RODRICK JACKSON
Adam Fisher didn’t start out to be a football coach. But the South Kitsap graduate is into his 17th year as football coach of the East Valley (Spokane) Knights. He also had no clue he would be a surrogate father of a teenage boy, but here he is with wife Jolene about ready to adopt a former lost soul.
Come Dec. 21, Adam and Jolene will be in court to legally sign adoption papers for the boy – Rodrick Jackson – and close out a chapter that began in darkness and now will be shown in the bright light of compassion and love. This story is so heart-warming that it was recently featured by Lester Holt on a NBC Nightly News broadcast that went out to a national audience.
Adam Fisher is the oldest of two boys of Ed Fisher, who is the guy that turned a bumbling South Kitsap football program into a state power during his 23 seasons as head coach, compiling an amazing 197-48 record with 17 consecutive state playoff appearances that included reaching three state championship games, the first two in 1983 and 1984 and the last one in 1994 when his Wolves beat Walla Walla 15-10 for the state title.
Ed Fisher left SK in the summer of 1997 to return back to his hometown in Spokane. A month ago he retired to live at Dove Mountain in Marana, Ariz. Adam, who served as the SK quarterback and punter for three years (1991-93) (younger brother Casey was on the 1994 state title game and went on to play at Boise State) gained a scholarship to play football at Eastern Washington (where Ed played) as a punter and wide receiver, but after two seasons injuries forced him to give up the sport.
It’s funny how life works sometimes. Adam saw what it took to be a football coach and decided he wanted to get as far away from that as possible and planned to major in criminal justice at Eastern and become a state trooper.
“I wanted nothing to do with my dad’s job,” said Adam, who was a ball boy at SK as a young boy. “I looked at all the stuff a head coach has to do and the lack of pay, and I wanted to do something different.”
So much for that. His first two summers from college he helped his dad at the week-long SK football camp and began to realize that he connected with the kids and could see the improvement they made under his guidance. But he wasn’t fully convinced he needed to switch majors and become an educator (physical education) and a coach until that second summer when his dad sat him down and showed him that he had a knack for coaching.
His first coaching experience was helping his dad in 1996 at SK, then with D. J. Sigurdson the next season and in 1998 at Cheney High School with Tom Oswald (now deceased) and 1999 at East Valley with Jim Clements (also deceased). When Clements resigned after the 1999 season, Adam, who had a job offer with Boise State, was named as replacement. He has since compiled a winning 90-77 record with the Knights, including 3-4 this year, as the school’s classification has gone from 3A to 4A, back to 3A, and now is 2A as the area around the school has lost considerable jobs in recent year.
One of those “lost” was Jackson, whose home life was not good to say the least.
“He played on the freshman football team and I could see he had some real talent,” says Fisher, “but I didn’t really know about his home situation. He ended up not playing football his sophomore year and in the middle of the year ended up not going to school.”
Jackson’s story is all too familiar for people that work in social services. There are kids out there, including locally, that have no home life and are called “couch surfers” because they land on them wherever they can be found, usually at a friend or a friend of a friend’s place.
Some of these kids make it to school despite living virtually on the street, but many are lured into things that not socially acceptable – drugs and worst. What is remarkable about Jackson is that despite an unstable family situation that led him to hang out with the wrong type of people, he at some point made a decision that would change his life for the better, which is something that is not usual.
What is usual is that you become accustomed to your environment and that is your normal. If you are used to getting wacked around by your dad, as a childhood friend of mine was, that is likely how you will act as an adult to your children. It then becomes extremely tough to break that vicious cycle.
“It took a lot of courage because like you said it does become the norm,” Jackson said in a phone conversation. “After a while it builds up with all these things and you can see you want to do better with your life.”
Jackson finally decided he needed help to break out of his abnormal normal. So one day he showed up at school and one of his classmates sarcastically said, “Nice to see you at school today.”
That was the straw that broke his back.
Fisher had always treated him fairly and with respect, so Jackson sought out Adam and asked if he could speak with him. They went around a corner into the school training room.
“He lost it,” says Fisher of Jackson. “We had an 18-minute conversation and he fully lost it three times.’
Fisher lost it too. Tears were plentiful.
“He said, ‘I have nobody. I have nowhere to go. No place to turn to. I want to make a life change and I want to play college football,’ ” Fisher said.
Fisher told Jackson that if he was serious about making a change, he would offer to take him in, but if that happened he would have to follow strict guidelines, promise that he would not only go to school every day and get good grades, but that he would have to make every football practice even though because he had missed so much school (his GPA was .7) that he would be ineligible for most of the season that started with practice in August.
Fisher added that he would first have to ask his wife about taking him. Jolene agreed, so in March Jackson moved in with the Fishers, which also include two daughters, Ally, an eighth-grader, and Sydney, a sixth-grader.
When Jackson came to live with the Fishers, he was six-foot-one and 168 pounds. Now he’s six-two and 193 pounds and happy as a lark. And his grades are on the move upward. He had a 3.3 GPA his second semester last school year and his accumulative GPA is now 1.8 (his core GPA is 2.6, which is what colleges look at when admitting students).
Jackson is a wide receiver and a cornerback for the Knights and Fisher says he still has some work to do to catch up and be a polished player that college recruiters will look at. But, Fisher adds, he has the talent, it’s just a matter of gaining the experience. In early October, Jackson had scored five touchdowns and had over 500 receiving yards.
The University of Idaho and UTEP both have said they would offer a scholarship to Jackson after watching him this summer during East Valley’s football camp. So the future now appears much brighter.
First, though, Jackson has to graduate from high school. Because he missed so much he will have to continue with summer school and do some on-line courses and then come back for what will be his fifth year of high school this fall to get enough credits to get his diploma. East Valley is applying to District 7 to grant him a fifth year on a hardship so he can play football and gain the experience that will help him with college recruiters.
Jackson, who is also a track athlete in the 100 and 200 sprints, runs the 40 in a handheld time of 4.51, has a vertical of 41 inches and broad jumps 10 feet and a half inch.
“Those are Pac-12 and SEC numbers,” says Fisher. “He just needs more game experience and to be more consistent. When he has the ball in his hands he has the ability to score touchdowns.”
Ed Fisher said he will fly up from Arizona to attend the Dec. 21 court date when Adam and Jolene legally adopt Jackson, who will then be known as Rodrick Fisher.
That day will be a celebration of a new life for a young boy who once was lost but now has been found.