INDIANAPOLIS -- The little hand on the clock hanging in the gym at Ben Davis High School is creeping toward 8 on a Saturday night in May, and Chris Evans has lost track of the time. One of the parents lingering on the sideline gives him a friendly reminder that dinner hour is whisking past and perhaps it's time to wrap it up. He has, after all, been working with the boys since lunch.

"Oh man, OK. Next touchdown wins," he hollers at the pack of 10-to-12-year-old boys spread out in front of him, then gathers half of them in a huddle. Evans is wearing a blue-collared button-up shirt with his first name sewn on to a patch on his chest and a dark-blue block-M hat, just like the one his head coach Jim Harbaugh wears at Michigan. He's toting a dry-erase clipboard, and he's still using it to draw up plays 30 minutes later when the parents along the wall start making the glances toward their watches a little more obvious. "Last drive," he says. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Evans is trying to squeeze in every rep possible before tomorrow's 7-on-7 tournament, which they've been preparing for all month. Carrie Eller, whose son Gavin is one of the boys on the team, shakes her head and smiles.

"We knew what we signed up for," she says.

Evans left Indianapolis a year ago to play running back at Michigan. He scored two touchdowns and ran for more than 100 yards in his first collegiate game. After finishing his freshman season as the team's second-best rusher, he's the front-runner to be the Wolverines' featured back in 2017. On the few occasions he has a chance to return to his hometown, Evans starts by sending out a group text to the players and parents of the youth football team he started coaching in high school. By now, they know when he's back, it's best to clear their schedules.

Harbaugh gave his Michigan players the month of May to get away from the normal demands of big-time college football. Some players traveled around Europe. Others found internships near campus. Evans returned home to continue working toward his clear vision of a future.

Chris Evans (back row, far right) takes the energy and dedication that has him in position to be the Wolverines' feature back this fall and pours it into his youth football team. From sketching plays to coaching extra reps, it's a labor of love. Courtesy of the Braunschneider family

The first seven hours of each weekday were dedicated to working at Grand Park, a 400-acre multisport complex that host events like Big Ten soccer tournaments and regional finals for the Little League World Series among other youth leagues and events. Evans' plan is to one day run a park like this one and coach as many of the kids who use it as he can.

At 3 p.m. each day, Evans races across town and slaps on a pair of latex gloves for his second job -- school janitor. He started cleaning classrooms when he was 16, and the head coach at Ben Davis let him know a local middle school was looking for help, and, more importantly, the custodians would be allowed to use the school gym after they finished with their work.

The extra gym time helped Evans grow into one of the area's best running backs. It wasn't long before he started bringing his youngest brother, Andrew, to the gym with him and teaching them how to train. As Evans continued to excel on the field at Ben Davis, more and more kids wanted to learn from him. He was happy to oblige. By the time he reached his senior year, he had enough of a group to form his own team. He called them 12-Gauge, a nod to his own jersey number.

"I wanted to see my little brother grow as a football player and grow up as a young man," Evans said. "I just wanted to be in his life and help him. I started helping my brother, and I was like, 'I'm helping him out, so I might as well just keep spreading out and see how many people I can touch.'"

To get to the kids faster, he has worked out an "assembly line" approach to his custodial duties along with co-worker/best friend LeShawn Johnson, who used to share a backfield with Evans at Ben Davis and now helps him coach the team. They crank through their share of emptying trash cans and sweeping floors in a couple hours, leaving them time to run their players through drills most nights of the week and get in their own workouts before stopping for dinner around 9:30.

"We don't see much of him when he's home," says Courtney Evans, Chris's mother. "I get my hug and kiss in the morning and my hug and kiss when he gets in at night. But my priority is he needs to spend time with his little brother, and he's working, so we're good with that."

Courtney calls herself Chris's "mom-ager." His dad, Derrick, was heavily involved in youth coaching while Chris was growing up. They couldn't help but be a little concerned when he called home last September to tell them he found a way to keep coaching while he was in Ann Arbor.

In his first couple months as a college student and FBS football player, Evans tracked down an email address for a local youth-sports program and signed up to coach one of the flag football teams for fifth and sixth graders. Between the demands of school and practice, his parents didn't know where he would find the time.

"But he loves it," Courtney says. "What else can I say, 'No, you can't go coach the youth in town?'"

Chris Evans ran for 614 yard yards and four TDs last season as a freshman at Michigan. Logan Bowles/USA TODAY Sports

The first game of the late fall season when Evans was up and running came on a Sunday, Nov. 13. The night before, Evans ran for a team-high 52 yards in a last-second, heartbreaking loss to Iowa to give Michigan its first loss of the season. The team plane landed back in Ann Arbor around 4 a.m. Six hours later, Evans was at the field with his clipboard and his new team. He had drawn up a warm-up schedule on the flight home.

Evans was disappointed with his team's third-place finish in the late fall season. He signed up to coach again in the spring and was determined to do better. That's how he landed in the bleachers of an indoor sports complex at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning in March. It was the first week of the league's playoffs, and Evans was scratching out scouting reports and notes on the 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds below as the bewildered parents who drew the short straw to coach the day's first game tried to figure out what he was doing. His team won the championship.

"He's definitely in it to win it, which is awesome," says league organizer Kyle Braunschneider. "He was the only one [scouting other teams]. He almost always brought a couple other players with him too. They would come in their U of M gear, head to toe, and the kids loved it. You could feel this kind of gravity wherever he walks. The kids just want to get close to him."

Back in Indianapolis this May, Evans' 12-Gauge team was an underdog. To find a tournament before he had to return to Michigan, Evans had to pit his team against a team of players that were mostly two and three years older than them. He, Johnson and little brother Andrew were the first three people at the field on game day.

Six hours, two close losses and one forfeit later, Evans was trying to piece together one last challenge for his group. They had come up 30 seconds short on a potential go-ahead drive in their previous game, and Evans was determined to give them a little taste of victory before heading back to Ann Arbor. After the tournament's winner had been determined and trophies had already been handed out, Evans talked another coach into playing one more.

On a fourth-down play late in the first half, 11-year-old Luke Munoz connected with 12-year-old Lincoln Murff for a long touchdown pass, and Evans' team was off and running. From there it was clear one team was happy to be out there and the other had had enough for one day. Team 12-Gauge rolled to a comfortable win.

Evans pulled his team into a huddle to recap the game afterward and told them they had make big strides in the month of May by sticking around and working hard.

"They're ready to go home. We still out here. We love this," Evans said, and a dozen young heads bobbed along in agreement.