About the author
Coach Nakia “Nick” Mitchell was born in Laplace, Louisiana, a small town just outside of New Orleans along the Mississippi River. His father Wilfred Mitchell, Jr. and his grandfather Wilfred Mitchell Sr. both founded youth organizations while using coaching the sports of baseball and football as platforms to touch the lives of three generations of kids in St. John the Baptist Parish. As a high school student Nick was asked to write an article for the school newspaper describing his game-winning home run in vivid detail, which sparked his curiosity in writing.
At 17, Nick entered Southern University in Baton Rouge. While there he played baseball, where he learned the value of cultivating relationships, the effectiveness of communication in coaching, and the psychology sustained genuineness within young men from his head coach, Roger Cador.
Prior to graduating from college Nick worked at a local school in Baton Rouge for juvenile delinquents teaching English, Math, and Life Skills in the afternoons and this brought him closer to his life purpose – children. He was afforded the opportunity to work to influence the lives of youth through various organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club, Upward Bound, and the YMCA - all while working on his Bachelor’s Degree in Therapeutic Recreation.
In 1998, less than a year out of college, Coach Mitchell was hired at East St. John High School where he coached baseball and football. A major turning point in his career – and his life’s purpose happened in 2000 when a football player on the team died from injuries sustained while swimming during the team’s preseason football camp. Mitchell, another coach, and a few of the team’s players helped to resuscitate the player before ambulances showed up.
“That moment made me never want to coach again,” Mitchell said. “The agony was too great. To watch that young man suffer and lose his life ripped at me every day so I walked away from coaching after that 2000 season.” Mitchell left coaching and went into sales until he got a phone call from a very good friend, Derek LaMothe, two years later. At that time LaMothe was the head football coach at L.B. Landry High School in New Orleans and needed an offensive line coach. This call proved to allow Mitchell to step back “into his purpose” and became one of his main reasons for returning to the sidelines.
Mitchell went on to coach at Booker T. Washington High School in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina and while there earned his Master’s Degree from Xavier University. Mitchell then coached at East Ascension High School in Gonzales Louisiana prior to getting his first opportunity to be a head coach at Southern University Laboratory School in 2011. In 2012, Mitchell began documenting the “life” of his program through a personal journal and end of the year assessments when he discovered how every goal he wrote down began to take shape not only for the program, but his players as well.
Mitchell is now in his 20th year of coaching, sharing his life and his life’s work with young men through the game of football just as his father and grandfather did before him.