Brain tumor didn’t stop Detroiter from his dreams
Panthers assistant: ‘My journey has been a long one’
Marcus Green thought his football career was over when he was a freshman in college, less than a year after Penn State recruited him for the team.
He regularly got headaches, but never thought they were serious — just a part of the game.
After a routine physical, team doctors were concerned about the results of Green’s blood test. They had him undergo an MRI. Then they called a meeting with Green, his parents and his coaches — an image of his brain loomed on a projection screen in the room.
Green had a benign brain tumor.
“Here’s the issue … ” Green remembers doctors saying, “if he gets hit the wrong way, he’ll go blind.”
On Saturday, more than 15 years later, Green will be at Ford Field as part of the coaching staff when the Michigan Panthers take on the St. Louis Battlehawks in the teams’ first game of the season.
Green is the athletic director and head football coach at Cornerstone Lincoln-King high school. This spring, he’s among eight high school coaches across the country to earn spots on coaching staffs of United Football League teams as part of the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches’ (NCMFC) UFL Fellowship.
“My journey has been a long one,” Green said, “and I feel like I found my calling.”
Dreams dashed
Green, 36, of Detroit, grew up on the east side of the city, and has been playing football since he was 7 years old. He attended high school at University Liggett in Grosse Pointe Woods, where he started all four years on the varsity football team as a defensive and offensive lineman.
“Football is something I fell in love with early on,” Green said last week. “I was real big on the history of it and I wanted it to be what I did to earn a living.”
Green dreamed of playing professionally. But the tumor cut that dream short. Two years of treatment reduced the tumor to a point where it was nearly nonexistent. Green didn’t play during that time, so a career in football was off the table. He pursued broadcast journalism, eventually working at ESPN and ABC News.
In 2017, Green returned home to Detroit to freelance as a journalist and created the “Determined Series,” an online platform showcasing inspiring stories of Detroiters that earned multiple awards.
“I tried to show the great side of where I’m from,” Green said. “There’s a lot of great people in this city that are doing great things.”
“... you’re a football coach”
In 2018, a friend and local high school coach asked Green to watch a practice and provide insight on the team’s defense.
“It took me back to when I was going to camps in high school and just learning,” Green said. The experience inspired him to pursue coaching football at the high school level. “You just saw a bunch of kids who were just hungry for something, they just didn’t know what.”
Green got his first coaching job as an assistant coach, and eventually was offered a chance to start up a new football program at a Cornerstone Lincoln-King High School in 2022.
The team started with nothing.
“We didn’t have a weight room, there was no equipment, there was no budget, it was just ‘hey you’re a football coach,’ ” said Elijah Richardson, network athletic and fitness director for Cornerstone.
The team didn’t have helmets until a week before the first game. “I coached kids that never played high school football before,” Green said.
That first season, the team went 0-9.
But Green said that forced him to find the small victories.
“I actually took my first head coach check and bought the entire team commemorative rings,” Green said. “Not because we won a championship … but I wanted them to see how important it was that they started and finished the season.”
A standout coach
Green said he decided to apply for the fellowship as a way to network with people in the professional ranks and to help strengthen the program at Lincoln-King.
Green stood out among 117 applicants to the
National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches UFL Fellowship, including 27 from Michigan, organizers said. The program aims to give coaches experience to succeed at the professional level — to “prepare, promote and produce coaches” — and ultimately bring more diversity to professional coaching, said Raj Kudchadkar, executive director of the NCMFC.
“When you look at the players on the field to the decision-makers and influencers, there’s definitely room for greater diversity,” Kudchadkar said. “So, for us, that’s what we’re looking for, we’re looking to increase diversity in those leadership ranks.”
Javé Brown, director of logistics and programming for NCMFC, said Green is already showcasing what made him a standout candidate.
“Marcus is always looking to better himself and the team that he’s around ...” Brown said. “He’s really excited and he brings a lot of energy, and that energy did not slow down once he received the news that he was a part of this.”
Green aspires to coach at the professional level. But he said he’s mostly looking forward to bringing what he learns as part of the Panthers coaching staff back to his team at Lincoln-King and to be an example to his players.
The opportunity, he said, “allows me to continue to show the kids that I coach to keep pursuing opportunities. Keep pursuing possibilities and give it everything you got when it does come up.”
Eric Guzmán covers youth sports culture at the Free Press as a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Make a tax-deductible contribution to support this work at bit.ly/freepRFA. Contact Eric Guzmán: eguzman@freepress.com; 313222-1850. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter: @EricGuzman90