The Riverside Press-Enterprise
PROSPECT NEARLY MISSED THE BUS
Chargers' top pick, Johnson, says stranger got him to play high school football
Hank Lloyd had lost track of Zion Johnson until the plumber from his church mentioned the name while fixing the hose in Lloyd’s backyard.
“That name sounds familiar,” Lloyd said. “That sounds like this kid that I asked, could he play football? Why didn’t he play?”
Lloyd was the mystery school bus driver who Johnson credited during pre-draft interviews for getting him to play football as a junior at Riverdale Baptist High School in Upper Marlboro, Md.
“Well, you must be the guy,” said the plumber, who heard the bus driver story from other church members.
A few weeks before last week’s NFL draft, Lloyd was made aware that the lanky golfer he encouraged to play football had transferred to Boston College and developed into a first-round prospect. In a span of seven years, Johnson went from being the “nerdy kid” who was clueless about football to the most Nflready offensive guard in the draft.
The Chargers selected the 6-foot2, 312-pound Johnson with the 17th overall pick last week, viewing him as an immediate starter at right guard and a cornerstone piece to their offensive line for years to come.
“What you don’t want to do is reach for a tackle and then you have an issue somewhere else,” Chargers coach Brandon Staley said. “We just really felt like (Johnson) is a really complete player and this guy is a first-round-level guard.”
It was a stretch to assume Johnson would become a reliable offensive lineman after what he displayed in his first spring workouts at Riverdale Baptist. Johnson spent most of his first year in football in the weight room and standing on the sideline before seeing game action as
“He would come home and say, ‘Mommy, the bus driver keeps saying why do I keep getting on the bus with these golf clubs? ...’ ” — Tammie Edwards, Zion Johnson’s mother, on Maryland bus driver Hank Lloyd
a senior, including a tussle against Chase Young, the star edge rusher for the Washington Commanders.
“Undersized is an understatement,” Johnson said. “I was 225 pounds and I played right tackle and our team played Chase Young, so it wasn’t like we were playing scrubs or anything.”
No regrets
Initially, Johnson wasn’t interested in football, but Lloyd kept asking and mentioned the idea to his mother, Tammie Edwards, and recommended him to the high school’s head football coach, Caesar Nettles.
“He would come home and say, ‘Mommy, the bus driver keeps saying why do I keep getting on the bus with these golf clubs,’” Edwards recalled. “He had to haul those to school every day.”
Johnson eventually agreed to try football and Edwards gave Nettles permission to meet Johnson at his bus stop.
“I was talking to his bus driver and said, ‘Well, can you point out Zion for me,’ ” Nettles said. “He came on out (with the football team) and he was really, really raw.”
Lloyd pushed football and Nettles showed interest because of Johnson’s long arms and large hands and feet. He was a few inches shorter than most offensive linemen, but once he filled out his arms, he made up for it with strength.
At the NFL Scouting Combine in March, Johnson had 32 reps on the bench press, the most among offensive linemen who participated. He was measured with 34inch arms, an 82-inch wingspan and 10 5/8-inch hands.
“With that size he had, he needs to be playing football,” Lloyd said. “When you get blessed with a body like that and you’re smart … I thought he would have no problems picking up the offense.”
But there were problems early on, and Johnson’s size wasn’t enough for Keith Mciver, Riverdale Baptist’s thenoffensive line coach. Johnson explained to Mciver in detail why the garage was structured near the front of the house after what would become the first of many rides home.
“He was saying this and that,” Mciver recalled. “I was like, ‘Son, just get out my car.’ The first thing I thought was, ‘This kid ain’t going to make it.’”
Mciver didn’t realize it then, but Johnson’s technical side and affinity for learning the ins and outs were reasons he quickly developed into a polished offensive guard.
Staley called Johnson proready and Chargers general manager Tom Telesco raved about Johnson’s strength and determination. Johnson continued football at Davidson, where he struggled financially for two years due to the private college’s nonscholarship program. He then went on to earn a scholarship at Boston College and left with a master’s degree in cybersecurity policy and governance.
Johnson had the right coaches and mentors during his meteoric rise in football, but it was Edwards, who raised Johnson as a single mother, who made this improbable football story possible. James Stacy Edwards, Johnson’s uncle, also played a role in why Johnson went from no-star recruit to the Chargers’ first-round selection.
“It was really my mom who pushed me to play,” Johnson said. “She always taught me that you should try things so that you don’t have regrets later on in life. I’m glad that I tried football because that would’ve definitely been a regret that I would have had.”
Draft experience
Mciver has been one of Johnson’s strongest supporters since he started football, but he was still surprised about being in the draft green room with Johnson in Las Vegas.
“If we look back and look at when you first started and look at where we are at now, we would never have believed it,” Mciver told Johnson before the draft began.
Johnson said he was glued to the prospect’s chair, a location for TV cameras to easily spot the draftees, for the first hour until he learned he was allowed to walk around. The draft experience changed rapidly after Johnson left his seat.
Johnson was expecting to get drafted after the 19th pick, with the Dallas Cowboys at No. 24 being the most likely destination. Johnson grew up in Bowie, Md., an area outside of Washington D.C. Most of his friends and relatives are fans of the Commanders and dislike the Cowboys.
“Then the Cowboys were calling, that would have been very difficult,” Mciver recalled. “I had mentioned to (Johnson), it might be nice to go to the Chargers. He was just chilling and then the phone rang. I knew something was up because the cameras came over.”
Nettles wasn’t surprised about Johnson being the 17th pick and thought he would go sooner after speaking with about 20 teams which showed interest in Johnson, including the Chargers.
“Zion was one of those prospects that teams didn’t really try to find dirt on because they know they couldn’t,” Nettles said. “He’s that good of a kid. He’s his authentic self. They were just trying to see what made him tick and all of that, because the film doesn’t lie. And once you meet him, he’s infectious.”
Johnson had a whirlwind first 24 hours with the Chargers and briefly met some of his new teammates. Johnson will have plenty of time to get to know them, especially those on the Chargers starting offensive line, including left tackle Rashawn Slater, left guard Matt Feiler and center Corey Linsley.
“From everybody that I’ve talked to, people that know him, they have all raved about him,” Linsley said. “The kind of person that he is and, obviously, the kind of football player.”
New kid on the O-line
Johnson played golf and basketball before the bus driver suggested football.
Edwards was a basketball standout at Virginia Tech where she set rebounding records, but she knew basketball wasn’t for her son.
“He didn’t have the passion for basketball like I did,” Edwards said. “But football, I saw it differently in his eyes. He has the passion, he loves the game. I think he loves the mechanics of it. He loves figuring things out. He likes breaking it down.”
But before Johnson gave up basketball, he won backto-back championships with his mom as the head coach of his youth team. Edwards was the only female coach in the U13 basketball league.
“Some of the fathers who would come with their kids and they would say, ‘Dad, here’s my coach,’ and they would walk past me and look for somebody else,” Edwards recalled. “No, it’s me.”
Johnson credited his mom for his athletic gifts, and some of his coaches credited her for Johnson’s competitive side.
“He is the most articulate, genuine young man I’ve probably come in contact with,” Nettles said. “But on the field, he’s going through the whistle on every play, and he’s gonna give you 110% on every play. And it doesn’t matter if somebody gets him on one play. … He’s coming right back and he’s going 1,000% at his throat. I think (the Chargers) have a silent assassin.”
For a period, Johnson’s passion was golf. He was the only middle school student on the high school’s golf team. Johnson learned to golf during summers spent with his grandmother, Rosa Edwards, who was a principal at a school in Norfolk, Va.
Johnson participated in the school’s golf camps and received coaching from a golf instructor. But Johnson stopped carrying his golf clubs after Lloyd physically nudged him to play football.
“I gave him a little elbow to the chest,” Lloyd said. “I asked him, ‘Did you feel it?’ He said, ‘I didn’t even feel it.’ I was just telling him you ain’t going to get hurt because you’ll be doing the hitting.”
Johnson gained the respect of Mciver and Nettles with his work ethic and how quickly he learned the playbook, but the coaches didn’t rush his development. Johnson weighed only 225 pounds when he joined the football team.
“This is a very bright kid,” Mciver said. “I’m thinking, like, ‘OK, this is a little nerdy kid. Not sure how much he’s gonna play or anything like that.’ But his work ethic changed everything.”
Johnson bench-pressed 135 pounds the spring before his junior season and increased that to 225 by fall.
Johnson didn’t see the field until the final game of his junior season, when he filled in at left tackle for Christian Darrisaw, who later starred at Virginia Tech and was a first-round pick of the Minnesota Vikings last season.
“You need to give (Johnson) a test,” Mciver remembered telling the coaches. “He did a heck of a job (at left tackle) and he proved that he belonged on the team.”
Johnson had a productive senior year at right tackle with Darrisaw patroling the left side, but Johnson joined the recruiting process too late and went unnoticed until Davidson called.
“Me and Christian were pretty close in high school because our O-line coach (Mciver) would have us over to the house,” Johnson said. “With him going to Virginia Tech, we weren’t able to stay as close because it’s like, ‘I want to beat you.’ He’s definitely someone who has pushed me, especially in high school and throughout my career, because with his level of play, I’ve always wanted to outdo him as a rival sort of thing.”
Johnson improved at Davidson under the guidance of Matt Applebaum and Phil Trautwein and later reunited with the offensive line coaches at Boston College. With Johnson in the ACC, he got to measure his skills against Darrisaw and Virginia Tech.
Mciver wore a Boston College shirt with a Virginia Tech hat when the game was at Boston College and vice versa for the game at Virginia Tech.
“I would sit on the Virginia Tech side for one half and the Boston College side for the other half,” Mciver said.
Credit to the bus driver
On Sunday, Johnson called Lloyd to reconnect and told his former bus driver that his advice got him drafted to the NFL.
“I told him, ‘That’s (the Chargers) gonna be my second team now that I’m gonna be rooting for,’” said Lloyd, a fan of the Commanders.
Lloyd, 68, coached high school basketball, volleyball and softball for 40 years before becoming a school bus driver. He coached former NBA players Michael Beasley, Nolan Smith and Thomas Robinson, and WNBA players Shakira Austin and Tianna Hawkins.
Lloyd’s only request for Johnson was to get one of his Chargers jerseys to hang next to his Wanisha Smith jersey, Smith being another former basketball standout he coached.
“He’s a great kid,” Lloyd said. “He’s going to be a great asset to the Chargers.”