“When a guy tries to tackle me, sometimes it will be illegal contact,” Nez explains. “So I'll explain to the opposing team how to grab me. Most of them are probably shorter than me, so what they're used to doing might get them disqualified. But I don't want them to get disqualified, either."

Trina’s younger brother, Alonzo Yazzie, was a star high school football player for the Hopi High School Bruins. Large and strong like his nephew, he helped teach Nez about the sport and encouraged him to stick with it. He is the football player — NFL stars included — that Nez says he looked up to the most. Yazzie died in 2011 at age 31, after what his family says was a “sudden accident.”

Tearing up, Nez recalls his uncle's wisdom: “Me and him, we were... we were like two peas in a pod. I lost a lot of support at that time. I thought of even quitting football sometimes because of that. But I thought of what he used to tell me: ‘If you feel like quitting, don't quit. Because I will always be out there, cheering you on.’”

“It was especially hard when we lost him because some of my brothers saw in my son the same playing talent that Alonzo used to have,” Trina says. “I think that's the driving force of them wanting to drive three to four hours out and see him all the time and motivate him and say, ‘You know what, try harder. Zo — we called him Zo — played all of these positions. Make your uncle proud!’”

When Nez was a small boy, Alonzo and his other uncles often woke him before 5 a.m. and told him to get up and go outside for a run. Navajo culture prescribes early-morning runs facing east to face the deities, Trina explains. Shout as you run to make your reverence know, so they may bless you for a long and good life. Yell for the deity to hear you and bless you, no matter the hour or feeling of lead in the legs. Navajo elders pass down the tradition as a lesson of strength and endurance: Fight laziness, fight the cold to build endurance to prepare for the trials of life.

“My uncles always told me, ‘Life is gonna be hard for you,’” Nez says. “So it's best to face it right now to prepare to face it later on."

The Nez family describes themselves as lower middle class. William works for the human resources department in the Navajo Nation government, and Trina works for a utility company. Trina and William met when they were students at Diné College, and have been married 21 years.

When his and Trina's second son was born, William had the privilege of giving him his name, which, he says proudly, translates to “Tall Warrior of the Red Streak in the Water Clan.” Nez explains that while the first half of his name, Nabahi, means “warrior” in the Diné language, he sees the role as not just someone who goes out to fight in wars, but also as someone who knows when to stay put to protect the children and elders.

“It’s not just going to war,” he says. “It's not just going and killing people. It's just to protect the children of the future and elders, and also the women who carried the kids of the future. Even a warrior knows when not to go to war. He knows which fights not to fight.”

The Nez family’s top priority is education. Nearly every conversation regarding their three children can and will wind its way back to talking about education, particularly the kids earning college degrees immediately out of high school.

William graduated from the two-year college where he met Trina, and she is working on her four-year degree now. “We’ve learned from our experiences, and we know we want our kids to get their college educations earlier in life than we did,” William said.

Education on the reservation is a complex and fractured system. Three separate entities control schools on the land: state public school districts, the Bureau of Indian Education (U.S. government), and the Department of Diné Education.

Children on the reservation are subject to state-mandated curriculums, regardless of governing body, which DODE Superintendent Tommy Lewis says might not always make sense for the students. In addition, students who move from state to state, but remain within the boundaries of the reservation, are subject to different standards of education. Funding and quality of educators is another major concern on the reservation, which the DODE looks to overhaul in the next few years by implementing a reservation-wide standard that fits the students’ needs and meets state requirements.

“The reality is: The majority of students getting diplomas have reading and math scores at the fifth grade, so they can't even use those scores to get into higher ed,” Lewis says. “They can't score high enough on the ACT or SAT to get admitted. I say, ‘Golly, that's not right.’ They can't even use those diplomas to get to the job market anymore.” Using a statewide benchmark, Navajo Pine received an F grade for “College and Career Readiness” in 2013. That year, only 23% of students were successful in passing one of the three criteria outlined by the New Mexico Public Education Department. Nez is preparing to take the ACT in February.

Access to quality education is far from the primary, if only, challenge for students on the reservation. The Nez family speaks honestly, but with concern and not judgment about the many single-parent families in poverty in their community. In the 2010 Census, the number of families who identified as single-mother homes were nearly equal to the number of two-parent, male-female homes.

“For my son, the support system is there,” William said about his family. “I think what makes a person successful when it comes to Native Americans is having the full support first of all from both parents and grandparents, and then extended family like uncles. I can't speak for everyone — I can't say that none of his peers have this. Some don't. Unfortunately.”

At school, classmates often pick on Nez, calling him a nerd and mocking him because of his height. “As the captain of the football team, I know how to choose my fights,” Nez says.

His parents, despite trusting their son’s judgment in social situations, have placed a heavy restriction on their teenage boy: no school dances, no girlfriends. Not while he’s under their roof, and, preferably, not until he’s done getting his education. “I'm gonna come forward and say this was my idea," says Trina, "primarily because we've seen in our family a history of domestic violence. So when we had our boys, that was the one thing I wanted to not let them see. I made sure that my relationship with their father didn't have any domestic violence and that we talked about a lot of things. The kids see that if we have a disagreement, we talk about it.”