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Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds

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“You’re not going to make everybody happy,” Kayvon Thibodeaux says. He is reflecting on the lessons he learned last year as a high school sophomore. “Everybody’s not going to be happy with the decisions you make, but they don’t have to live your life. They’re not in your shoes.”

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This morning, Kayvon is not wearing any shoes. It’s late June, and he’s lounging barefoot in a black sweat suit and black skullcap in the living room of his father Angelo’s house, one of four units in a building wreathed by iron fencing in South Los Angeles. Angelo is outside, tinkering with the engine of Kayvon’s 1995 Ford Mustang. Kayvon got the Mustang earlier this spring, along with his driver’s license. It was teal then; in his first order of business as a car owner, Kayvon had it painted a fresh coat of black.

The car was something of a luxury at the time. Kayvon and his mother, Shawnta Loice, lived less than 15 minutes away from Dorsey High School, where Kayvon was a student and a member of the football team. Getting to and from school was rarely a problem—he could almost always bum a ride from one of his coaches.

Back then, before he transferred to one of Southern California’s most prestigious private schools and upended his life, Kayvon spoke of high school almost reverentially. It was a time in his life that would anchor him to his community. Dorsey is predominantly black, and sits right in the middle of some of LA’s most vibrant African American communities. Kayvon was a 4.0 student and a star athlete. He was in his element.

“I want to be that guy,” he told me on a lazy spring afternoon while he was still at Dorsey. The sun was slipping behind the high school’s labyrinth of buildings as he sat on a concrete stoop. A few minutes earlier, his mom had called to let him know his driver’s license had just arrived in the mail.

“I want to be that story. I want to be that reason. Everybody has a story and my story is—we do have a lot of guys in the NFL, but we don’t have a lot of guys that bring up the whole community. I feel like I owe something to my community.” He wanted to rebuild the school, maybe even the entire neighborhood. “When I make it,” he added, “it’s going to be life-changing for everybody.”

Photo by Demian Becerra

Kayvon is arguably the top high-school football player in the country in the class of 2019. With two years still to go in his high-school career, there’s already talk that the sprightly, six-foot-four-inch defensive end could be the best pass rusher to come out of the West Coast this millennium. The sport wasn’t the reason he decided to transfer and leave his community behind, at least during school and football hours, but it was the tool that allowed him to make that choice.

“His gift is not football,” says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey’s defensive backs coach. “If he does it right and plays as long as his body allows him to, football is going to platform him to somewhere his mind can’t even fathom.”

Now the car is a necessity. After Angelo gets the Mustang purring and slams the hood shut, Kayvon will drive 45 miles northwest to Oaks Christian, a private school in Westlake Village where a year of tuition costs $30,900. Kayvon has been there since May with full financial aid. He is pulled between two worlds: days in Westlake Village, where the median family income is $112,000 and his new high school sits a few blocks away from a Four Seasons hotel; nights back home in South Los Angeles, where the median income is $32,000 and his parents live in neighborhoods controlled by rival gangs. “Two microcosms,” he says. “That’s exactly what it is.”

Soon Kayvon will relocate out of South Los Angeles entirely. That’s what happens when you’re a star football player. You go away to college, then the NFL. He believes that the decision to leave now, a couple years ahead of schedule, will benefit his future, and ultimately his community’s.

“Everything is a pit stop,” he says. His voice is flat, his sentences truncated. Switching schools has made him wary, spread him thin.

Kayvon says that his plans haven’t changed, but everything else has. Being at Oaks Christian, on its sprawling campus and among its upper-crust student body, means he is no longer of the place he so earnestly wants to elevate. At 16, he has chosen to become a man apart, if only for a little while. He has to go away to come back.

“What people don’t understand is you can’t be stagnant,” he says. “You can’t get comfortable, because a lot of people in the city get comfortable with just being in the city. That’s what my mom and I weren’t comfortable with. We can’t just be in the city all our lives. We can’t just be seeing the same thing all our lives. We want to see something different, experience something different.

“That’s what I’m doing. Seeing the other side of things.”


The story of the game has been told enough times by now that it’s almost a tall tale. In some versions, Kayvon is six foot two inches; in others, he’s already his full height. Some people have him taking out as many as seven opposing players. Kayvon remembers the game being stopped entirely.

What is known and agreed upon is that, in his eighth-grade year, Kayvon played in a Pop Warner All-Star game. Somewhere along the way, he got kicked out—not for doing anything illegal, or for showing off. Rather, it was safety issue. Normal middle schoolers were physically unable to withstand the amount of force he could already dish out.

“Everything was clean hits,” says Jovon Hayes, Kayvon’s defensive line coach at Dorsey. “It wasn’t dirty. He wasn’t getting up and flexing on them. He was just hitting them too hard. They weren’t getting up.”

Photo by Demian Becerra

It was always this way. Kayvon was born ten pounds, four ounces. By elementary school, he was already big enough that other parents would grouse at his friends’ birthday parties about how, whenever they broke the piñata, Kayvon would outmuscle the other children to the candy that spilled out.

“He’s the same age as these kids,” Shawnta would tell them. “He’s just quicker and bigger.”

His size provided levity, too. Shawnta cackles at the memory of their trip to Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights when Kayvon was 13. He teased her relentlessly for being scared by the park’s decorations. Then a life-size version of Chucky from the horror film Child’s Play popped out, and park-goers were treated to the sight of a seemingly grown man sprinting in the other direction at full speed.

Yet for Kayvon, being big was often stultifying. He now recognizes his physique as a blessing, but it took time to gain that perspective. It was especially hard before he got to high school.

“Back then, it was a curse,” he recalls. “I can never do what everybody else did. I can never just mix in. I always stood out, I was always looked at.… Something breaks, Who did it? It’s me. I’m the first one people look at.”

Words, he decided, would be his great equalizer.

“Everybody was seeing me, they all looked at me waiting to see what came out of my mouth so I had to make sure it was intelligent,” he says. He read books—Mike Lupica, the venerable sportswriter, became a favorite author—and developed a penchant for debating anyone on nearly any topic, sometimes just to gauge different ways he could construct an argument. When he saw the Robert Downey Jr. movie The Judge as a high-school freshman, he decided he would become a lawyer.

Today he carries himself with an easy charisma and the sort of social grace that leads one of his former Pop Warner coaches, Dorsey assistant coach Jadili Damu Johnson, to label him “banquet smart.”

“You can drop him in Spain, and Kayvon is going to know everybody in Spain,” Johnson says.

Photo by Demian Becerra

Kayvon says he only began watching college football in the past 18 months. He had never even seen a football game when Antonio Patterson, one of his teachers, cornered him in the fifth grade about signing up for Pop Warner.

“If [he] never approached me and told me to play football, I’d probably be somewhere reading a book,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d be doing.”

He began on the offensive line, the proving ground for every overgrown player without an obvious home on the field. After two years of biding his time and learning the game, he yearned to do more. “I told my coach, like, ‘I can run!” he says, before breaking into the sort of machine-gun cadence that middle schoolers use to badger adults into giving them what they want. “I can run, I can run, I can run.”

“In three, four years he’s going to have just the ideal defensive end, long, athletic, coming off the edge, Jevon Kearse–like frame.”

The coach relented and Kayvon scored a touchdown on his very first carry. Suddenly, he was a fullback and a middle linebacker. By seventh grade, he’d sprouted into a defensive end. Today, he weighs 225 pounds, with a wisp of a mustache and a jawline that looks like it was etched out of limestone.

It’s the sort of package that has made him a household name in high-school-recruiting circles ever since the summer after his freshman year, when the initial rankings for the class of 2019 were released and 247Sports tabbed him as the No. 1 recruit overall—a position he has yet to relinquish 14 months later. All told, of the industry’s four major ranking sites, none currently have him listed lower than fifth overall nationwide in his class.

Greg Biggins, an analyst for CBS Sports and Scout.com who has covered West Coast recruiting for more than 20 years, could name only a handful of other pass rushers with Kayvon’s combination of physical ability and proven production—and perhaps none of them had put these assets together as early in their high-school careers.

“In three, four years he’s going to have just the ideal defensive-end, long, athletic, coming-off-the-edge, Jevon Kearse–like frame,” Biggins says. “The ability to be strong at the point [of attack], to be able to have the athleticism to run down plays from behind, the motor. He doesn’t take plays off. He rises to the occasion when they play really good teams.”

Hayes likes to tell a story from a playoff game during Kayvon’s freshman year, when the opposing team concealed a trick play within what looked like a standard huddle formation coming out of a timeout. While Dorsey’s coaching staff scrambled to signal their players, Kayvon snapped on his chinstrap and blazed across the field to snuff out what should have been a big gain.

“His skill set is unbelievable,” Hayes says, “but the biggest thing is his mind.”

This is evident when you watch Kayvon play in person. Yes, he’s bigger, and stronger, and faster, but he’s also smarter. He moves with a greater sense of purpose. All those academic gifts apply on the field, too.

Photo by Demian Becerra

Last November, in Dorsey’s second-round playoff game against San Pedro High School, Kayvon delivered in expected ways: the pyrotechnic bursts around the left tackle’s outside shoulder, the loping strides to chase down a ball carrier on the backside of a second-quarter run, the resolute intensity with which he snatched a ball out of the arms of a running back deep inside Dorsey territory.

There was something more, though, something ineffable.

He was hobbled during the San Pedro game, a byproduct of a play a few weeks earlier, when he eagerly scooped up a short kickoff and tried to reenact his past life as a running back by returning it. Instead, he sprained his knee, the sort of injury that could sideline a player for weeks. “The only time when I get hurt in football is when I try to do too much,” he says.

“My childhood has been compact. That’s part of being recruited. You can’t be a kid.”

But if Kayvon’s body had lost a step, his mind seemed to compensate for it, and his ability to anticipate his opponent’s next move shone through. That’s the best explanation for what happened late in the third quarter, when, with Dorsey up 25-3 and San Pedro about to punt, Kayvon lined up on the outside, rocked back and forth like a six-foot-four mechanical metronome keeping time, and burst through to block the attempt. It also explains how he did the very same thing on a field-goal try one quarter later.

The postgame reaction to all of this was relatively muted, even after it was revealed that Kayvon had been playing with a knee injury. He had only managed half a sack—a pittance given that he took down the quarterback 16 times that season. But that’s life as the most coveted football prospect in America. A forced fumble, a blocked kick, and a blocked punt, all on a bad knee, still amount to something of an off night.


By the time he graduates, Kayvon Thibodeaux will have spent three-fourths of high school as arguably the most scrutinized, most sought-after prospect in the country. This means three years of beseeching by eager college coaches, three years of being side-eyed by other prospects jostling for similar attention, three years of fan bases across the country prodding him to attend their favorite school.

Already, it wears on him.

“My childhood has been compact,” he says. “That’s part of being recruited. You can’t be a kid.”

To the wider world, that process began last summer, when the University of Utah extended him his very first scholarship offer. Functionally, however, his recruitment kicked off years before that. Just as colleges scout high schools to restock their talent base, high schools across the country use Pop Warner teams to replenish theirs. In Los Angeles, the process has intensified this decade, with wealthier schools as far as 90 minutes away disembarking for the inner city to poach the best talent.

Which is how Kayvon had coaches approaching him on the sidelines of his games before he even hit puberty. By the time he was in eighth grade, Shawnta was taking meetings with schools from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley and everywhere in between, each dangling great promises for her only child. Of this experience, his father Angelo says, “It was amazing but it also made me want to hold him tighter. As a parent, it made me want to shield him even more.”

Photo by Demian Becerra

Kayvon initially enrolled at Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, a private-school powerhouse known for churning out alumni like recent USC All-Americans and NFL draftees Robert Woods, Marqise Lee, and Adoree’ Jackson. In truth, it wasn’t much of a decision. “I had all of my eggs in one basket,” he admits now. His best friend, Justin (Antonio Patterson’s son), was already there, and it didn’t hurt that, for the previous two years, the bulk of Serra’s coaching staff could be spotted at every one of his Pop Warner games.

Then in the fall of 2015, his freshman year, he left. According to Kayvon, playing time was a major factor: Serra’s varsity team featured one of the best defensive ends in the country, leaving Kayvon to toil away on jayvee until a brief cameo at the end of the season. “I had about ten plays,” he says, “and that was garbage time.” Shawnta says the transfer was precipitated by their moving farther away from the school into a new apartment in South Los Angeles.

Whatever the reason, by mid-October, Kayvon found himself in an unlikely place. For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players than Dorsey, whose campus sits at the nexus of four distinct neighborhoods and is able to cull talent from each of them. The coaching staff almost exclusively comprises Dorsey alumni who played major college or professional ball, including Hayes, a multi-year starter at Arizona; Stafon Johnson, who played for USC and then the Tennessee Titans; and head coach Charles Mincey, who starred at Washington and played for four NFL teams over ten seasons.

In a different era, the idea of a player like Kayvon Thibodeaux starring at Dorsey the way, say, Keyshawn Johnson once had would have been the natural order of things, but the fever pitch of private-school recruiting has changed all that. As the Serras of the world rose in prominence, they did so at the expense of neighborhood schools that depend on the talent in their backyard to stay in their communities. Few programs were hit harder than Dorsey, which had sunk from perennial city champions to a combined 20-15 record from 2012 through 2014. College coaches, cognizant of the talent drain, stopped turning up as often. But also, Hayes says, “you get schools who don’t always come to the inner city because of the stigma that kids don’t have the grades [to qualify for college].”

For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players.

So when Kayvon Thibodeaux, the athletic and academic dynamo, decided to enroll at Dorsey, he was met with skepticism.

“‘Dorsey? I went to Dorsey. You think you’re going to Dorsey?’” he recalls being asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I want to do,” he’d reply.

His reasons were mostly pragmatic and entirely personal. It was close to home, for one thing, and he would not want for playing time on the varsity team. It also boasted a law magnet program, with its opportunities for him to conduct mock trials and serve on a jury in teen court cases.

Kayvon debuted on Dorsey’s varsity squad that November during first-round playoff game against Carson Senior High. He promptly registered a sack. “That was throwing him in the fire,” says Ivan Stevenson, the Dorsey defensive backs coach. “[We told him,] ‘Go be athletic.’”

By mid-summer, the first crush of scholarship offers arrived. Then came the 247Sports ranking. In fewer than nine months, he had rocketed from an unknown jayvee player to the top recruit in his class.

Because of Kayvon, college coaches once again had a reason to show up at Dorsey. “A lot of kids benefit from his success,” Hayes said this spring, before Kayvon transferred. “When a school comes up here, they’ll look at him and go, ‘Yeah, yeah, but who is the guy on the other side of him? Who is the D-tackle? Who’s that safety right there running to the ball? They’ll have a chance to come up here and see certain athletes that they probably didn’t come up here for.… It opens up doors for everybody.” He speaks from experience: while he was a student at Dorsey, Hayes became a highly touted prospect in part by blocking for Stafon Johnson, the Dons’ star running back at the time.

Kayvon eagerly played his part. This spring, he took the unusual step of canceling any appearances at off-season showcase events, the very same camps that one year earlier had helped put him on the map. Why? He had nothing to prove, for one thing. It also effectively funneled every college and media outlet to Dorsey in pursuit of Kayvon, whereupon he used his clout to broker introductions for many of his teammates.

“You don’t come to a place and [only] greet the man of the house,” he joked during a conversation this spring. “You’ve got to get the whole family.” I told him that showed a lot of confidence for a 16-year-old. “It is,” he replied, “but closed mouths don’t get fed. And if you don’t have a mouth, you don’t get fed. So, I’m giving them a mouth.”

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Dorsey finished 11-3 last season. New players are transferring in from all over the city. Their junior and senior ranks have ballooned, and now the coaching staff estimates as many as eight players on campus could play in one of college football’s elite Power Five conferences. Kayvon’s success, says Hayes, “shows it can be done in the inner city.”

Kayvon embraced all of it. Sitting there on the stoop at Dorsey this spring, a year and a half after he had left Serra, he felt he’d found what he was searching for the whole time: a place to belong.

“Dorsey is home. Dorsey’s home for everybody,” he says. “If you’ve got problems, if you’ve got anything, you come to Dorsey.… It’s the way out. It’s the back door. If you’re in trouble, in this or that, you come to Dorsey. You’ll always find somebody that will help you. You ain’t got a ride home? You’ll never have to walk. Somebody.

All of these things are bigger than Kayvon Thibodeaux. But, as the team’s most recognizable face, the idea of him began to loom larger than any scholarship offer or quarterback sack. He was the player who abandoned the private-school machine to return to the inner city when all avenues pointed in the other direction. He was the student who reminded people that the neighborhood schools could educate their athletes on a level attractive even to universities like Stanford and Northwestern. He was proof that Dorsey could still incubate the very best talent on the West Coast. He was hope. He was validation.

And then, he was gone.

Photo by Demian Becerra

As his mother, Shawnta Loice, tells it, the move had long been in the works.

It was an accident that she and Kayvon wound up in their home near Dorsey, a duplex just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, in the shadow of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Part of the ceiling had caved in at their old apartment, and they had been relying on temporary accommodations in a guesthouse at the time she signed the duplex lease. Only after they moved in did she realize that it was located in the middle of gang territory.

Originally, the plan had been to move while keeping Kayvon enrolled at Dorsey, but Shawnta had long harbored worries that Kayvon wasn’t being challenged enough academically. “It was too easy for him,” she says. “He didn’t have a lot of homework. He didn’t have a lot of projects.” Dorsey’s coaching staff was well versed in her concerns. She had met with them before his sophomore season about the matter, and she routinely checked in to see when Kayvon could be placed into the most advanced classes on campus.

When she brought the issue up again ahead of Kayvon’s junior year, Junie Rivero, Dorsey’s special teams coach and a longtime friend of the family, was prepared. He laid out a plan to enroll Kayvon in a gauntlet of AP classes, possibly allowing him to graduate high school a semester early if he so chose. Besides, he told her, “he’s got a 4.0. He’s got over 30 scholarships. Not just football scholarships—top academic schools. What else could another school do for you that we couldn’t?”

Shawnta didn’t doubt Dorsey’s intentions, but she worried about how rigorous the curriculum could truly be, as well as about the impact if it wasn’t enough. “Sometimes I feel like [you] have to surround yourself around kids that have the same goals you have in life, that want to actually do something,” she says. According to data compiled by the Los Angeles Unified School district, just 32 percent of Dorsey students complete all of their state-required courses with a C or better in each. Only 16 percent are enrolled in an AP class.

When reached for comment regarding Shawnta’s concerns, Dorsey co-athletic director and football program coordinator Irvin Davis said, “I respect students’ choice to go down the path that they think will be the most conducive for them. When Kayvon was here, he was an outstanding student in the classroom, he’s a very nice young man and I wish him the best in everything he endeavors to do. All of the opportunities that a person could ever look for academically are here for them at Dorsey High School.”

Demian Becerra

To Shawnta, getting Kayvon admitted to a top university was one thing. Making sure he was equipped to thrive there was another. “If I give it another year, then he’s going to be a senior,” she said. “I didn’t want him to get to college and then not really be [prepared.]”

She concluded that her own past might offer the best pathway for her son’s future. Shawnta grew up in South Los Angeles, too, before her family moved to white-bread Orange County for her high-school years. The change suited her. She found the classes to be more challenging and the environment more tranquil. She can’t know for certain how much it ultimately improved her circumstances, but she notes that, years later, “a lot of my friends that way have done more than a lot of my friends this way that I’ve known from growing up.”

She wanted to give Kayvon a new life, away from the inner city and its hardships. “There are bigger things than what you see right here that you can actually do with your life,” she told him. So, she made a decision: After the school year, they would move to Woodland Hills, a middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley, the sort of place where Shawnta would no longer need to bar Kayvon from stepping outside once the sun set.

“You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city? Let’s be honest. If football wasn’t in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No.”

Central to that new life would be a new school. To her, transferring Kayvon to Oaks Christian was a no-brainer, the type of opportunity kids from single-parent homes in the inner city simply don’t receive: $60,000 worth of free tuition at one of the state’s premier college preparatory schools. Already, she sees an uptick in his academic workload. Shawnta believes the majority of his new classmates come from stable home lives, where they are reared to view college as an expectation. Why wouldn’t she want this for him?

For all his academic prowess, and although he qualified for need-based financial aid that covers his tuition, the reality is Kayvon is at Oaks Christian because of what he can do on the football field*. He is no longer ensconced at Dorsey on a team of players with similar life experiences, coached by men who have known him since before he even reached puberty, who drove him home from school when he didn’t have a ride and fed him when he asked for dinner. He is now a stranger on a campus that just lost a star wide receiver, linebacker and quarterback to transfers, the latter of whom publicly declared that Oaks Christian is “biased towards money.” His former coaches worry that he’ll be treated as a commodity instead of a teenager.

“You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city?” Stevenson says. “Let’s be honest. If football wasn’t in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No.”

“We knew Kayvon when Kayvon was just Kayvon Thibodeaux, not Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation,” adds Rivero. “The only thing Oaks Christian is getting is Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation…. I hope the coaches can look out for him and not just exploit him because he’s the number one player.”

More than that, they wonder about the damage the transfer could do to Kayvon’s greater goals. Can he really build up a community that he’s no longer a part of? And if he can’t, will Oaks Christian ever truly embrace him as an outsider?

“I see a lot of schools, once you’re no longer needed, I see a lot of players get thrown in the trash,” says Jadili Damu Johnson, the Dorsey assistant who coached Kayvon since his Pop Warner days. He quickly corrects himself. They are not actively discarded so much as forgotten, slowly growing invisible once they can no longer capture a crowd’s attention on Friday nights. “They’re not given that phone call, ‘Hey we’ve got stuff going on, you coming to the rally?’”

But, Johnson adds, all of their concerns intermingle with the ache of being left behind. No matter what happens, Kayvon Thibodeaux will never mean more to a place than the one he just left.

“He’s great in every aspect,” Johnson says. “We’re just sad, because we wanted him to show the greatness from here forever.”


For his part, Kayvon is mindful of the sacrifices he’s made to get here. He says that he originally did not want to leave Dorsey and the camaraderie he built. Nor is he under any illusion that a depleted Oaks Christian makes for a better on-field situation than the program he helped breathe new life into. “If I was going for football, I would have stayed at Dorsey,” he says. “I love everybody, of course. That’s my team.”

“But at the end of the day,” he adds, “it wasn’t tough for Kevin Durant to leave the Thunder… It’s what’s best.”

Not everyone understood.

“Some people were mad,” he says. “Some people were sad.… People look at me like I did something wrong.” That, he says, forced him to learn a second lesson: “When you get emotions into it, that’s when stuff doesn’t go right.”

Though he may no longer go to school in South Los Angeles, his loyalty to the neighborhood hasn’t changed. He still wants to be a lawyer, and still wants give back to South Los Angeles. As inspiration for how he can help his community from the outside, he cites the example of Nipsey Hussle, a popular LA rapper from nearby Crenshaw whose numerous charitable ventures include helping fund the reopening, this summer, of World on Wheels, a legendary Mid-City roller rink that functioned as a safe space for young people throughout the area.

“He made it and he’s still bringing money back to his community,” Kayvon says. “I can help them once I set myself up.… [The plan] tweaked a little bit but the overall message didn’t.”

A few minutes after Kayvon and I speak, he’s in the Mustang, motoring toward Interstate 110. The only thing on the day’s docket is an off-season workout, one that might actually take less time to complete than the commute to and from his new reality. At that point, he hasn’t spent much time on the Oaks Christian campus—just a few weeks last spring, as well as summer school—and he hasn’t had “the full effect” yet.

But there are aspects that will always seem alien to him. The school parking lot is dotted with luxury cars—BMWs, Lexuses, Mercedes Benzes, and even a Maserati. “The engine sounds like an animal,” he says. “Out there, it’s spoon-fed.… We don’t have the same problems.” He recalls overhearing a conversation in the school hallway between two girls, with one being irate at how someone looked at her. “That’s what you’re mad about? Your whole day is messed up because of that?” he says in his father’s house, which sits only a couple zip codes from Westlake Village but at times feels like an entirely different universe.

For better or worse, Oaks Christian is just the latest pit stop for Kayvon Thibodeaux, one that brings fresh challenges. He’ll learn a new defense, and he’ll add snaps on offense at tight end to his job description. As a rising junior, he’ll have more contact with college coaches. He’s preparing to parse their intentions.

“People constantly feeding you bad cars, like car salesmen,” he says. “They’re all selling you a dream, selling you what you think you’ve got and not really what it is.” Where does he want to end up? At whichever program can help facilitate his dreams, he says. “Wherever I can get business taken care of.”

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Kayvon was on full scholarship at Oaks Christian. While Kayvon and his family referred to his financial aid at Oaks Christian as a scholarship, a school spokesperson clarified that Oaks Christian does not offer athletic scholarships—Kayvon is receiving need-based financial aid.