Derrick
”
D-Train
”
Morrison took the discipline his mother instilled and hasn’t
looked back
As he stood in the huddle with his teammates in a key,
late-season high school football game against Bellarmine, Junipero
Serra High School’s star running back, Derrick
”
D-Train
”
Morrison, remembers looking across the huddle and hearing his
quarterback telling him that his only job was to hang onto the
football.
Derrick “D-Train” Morrison took the discipline his mother instilled and hasn’t looked back
As he stood in the huddle with his teammates in a key, late-season high school football game against Bellarmine, Junipero Serra High School’s star running back, Derrick “D-Train” Morrison, remembers looking across the huddle and hearing his quarterback telling him that his only job was to hang onto the football.
“He kept saying, ‘D-Train don’t lose the ball. Don’t lose the ball,'” Morrison said.
A win over the Bells in that 1995 football season would have given the Padres a shot at making the Central Coast Section playoffs.
Morrison wound up fumbling the ball, but his team got it back and they won the game anyway. They would lose the following week and miss the playoffs by the slightest margin.
Today Morrison is the star halfback on the Gilroy-based Central Coast Barnstormers amateur football team.
He’s 11 years removed from his high school playing days at Serra. And he probably would have never remembered that mediocre season in 1995 had the player handing him the ball on running plays that year been someone other than Tom Brady. The same Tom Brady who would go on to achieve stardom in the NFL as the Super Bowl MVP quarterback of the New England Patriots.
“I played with him a couple of years,” said Morrison, 28, who graduated a year after Brady. “He was a real cool nonchalant guy – not a guy that you’d think would be in the NFL. He was a calm, real smart kid, real laid back and not big headed at all.”
Although he never played baseball, Morrison remembers Brady as the Serra catcher with a rocket arm.
“Barry Bonds and Greg Jeffries went to Serra. We were much more known for baseball. (Brady) didn’t even take up football until his sophomore year,” Morrison said. “They started him at outside linebacker then switched him to quarterback. He always had the arm to throw a baseball, now he just had to learn to make decisions in the pocket. Baseball helped make him the good quarterback that he is today.”
Morrison also remembers that Brady was talented enough to play either sport beyond high school and sought his advice in the decision.
“I remember he told me one day that he was offered a contract to play for the Toronto Blue Jays and wanted to know what to do,” Morrison said. “I told him to do what’s best for yourself. He also could have gone to Cal to play football where he was told he would start right away, but he wanted to go to a bigger football school.”
After high school Brady would go on to play football at Michigan while Morrison entered his senior year at the Catholic high school keeping focused on football, basketball and track – the three things that helped him stay off the streets of East Palo Alto and avoid a life of crime that too often engulfs impressionable youth in the gang-plagued area.
“I’d say at least over 50 or close to 100 people that I knew or went to school with were killed in drive-by shootings,” Morrison said. “Sports kept me from hanging in the streets. Most of the guys that I grew up with are either dead, in jail or still on the street.”
Morrison says that going to Serra in San Mateo played a key role in helping him to stay off East Palo Alto’s hardened streets. He also credits his mother Billie for raising him and his older brother Montel in a household that instilled love, morals, guidance and nurturing qualities, which have helped shape him into the individual he is today.
“It was tough growing up in East Palo Alto,” Morrison said, who recently moved to San Jose. “I’ve seen friends get shot and heard gun shots every night. But I never got caught up in the violence. My mom raised me in a real respectful way.”
Morrison was first introduced to football when he was 5 by his uncle Willie, who coached the local Pop Warner football team.
“Football was something that I looked forward to every season,” Morrison said.
In high school he acquired the nickname D-Train his junior year after taking a handoff from Brady on a sweep play and running over two or three defenders en route to a 50-yard touchdown run.
“My coach (Tom McKenzie) said that I ran just like a train,” said Morrison, who currently has three touchdowns and 150 yards rushing in just two games for the Barnstormers. “Then my senior year our running backs coach Tom Rathman (former 49er) really kept it going and said I should keep the name because it was my style of running.”
His senior year Morrison earned All-League honors at Serra, despite missing a number of games due to injury.
When the 5-foot-8, 200-pound back is not running like a freight train over opponents for the Barnstormers, he works during the day in sales and marketing for Aramark in Hayward. But the camaraderie of football is what he enjoys most.
“I love playing for the Barnstormers. It’s a good group of guys, like a family,” he said. “Playing for the Barnstormers gives me a chance to mess around and get my mind off the frustrating things in life.”
