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(Gallery by Mike Roy/The Star-Ledger)

NEWARK — The buses were quiet and dark as they rolled home toward Newark's South Ward. Inside, rows of bruised, muddy football players from Malcolm X Shabazz High School said nothing. The only sounds were sniffles and muffled crying.

The 2012 high school football season had just ended without a state championship — the way every season ends at Shabazz. The head coach, Darnell Grant, sat glassy-eyed in the front of the lead bus, heartache building in his chest.

Grant hurt for his players, for the school and for the community. The playoff loss at Carteret High stung, but this was a lost opportunity in a much bigger fight — the fight for Shabazz, a long-shot crusade he and others have taken on to save one of the worst high schools in the country — and to do it starting with sports.

When he arrived at Shabazz in 2010, Grant found a school choked by chaos. Gangs fought inside and outside the main buildings. Students smoked weed in the stairwells and wandered the halls instead of going to class. Teachers were punched and beaten. So brazen were the kids that much of the mayhem ended up on YouTube.

An assessment done by the state in 2009 said Shabazz should be closed. Its recommendation came with a chilling conclusion: The students had taken over the building.

In better times, Shabazz — or South Side High as it was known until 1972 — had been the pride of Newark, molding mayors (Sharpe James and Ed Koch), Grammy Award winners (Cissy Houston), world-class athletes (Lonnie Wright) and even the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot (Bernie Marcus). It was a school with sports programs filled with rich tradition and community pride, a school where players locked arms after games and sang chants the fans knew by heart.

Today, the neighborhood around Shabazz is smothered by police sirens, gunfire and weathered memorials to the dead — dollar-store teddy bears, crumpled plastic flowers and burned-out candles.

"This will never be Mayberry," Grant likes to say.

With an important game coming up against Central, Grant had hoped to focus on football. Now, he worried Douglas' shooting might disrupt the team.

"The guys at Piscataway don't worry about that stuff," Grant said. "The guys in Union, you're not worried about this stuff. So when you play other teams, you think they have to worry about somebody being shot on the way home? At Cedar Grove, is he worried about that? No, that's not in his preparation this week. It's, like, damn. You're beating your head against the wall."

Before practice the day after the shooting, Grant brought the players together.

"Things aren't always normal once we leave these gates, once you leave the school," Grant said. "You should be able to walk home with your friends and not have people shoot at you or want to rob you. You should be able to enjoy your neighborhood without this violence. But we can't control what happens on Bigelow, on Elizabeth Avenue, on Stratford, on Bergen. The only thing we can control is what happens to us between these white lines. You understand?"

"Yes sir."

"It's normal here. Here you're going to be coached up by men who love you and who care about you and want nothing but the best for you. You guys are some of the greatest people that I've ever met in my life. We all enjoy every day with you. Win, lose, draw, we do it together, right?"

"Yes sir."

"One family. One team. One heartbeat. Right?"

"Yes sir."

FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT

A week after Douglas was shot, the school kept heaping problems on Grant. When things were quiet, he could focus on practice plans and scouting reports. But those opportunities were infrequent, even as Shabazz, as a whole, continued to show improvements.

A few minutes before the final bell rang on Oct. 23 to dismiss students for the day at 4:07 p.m., Grant slid on a blue jacket and headed outside on an overcast afternoon. He was joined by Ellis, who carried a bullhorn, Harrison, the assistant coach, and White.

"Here comes the muscle," a security guard said.

Grant walked toward the corner of Johnson Avenue, hands dug in his pockets, scanning groups of kids heading home. There had been a fight over the weekend between students and some young people who did not go to Shabazz, then a retaliatory fight on Monday two blocks away on Elizabeth Avenue, which led to the suspension of six Shabazz students. Rumors of a third fight spread through school, and Grant and others were outside to make sure it didn't happen.

"I don't feel a fight today," said Grant, knowing all too well that disagreements outside of school can spill inside the building. Still, the men walked down West Bigelow toward the convenience store on the corner of Elizabeth Avenue. A group of young people — some students, some not — hung out, but the men shooed them away. Grant spotted a young man from Stratford Avenue and five friends and recognized them as some of the people involved in the fighting.

"We don't need all that," White said, over and over.

"Kids die from foolishness like this," Ellis said.

Grant and the others waited for the young men to head toward their homes before walking back to Shabazz.

Two days later, inside the discipline room, Grant watched over mandatory parent conferences with some people at the center of the fight. The conferences were a critical piece of the reform effort, forcing parents to be involved. And this way, parents knew exactly why their children were in trouble.

For the conference, two boys involved in the fight — one a Shabazz student and the other a student at a Newark charter school — sat with their mothers and younger siblings. The mothers cried as they urged their kids to end the disagreement.

"I cry every night," said Sheledia Cade, the mother of one of the boys. "I pray to God he walk in the door. I know what goes on out here. But to see it at your own front door, it's scary as hell. I'm not prepared to bury him."

By the end of the session, the boys shook hands and apologized.

Later, Grant headed toward the field house to prepare for practice. Shabazz was coming off a 41-9 victory over Central six days earlier — the team's best win of the season. When the game was over, players scribbled their names on the game ball, and Grant and Curry drove to Joshua Douglas' house on South 18th Street and handed it to him.

As the postseason approached, Grant said he was seeing changes in the school. He leaned against a chain-link fence near the field house.

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"This is why I know it's working," Grant said. "We're dealing with the issues that everybody in every other school in New Jersey, for the most part, is dealing with. Like, regular kid stuff. And when I first came here it wasn't kid stuff. It was real.

"We had intruders in the building where the kids weren't safe. My first year it was, like, blood feuds. It was no stopping that. There was no conference, 'Let's all talk. You cry and my mom cries and your mom cries.' Hell no! If (rival neighborhoods) Stratford and Seth Boyden beefed, it was for real. And it went on the whole year."

First-quarter grades had recently been reported and Shabazz students had 440 Fs — down from 707 in the first quarter the previous year. There had been plenty of skirmishes, mostly between freshmen or students with relationship problems. But there were no gang-related fights or large brawls, principal Mills said.

Bolden, the former superintendent, and Sharpe James, the former mayor of Newark, praised the changes at their old high school. Even current Newark superintendent Anderson, who made an unannounced visit to the school last May, noted the improvements.

"I walked the halls, popped into a bunch of classes and myself and the person who travels with me, we literally felt, like, 'Is this a holiday? Are kids in school today?'AC/AA" Anderson said. "Because we couldn't believe there was no one in the hallways. You could hear a pin drop. Just the sense of purpose and the entire tone of the building had changed radically."

Still, Anderson was careful in her praise of Shabazz.

"Certainly it's taken steps in the right direction," she said. "We'll have to do even more work to support a total vision of success. I would say we've put in place the building blocks, but we still have a ways to go before Shabazz is a school that puts kids on the pathway to college."

THE BLACK AND GOLD

Two Villani charter buses waited outside Shabazz Stadium on Nov. 16 as the Bulldogs emerged from their locker room clutching shoulder pads and equipment bags.

"We on a charter bus?" senior Kenny Prioleau asked, his eyes wide. "Okay!"

Shabazz was coming off a 26-19 victory over Glen Ridge to improve to 6-2 and earn the No. 5 seed in the Central Jersey Group 2 playoffs. The Bulldogs now could win their first playoff game since 2005. To do so, they would have to travel an hour west into the hills of Hunterdon County and beat No. 4 Delaware Valley.

Understanding the magnitude of the game and the distance, Grant persuaded athletic director Watson to spring for the charter buses, instead of the usual yellow school buses. The players and coaches loaded on and they pulled down Hillside Avenue shortly before 4 o'clock, on the way to Interstate 78.

The buses pulled off the highway about 40 miles later and exited onto a winding country road. The team drove down Hog Hollow Road and turned left onto Senator Stout Road, heading for the school, counting deer along the way — four, six, 10, 15 and all the way to 18.

After taking the field, Shabazz trailed, 15-12, at the half. But the Bulldogs dominated the second half and would walk away with a 34-22 victory.

Principal Mills, who came to all the games, beamed from the sidelines, with Ellis, the vice principal, cheering by his side. Grant and Harbin wrapped their arms around one other and jumped up and down.

Grant and his players were exhilarated as they spilled onto the field. They had come up short his first two years. Now: A taste of success.

All night, with their arms weaved, the familiar chant could be heard roaring from the Shabazz players:

"I said black!"

"Black, black!"

"Black and gold!"

"Gold, Bulldog soul!"

"You look!"

"You look, you look, look!"

"So good to me!"

"Oh you look so damn good to me!"

"I said black!"

"Black, black!"

"Black and gold!"

"Gold, Bulldog soul!"

The glory would be short-lived.

MORE THAN A GAME

Six days later, the Bulldogs came out flat and were shut out, 33-0, against Weequahic in their Thanksgiving Day showdown.

The following Friday night, Shabazz fell behind Carteret, 20-0, before a furious rally fell short on a muddy field in Middlesex County. The loss ended the team's season at 7-4, denying the Bulldogs a chance to play for a sectional state championship.

A week after the season ended, Grant sat at a scuffed table inside the discipline room at Shabazz. Over the course of his morning, he had reprimanded a girl who cut class to give her brother lunch money. One of his football players, Wesley Ellis, poked his head in the room, knowing he would pay for getting caught with his cell phone in school.

All things considered, it had been a quiet day and a quiet week. No big fights. No students cursing out teachers. No one hanging in the hallways.

Almost peaceful, Grant said.

A stack of 13 manila folders containing transcripts — one for each senior — sat in front of him. Benton, his star linebacker, had made his college decision. Twelve more to go.

Grant thought about the bus ride back to Newark after his team's final loss. He thought about the lingering threat the school would close. He thought about what winning the last game of the 2012 season may have done for the school and for the community.

He leaned forward and shook his head.

"It would have been a helluva story to finish up and win a championship," Grant said. "But you know what? Nobody would have believed it. Because that's not real life. In real life, it doesn't ever really line up. You know how it is. You think you're on top of the world and then what? The rug gets pulled out from under you. That's real life. We have a real-life freaking story.

"You wanted the fairy tale. You wanted to be 'Remember the Titans.' Everybody wants to be the Titans. But that's not real life. This here, this is real life."

Matthew Stanmyre: mstanmyre@starledger.com; twitter.com/MattStanmyre

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