partly because he regards anybody touching his quarterback as a personal failure.
Has run a six a.m. lift with Nick four days a week since June 8 and communicates about it exclusively in two-word texts. Has told Nick nine times in that weight room that being good is not the same as being seen, and has watched him agree and do nothing.
Nick's cousin. A year older, repeating his senior year. Cocky, certain he is smarter than everybody in the room, in trouble constantly, undersized for a guard, and strong and mobile enough to have been all-state honourable mention anyway.
Loves Nick more than almost anyone in this building and treats him like a little brother, lovingly and condescendingly, sometimes inside one sentence. That love is going to cause a problem this year.
Profane to the point of being difficult to quote. Given one question by the school paper, he spoke for four minutes and roughly eleven percent of it was printable; he asked them to leave the brackets in so people would know what he actually said.
One of the three highest-upside players on this roster alongside Nick and Chase. Big, long, strong, moves decently, pleasant to everybody, and liked across every social group in the school.
Grew an inch and a half over the summer and is now, by the training staff's own measurement, the largest human being enrolled at Fenton High School.
The one Fenton player with real FBS recruiting attention. Eastern Michigan has been to two practices in person, Ferris State has been in contact. Big, athletic, rushes with a plan rather than running upfield and hoping.
By every objective measure of how recruiting actually works he is the best college prospect on this team, and he is careful, with no edge in his voice at all, to say that his situation and Nick's are not the same. His explanation of the difference: he went to a camp in June after his sophomore year and a man wrote his name down.
Bruising, not fast, not dynamic, extraordinarily hard to bring down, and a class clown nobody takes seriously. Every carry inside the five is his, which by itself accounts for Nick's zero rushing scores. Surprisingly excellent hands — eighteen catches last year. Gained fourteen pounds over the summer and maintains it is "neck, mostly."
Cheerfully and completely does not know the offence. Three years running the identical six plays, and he is outstanding at all six. Asked in a team meeting what the coverage was, he said "the bad one," which was not entirely wrong.
A homeroom acquaintance and one of the two people who told Setzke about Nick before any of this. Skinny, glasses, does not look like a football player, does not fit the team socially, and is not especially bright.
Hard to corner in open space and a real weapon on third down. Watches every clip anybody sends him, including ones nobody sent him.
The other person who told Setzke. Shares half of Nick's timetable. Rarely plays.
His role in this story has already happened and it was larger than anything he will do on a field. He does not appear to know that and nobody has told him.
Replacing a four-year starter. Does not speak. The line coach's complete evaluation is "been fine, which for a sophomore centre is a rave review."
Every snap of this season goes through his hands before it goes anywhere else, and the school newspaper printed that sentence, which was arguably unkind to a fifteen-year-old.
Second-year starter. Believes sincerely, and says out loud to reporters, that Fenton wins the Metro title and that nobody ever talks about the offensive line.
He is right about the second part. Nine sacks allowed in nine games last season and it ran on page two, under a photograph of somebody else.
Has known Nick since childhood, was never close to him, and has always been kind to him. Does not fit the football social world either.
Has wanted to start for three years and there is no realistic path, because he is not good enough, and everybody including Tony knows it. Gave the longest and most thoughtful answer of anyone the school paper interviewed and then apologised for it on his way out.
Cool without belonging to the loudest group in any room. Sometimes clocks the social meaning of a thing before Nick does and says so; sometimes misses it completely and finds out with everybody else. Both happen and neither is his function.
The only person this month who got the honest version of anything, and the one who pointed out that an A− from Shaun Lawrence is not a victory but a calculation.
Extremely competent, quiet without being shy, funny, broadly liked. Will give you the short version nine times out of ten and then, once, deliver four paragraphs that reframe the entire conversation and go quiet again for a fortnight.
He is the one who noticed that Nick's habit of making something excellent and handing it away for nothing is not a football habit but a Nick habit, and that it worked once, so everybody now assumes that is how it is supposed to go.
Shared the trombone section leadership with Nick from their sophomore year and has been his friend since ninth grade. Band circle specifically — not in the group chat, not at the games, entirely outside the football economy.
Emphatic in public that section leader and best player are different things: "We split it. I did the paperwork and I yelled at people, which is most of the job. He did the part where you have to actually be the best player in the section, which he was, and which nobody voted on because you don't have to vote on that."
Has never once asked Nick about football, and considers that the favour.
The hothead. Takes a loss personally, goes off about something nobody else is upset about, and has to be talked down roughly once a month. It passes quickly and he does not apologise for it, and occasionally he is simply right and everybody else was being polite.
He is the one who read the correction and said out loud, in a group chat, that a grown man ignored a fourteen-year-old twice and this town keeps calling it a fairy tale.
A fixture in the group and the holder of its most confident football opinion, which is a different thing from its best. Knows the names, knows the vibe, does not know what a coverage is, and states everything as settled fact.
Will explain the game to Nick. Is occasionally, accidentally, completely right, and has never once noticed which of the two just happened.
Knows sport well, a genuine friend, and one of the paper's two real reporters — which means he routinely knows things as a friend that he cannot print as an editor, and has to decide which is which every week.
Wrote "Nobody called." Told Nick in a driveway in June to go to a camp, spent two months believing he was being ignored, found out he had never explained what the sentence meant, and put that error in the article on purpose.
Small, scrawny, does not play, and understands sport better than most people who do. Dorky-popular. Talked ball with Nick long before any of this happened.
Wrote the November piece that got the origin story wrong, spent eleven days this August finding out how wrong, and ran the correction on the front page with his own name on it rather than in agate at the back.
The most popular girl in this school and kind to nearly everybody, which is not at all the same as being uncomplicated. Co-runs the student section with Nick Melero. Writes.
Has posted about the orange-out four separate times and has begun replying to people individually. Is also the one who worked out that Nick hates the chant with his name in it, said so in print, and asked the school to stop.
Co-runs the student section with Hannah and supplies most of the propulsion. Loud, bombastic, warm without trying, hugely popular and a bit obnoxious about all of it — the one standing on something with no shirt on in forty-degree weather leading a chant nobody else knows the words to yet.
Not on the football team and does not need to be. Knows Nick hates the chant and is doing it anyway, which he has been asked about and did not defend.
Has had a crush on Nick since their freshman year, well before football, which is neither new nor a reward. What is new is how other people would read it now, and the anonymous app has opinions.
Asked by the school paper about him, she said people are weird about him in a way she thinks he hates, that he is the same and everybody else changed, then asked them not to print her surname, then said print all of it, it's fine.
Loud, funny, socially central, and popular in the way that requires no particular skill at anything. Does not play football and is entirely at peace with that.
His humour about Nick is real and mostly aimed at the absurdity rather than the kid — the restaurant poster, the Culver's visor, the notion that any of this is normal. He is also the only one of that group who noticed the line and stepped back from it.
Preppy, extremely nice, buttoned-up, good company. Fenton's distance star and the Metro champion last autumn.
Ran a time trial on August 22 that would have placed second at the state meet and described it, without any apparent awareness of what he was saying, as "just a time trial." May walk on at Michigan.
Reacted to the quarterback thing with flat disbelief and has since moved through pride into something more complicated. Rates him the finest musician of his twenty-six years on the job and is watching football consume it.
Will not rank his students on the record — "I'm not going to sit here and put my kids in order for a newspaper" — but confirms the unusual part, which is both instruments, and mentions Interlochen and stops. His grievance is with the school, not with football, and he says so explicitly: "Don't print that as me complaining about football. Print it as me complaining about us."
Wrote the 2026 marching show himself over the summer, which he does not normally do, and put a sixty-one-bar solo trombone feature in the third movement. Nick's old chair, alone, out front on the fifty, in October. He has never asked him to play it and has no plans to. "He knows."
Knows Nick as a writer, which almost nobody at this school does any more, and is the only adult in the building aware that the outside bylines exist.
Has watched this building decide a seventeen-year-old is a symbol before, will not say who, and closes the subject in a tone that ends it.
Not a lovable sceptic — an actual jerk about it. Ran a freshman team back in the nineties and brings it up constantly. Opened precalculus this year with eleven minutes on the 1994 Fenton Tigers.
Told about the thirty-five touchdowns: "Against who? You expect me to be moved by production against Clio and Kearsley? I played in this league." Asked if Nick could play at the next level, his answer was "he seems like a nice kid who had a nice year" and ended the interview because his prep hour was over.
Prior to football he had no idea Nick Mansour existed. Not "underestimated him" — did not know the name, the face, or that the student existed. Asked what he remembered about him from before, his complete answer was "Refresh me — is he the tall one?"
He is not the tall one. Told that Nick had played piano at the spring assembly two years running and written for the paper since his freshman year, Bakker said "Well, sure. Sure," and returned to the subject of Friday nights.
Hates him. Not "is tough on him." Not "pushes him." Dislikes him personally, visibly, and for no reason anybody has ever been able to name, Nick included, and Nick has spent two years looking.
It predates the football completely. It was there when Nick was a band kid with a 3.9 who wrote for the paper, which is the part that resists every available explanation: there was nothing to resent yet. He grades Nick's essays a full letter beneath what the rubric supports and writes two words in the margin. He is called on exclusively at the moments he is least prepared. He said "Must be nice" out loud to a fourth-hour room the Monday after the record game and did not elaborate.
Nick has never said a word back and carries an A− anyway, which is its own quiet running argument.
Real Fenton students who exist in this universe and can be used wherever a name is needed — a hallway quote, a group chat, a Yik Yak reply, a class project, a party nobody describes. They do not need arcs. Reuse them consistently so the school has a population rather than a cast, and give each one a small stable habit the first time they appear.
| Group | Names |
|---|---|
| Popular, not on the football team The social centre. Aware of Nick, unimpressed by default, and the ones whose approval would actually mean something. |
Cairnduff, Jake · DeGroat, Jared · Haas, Joe · Flannery, Emma · Sullivan, Callah Michael Fabatz and Nick Melero belong here too, and both already have cards. |
| Less popular · good friends of Nick's His comfortable social ground outside the core four. Use them when a scene needs somebody kind and unimpressed by the football. |
Casey, Erin · Bedell, Erin · Rostitano, Donny · Gutzeit, Jake |
| General population Usable anywhere at all — a hallway, a reply, a homeroom, somebody two places ahead in the concession queue. |
Lixie, Hannah · Meldrum, Mackenzie · White, Gabe · Fenbert, Eli · Curran, Hannah · Hatch, Brenna |
Not a sports person, but a Michigan graduate and a casual Michigan fan, so he follows a football game perfectly well — knows down and distance, knows what a good throw looks like, could not tell you what a coverage is and would not pretend to.
Where he is at zero is recruiting, which is a separate subject that nobody warned him was a subject. Printed a colour-coded list of sixty-one schools within four hours, at work, and then asked what a preferred walk-on is.
His formulation, and it is the one a lot of parents in this town would give if anybody asked them: "I feel like we're already behind and nobody will tell me what we're behind on."
Very intelligent, extremely practical, and not especially emotional in how she communicates, which people mistake for not feeling it. Grasps the kidney completely and is the reason he sat out the playoff run.
Started the shared document in July after working out what the family had missed, and gave Nick edit access to it on purpose. Her line, and it is the thesis of this entire save: "I am professionally good at finding out how a system works. I could not find out how this one works. There's no office. There's no list… I kept waiting for the part where somebody explains it and there is no such part."
Found out at 11:41 on a Thursday night that her son has been emailing college programs alone since June, and asked for the spreadsheet before she said anything else.
Preppy, driven, leadership-track, and nothing like her brother temperamentally. Built a 140-row outreach spreadsheet nobody asked her to build and maintains it without being thanked.
In this building seven hours a day with the poster, the assembly, the announcements and the app. "People who have never spoken to me one time say 'Mansour' at me in the hallway. Not to me. At me. Like it's a fact they're reporting."
Told a reporter, unprompted, that her brother has stopped playing piano when anybody else is home. Not stopped playing. Stopped playing where he can be heard.
Relaxed, funny, and temperamentally the closest thing to Nick in this family. Deflates any room that has become too serious in roughly four seconds.
Texted "you up" at 11:04 on a Wednesday night for no stated reason, on an iPad she is not supposed to have at that hour, and was the only person in the house who noticed.
Watches. Says very little. Has opinions and distributes them sparingly, which makes them land harder than they should.
Confirmed he is coming on Friday in a single word and the family group chat lost its mind for eleven minutes.
· · ·