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Members of Alexander's Athletics pose for a picture with LaColby Tucker. Matthias Leach is second from the left. Jonathan Alexander stands next to Tucker, and Darious Chase is at the end on the right.
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Tucker talks with Jonathan Alexander and the very attentive boys of Alexander's Athletics.
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Kevin Terrell/XFL © Kevin Terrell/XFL
Jonathan Alexander last year with the St. Louis Battlehawks.
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Fort Worth Magazine
Arlington Renegades head coach Bob Stoops signs autographs for season-ticket holders.
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Fort Worth Magazine
Former Texas and NFL standout Sam Acho, today an XFL analyst, has some fun with fans.
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Fort Worth Magazine
XFL hopefuls wait their turn to run receiver drills.
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Fort Worth Magazine
These appear to be serious Arlington Renegades fanatics.
Edgar Jones and I stood in a slice of shade trying to escape detection by the ever-present sun while watching the XFL Combine at Arlington’s melting Choctaw Stadium.
We were out where baseball’s left field once withered under these conditions each summer for 81 games when the Texas Rangers called this home. On Wednesday, professional football hopefuls were here trying to catch the eye of an XFL franchise. The event was being hosted by the XFL champions, Arlington Renegades.
Anyway, Jones, a former NFL player who has made Dallas-Fort Worth his home in football retirement, was telling me about his message to young players of this age. Jones is often asked to speak to high school football teams. Just recently, he was at Arlington High School doing that.
“I say this all the time, when you think about the grand scheme of things, we only get this much time to spend on the field,” he says showing me about an inch between his forefinger and thumb, “in comparison of all the other life you're doing off the field. How are you conducting yourself off the field? I think about the people important to me, and how they taught me to be a good husband, a good guy in the community, and to take care of my family and my neighbor.”
We’re in this conversation because I was there to write a story about Jonathan Alexander, a Fort Worth native now playing defensive back for the XFL's St. Louis Battlehawks. Alexander, on-site as a representative of the league, and his good friend from Fort Worth Darious Chase have formed Alexander’s Athletics, a nonprofit designed to make the kind of men Jones is talking about through the game of football.
Four young men from the Fort Worth area joined Alexander on Wednesday to watch the workouts and talk to some of the guys hoping to extend their football careers.
One of those was LaColby Tucker, an offensive lineman from Missouri Southern State who resembled the 67-foot Sam Houston statue gazing over Interstate 45. Tucker is a big man who played with Alexander at Garden City Community College in Kansas.
Tucker, who received an invite to the combine despite not playing football for two years, shared a message with the four, wide-eyed boys: “God opened doors for me, and He will open doors for you, too.”
These days that kind of dispatch might get you ridiculed by toughs and yobboes on social media. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t dare do it in front of the 6-foot-9, 315-plus pounds of LaColby Tucker.
“It means a lot [to be here],” says Matthias Leach, a Fort Worth native who plays football at Saginaw Chisholm Trail High School. “Having somebody talk to me who has been through [adversity] but still showing up at the XFL Combine … that’s crazy. That’s pretty cool.”
Alexander and Chase started the nonprofit just this year. Right now, they have six kids in their program.
Alexander’s journey in football has been winding, too.
After graduating from Trimble Tech, he first went to Garden City Community College and then to Kilgore Junior College, where he stood out as an all-conference cornerback. He was recruited to Kansas State. There, he graduated with a bachelor’s in sociology. As a graduate transfer, he went to University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He earned certificate in child and family development.
He signed as an undrafted free agent with the Chicago Bears in 2022 and played with the Battlehawks last season.
A nonprofit to help children had always been a goal of Alexander and Chase. Like literally always.
“It started when we were like 10, 11, 12 years old,” Alexander says. “We always said we were gonna do something special for the city. But we were like, ‘Man, we got to take care of our own lives first.”
While Alexander was working his way up a football life, Chase was serving his country learning naval operations and lots of other things, like communication, honor, ethics, and hardly least of all, leadership, in the U.S. Navy, where he spent four years on the USS Portland.
“Last year we talked about it and thought this would be a good time to start the nonprofit,” Alexander says. “We had the vision and we just took off with it.”
They do football with the kids, for sure, but they also do manners and “how to approach people in different opportunities and situations,” says Chase.
Because, as Edgar Jones says, football lasts only a little bit. Being a gentleman is forever.
