Ohio State’s Arvell Reese arrives at NFL draft with a community behind him

CLEVELAND — Eight years ago, Maeko Walker was in her usual place on a fall Friday night: in the stands at a high school football game, ringing her cowbell and cheering on her son Alex.

Then everything went dark.

“I had a stroke,” Walker said. “Doctors told my family I wasn’t going to make it.”

Her youngest son, Arvell Reese, was home when he got the call. By the time the eighth-grader got to the hospital to see his mom, the game he loved and dreamed about no longer mattered.

“I didn’t want to play football anymore,” Reese recalled.

Walker survived, and Reese eventually returned to the field. But the path from that hospital room to Thursday’s NFL draft (8 p.m. ET, ABC/ESPN) — where Reese, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound Ohio State linebacker, is projected as a top-five pick — nearly crumbled long before it ever came into focus.

Reese’s journey to the NFL has never been just about football. It’s about the people who refused to let him walk away, starting with a mother who built a community around her three sons, and a high school football coach who saw a future Reese couldn’t yet see for himself.

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Walker’s involvement with football had always been deeper than merely supporting her sons from the stands on game days.

It started with a promise made when Reese was just 5 years old, when his father, Alex Reese, was incarcerated. Before entering prison, he made a request of Walker: Keep our sons in football.

A year later, in 2011, Reese’s oldest brother, Darquez Walker, was murdered. From that point on, football became more than a game in their household: It was structure. It was direction. It was something to hold onto.

“She meant everything,” Reese said about his mother. “She pushed me and [Alex] in football. She inspired us to play hard on the field.”

Years before Reese developed into one of the nation’s top prospects at Ohio State, Walker built that structure around him, and around dozens of other kids who weren’t her own.

She started as a team mom for the Pee Wee football teams.

Then she became something more.

If a player didn’t have cleats, she found a way to find a pair. If someone didn’t have food after a game, she cooked it — sometimes for the entire team, out of her own pocket. That turned into fundraising, organizing travel, preparing meals for 50 players at a time and helping manage logistics so teams could make it to games.

“I eventually bought a van so I could help take kids to practice and to games,” Walker said. “I looked at all of them like they were my sons.”

She checked report cards. She stayed in contact with parents. If a player slipped in the classroom, coaches knew about it. It wasn’t unusual for players to spend nights at her house just so they could make it to games the next day.

“I wanted to keep them safe,” she said. “Keep them busy so they didn’t have time to get into trouble.”

That same structure shaped her youngest son.

From the time he was 5, Reese was around the game — not just playing it, but studying it. He watched his older brother, absorbed the details and learned how plays develop before he ever fully stepped onto the field himself.

“I saw something in him back then,” Walker said. “People would say, ‘He’s cold.’ ”

Even with that structure, there were moments when Reese’s future was in jeopardy. Walker’s stroke was a medical emergency that also shook the foundation she had spent years building. It would be six months before she had recovered enough to return home, and she still struggles with mobility on her left side, though she is able to walk without always using her wheelchair.

For Reese, it brought everything into question. Football, once a constant, suddenly felt distant.

For a stretch, he drifted. The focus that once came naturally wasn’t there. The structure his mother enforced had weakened as she fought to recover. The game that once gave him direction no longer felt certain. That’s when help arrived in a different form.

Enter Ted Ginn Sr.

Ginn is the Hall of Fame football coach at Cleveland’s Glenville High, about 5 miles from downtown. He’s won more than 270 games and three of the past four state titles in Ohio. He’s sent more than 300 players to college and 21 to the NFL, including his son Ted Ginn Jr., Chicago Bears defensive back Coby Bryant and Washington Commanders defensive back Marshon Lattimore.

The reputation Ginn Sr. has built at Glenville, in a challenging section of the city, extends far beyond football. In 2007, he opened Ginn Academy, an all-boys public school among the leaders in grade-point average and graduation rates in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

When Reese transferred to Glenville during his junior year, Ginn didn’t begin his conversation with football.

He began with reality.

“I talked to him about life,” Ginn said. “He had no guidance. His mother’s sick, he lost his brother, his dad’s in jail. Who’s going to tell him what to do?”

Since Reese had a GPA below 1.0, Ginn emphasized that only an education would open doors to help fulfill all of his dreams. And if there was going to be a future, it had to start there.

Ginn laid out the plan: classes during the day, classes at night, accountability at every step, and a clear connection between what Reese did in the classroom and what he wanted on the field.

“No one is coming on a white horse to save you,” Ginn told him. “You have to take responsibility for your life.”

For Reese, it required something deeper than talent. He needed to commit. Fortunately, he did.

The grades improved. The football talent led to Glenville’s first state title, followed by a scholarship offer to Reese’s dream school in Ohio State, where he flourished on and off the field. Reese became a two-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree with a 3.7 GPA, and he plans to complete his degree in the offseason. He capped a three-year career with the Buckeyes by earning consensus All-America honors.

A once uncertain future is now highlighted by top-five pick projections.

“I’m just proud of him,” Ginn said. “Because if he didn’t sit down and buy into it, what would that kid be?”

Reese is expected to hear his name called early on draft night, but he knows the most important decisions in his life were made long before that — in classrooms, on practice fields and in conversations that had nothing to do with measurables or draft rankings.

“If it wasn’t for my mother and Coach Ginn, I don’t know where I’d be,” Reese said. “If it wasn’t for Ginn, I wouldn’t have gone to college. I owe him everything.”