This must be emphasized from the outset: The Bill Belichick Offseason Simulator is a tool, and not a toy. It does not exist to amuse you. It is meant to train prospective football coaches in the art and science of managing the travails of the offseason.

Any fun you may have, or amusement you may find, while piloting this simulator is purely accidental, and should be reported as a software bug.

This "video game," if you would like to call it that, is not about fun and games. It is about getting dressed, resetting the clock on your car radio, shopping at the hardware store, and accomplishing offseason tasks. In other words, it is the exact sort of game Bill Belichick might himself make.

This game is possible to beat, but you may find it frustrating and difficult at times. That is because you are not Bill Belichick.

Best of luck piloting the Bill Belichick Offseason Simulator. Due to its immersive realism and state-of-the-art graphics, the Simulator may take a few moments to load.

DO NOT ABUSE OR ENJOY THE BILL BELICHICK OFFSEASON SIMULATOR.

La Courneuve may not have become France’s football powerhouse if Bruno Lacam-Caron hadn’t chased a girl. They were dating when she introduced him to a classmate named Yazid Mabrouki, who told Lacam-Caron that he wanted to start an American football club — football américain, in the parlance — in their dirty little Paris suburb 32 years ago. Lacam-Caron thought that joining the Flash might bring him even closer to her.

His relationship with football endured longer than his relationship with the girl, who he later married then divorced. He has never left the Flash, through the long period when the team was a glorified group of friends playing in a park, to now as a European Football League powerhouse. The Flash have won the French championship nine times and claimed a European championship. They have never been relegated out of France’s Élite division. Lacam-Caron has been the team’s general manager since 1994.

American football is a sub-chic sport in France, fervently practiced but in just a few small, insular places like La Courneuve and Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône in the Paris suburbs, or Thonon-les-Bains in the Alps. It has become French like so many things that define France — simple and good, rough and beautiful, like red wine and two-top cafés. It isn’t ubiquitous, but the sport is growing. There are now approximately more than 22,000 American football players in France, up from 2,000 20 years ago.

Lacam-Caron was one of the first few.

At age 14, he was living in the middle of France when his older brother died of leukemia, then he went — “psheeewwww,”he says — to Paris to live with his mother. Lacam-Caron’s parents were divorced and he didn’t like his stepmother or stepfather. He laughs and admits he was “a big asshole.” He says that maybe 80 percent of the original 26-person team was in trouble with the law, including him. He stole car radios and sold them. The other guys stole money, cars and wallets.

“It was a good salvation for me and my friends to be on this team,” Lacam-Caron says. “Because we create a new thing, a new family. We didn’t have a past. We come in like virgin people.”

Lacam-Caron didn’t care that he was playing an “American” sport. The sport shaped him as he and his teammates were simultaneously interpreting it 5,500 miles from the States.

France’s first American football club formed in 1980, four years before the Flash. In the years since, Lacam-Caron has helped build the Flash into a self-sufficient football machine, just as other programs are being molded in hidden places around France. French football exists. It isn’t a secret. It is spreading as a whisper you must be privileged enough to hear. And to the sport’s closest caretakers, that’s just fine.

“What does La Courneuve mean?” Mike Leach is wondering. “Is it some dude’s name, you think?”

I think the Washington State head coach thinks I know because of my name, and because I pronounce French words better than he does. I say it may have something to do with roosters, which isn’t even a little bit correct.

“They like roosters and frogs,” Leach says. “Why the fascination with roosters and frogs?”

The rooster is the national bird, and I think they just like to eat frogs.

“Well you know Benjamin Franklin thought the wild turkey should have been our national bird.”

The question I asked was about Flash de La Courneuve’s pro style offense and whether that was Lacam-Caron’s influence. Leach has been a friend and consultant to the program since 2010. He knows the Flash almost as well as anyone, but curiosity gets ahead of him a lot.

Leach loves history and wants to travel more, talk to more people, and see more things. His first head coaching job — 11 years before he took over Texas Tech, and 23 years before he took over Washington State — was with the Pori Bears in Finland. He had to have an interpreter tell his players what he wanted them to do. Physical demonstrations often translated better than words.

“Sometimes they’d laugh at inopportune times, and I’d be like, ‘Uh, hey, well hopefully you got that,’“ Leach says. “They were probably goofing on me, which would be understandable.”

Shortly after Leach was fired from Texas Tech in 2009, he met Lacam-Caron in a roundabout way through a former Flash quarterback named Braxton Shaver.

Shaver came from McMurry University, a small Methodist college in Texas, to play two seasons in La Courneuve before trying to find “a real job.” Then he decided he missed his friends in France and went back to La Courneuve to play three more.

Shaver’s last season in France was in 2006. In 2009, Lacam-Caron reached out to Shaver because Hal Mumme, the godfather of the Air Raid offense, had become McMurry’s head coach, and he wanted to know if the coaching legend was interested in visiting the Flash.

Mumme declined the offer, but heput Shaver in touch with Leach, who was living in Florida without a coaching job. Leach had wanderlust and a lot of time on his hands. He and Lacam-Caron exchanged a few phone calls, and then Leach was on a plane to spend a week in La Courneuve as a guest of the Flash.

“I was in touch with him, he said, ‘It’s not a joke. It’s Mike Leach,’” Lacam-Caron says. “And fuck, Mike Leach came.”

In La Courneuve, a street market envelops the games. The city is a popular place for artists and writers who want to live in “Paris” without paying the rent. A good deal of the population, 36.3 percent, was born outside of France’s five-pointed continental footprint.Booths outside the stadium sell dishes from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Tahiti. Inside the stadium, music will be blasting, “and the best way to describe it is ‘explicit,’” laughs Shaver.

He and Leach became close friends after that first meeting. They explored Cuba together. In 2015, Shaver traveled to the Middle East by himself, a trip he says he could only do because of the confidence he developed when he continued his playing career in La Courneuve instead of some Texas arena league.

American football clubs in France need American imports to succeed. American players are simply better — they start playing football at an earlier age, in better facilities, with more quality coaches, and a more rigorous practice schedule.

The way Leach and Shaver landed in La Courneuve is the same way that players in far-flung schools come to France. Few people seek it out. The opportunity has to come to them, often by word of mouth, and then players have to be daring enough to go.

“There’s a story you always hear, a kind of agreed upon story, of Division I football players from big schools sometimes don’t do so well when they go to the European leagues,” Shaver says. “They carry their pads to practice, they’ve got to ride the subway, they’ve got to wash their own clothes when they get home.”

They’re good players, but they have to be a little scruffy to end up in France. Ryan Perrilloux, former five-star prodigal son of Louisiana football, started last season for the Argonautes in Aix-en-Provence. Josh Turner, once a top-150 high school recruit for Texas, was the offseason’s prize signing for the Thonon-les-Bains Black Panthers, even though he was never much more than special teams ace for the Longhorns. He served a two-game suspension in 2014. Black Panthers president Benoit Sirouet calls him “the best athlete of his time here in France.”

Thonon-les-Bains is the most secluded of France’s football cities, hugged between the French Alps and Lake Geneva. The town is next to Évian-les-bains of Evian Water fame, and the Black Panthers play their games in full view of the real life three mountain tops on the bottle label. Players joked that they were showering in Evian water after games: The water from the shower heads really was that clear.

Thonon is small, a town of about 40,000 people where football is bigger than even soccer or rugby. American football is the only sport in which Thonon can claim a top-league team all its own. Sirouet says the club now has almost 500 members. The Élite squad won back-to-back titles in 2013 and 2014 behind French national team head coach Larry Legault.

Sirouet attracts a lot of athletes who are tired of France’s obsession with soccer. The Black Panthers regularly draw 1,000 to 2,000 people to watch home games at perhaps the best American football facilities in the country.

“It’s pretty weird seeing like a full turf practice field in the middle of France,” says Sam Poulos, a former dual-threat quarterback for Grinnell College in Iowa. He will be going back to Thonon to play a second season. “That’s a lot of money for a town or team to put in.”

American players get paid, too. The monthly stipend isn’t much — 500-800 euros a month depending on the club — but most of their French teammates pay dues, and often buy their own equipment.

The perks are better than the pay. Poulos gets housing and a car that he shared last season with former Idaho State linebacker P.J. Gremaud. The team was sponsored by local restaurants, so Poulos and Gremaud could go to a different establishment every night and get a free meal.

Clubs practice just two or three times per week and play games every other weekend. There’s no comprehensive film study. Most of the French players have to work jobs, or go to school, or be parents. Poulos and Gremaud, free of the football regimen as they knew it, took mid-week trips into the surrounding nature, up into the mountains.

“It was absolutely incredible,” Poulos says. “One of the more beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

Shaver has been back to La Courneuve from Texas five or six times since his last season. Leach visited a second time in 2015 to host a football camp, and hosted three Flash coaches to shadow his staff for three weeks through the Boise State game in September. Lacam-Caron once asked Leach if he would like to coach for the Flash. Leach said no, but the offer stands.

“I’ve actually thought about if and when I ever retire,” Leach says. “Just pick out someplace over there and I guess rent a house … satellite from there and kind of saturate the region.”

Shaver will will hop on a plane for any flimsy reason to come back. He likes the idiosyncrasies.

“After a game in college, we’d all gather around on the field and say the Lord’s Prayer, right?” he says. “At La Courneuve, at the end of the game they bring out Heinekens.”

Anthony Dablé would rather he never play in France again. Just a handful of French players have ever made it to the NFL for even a tryout. Richard “Le Sack” Tardits, born in Bayonne, set the career sack record at Georgia before spending three seasons with the Patriots until 1992. He is the only French person to ever play a regular season game in the NFL. Dablé could be second, and the first who was entirely Euro-raised.

Dablé came close last year. In February, he signed a one-year minimum contact with the Giants to play wide receiver, but was cut from the team at the final roster deadline. He bided his time in Boca Raton, training at XPE Sports Academy, throughout the season. He had tryouts with the Jets and Patriots in September. In early January, he signed a reserve/futures contract with the Falcons and may finally take the field in 2017. At 28, his opportunity is now and only now.

When he was 17 his cousin showed him the video game NFL Quarterback Club ‘98. Dablé didn’t understand the rules, but he understood big plays when they happened — long passes and kickoff returns — not just by the yards they gained but by how scarce they were, even in the polygonal universe.

“And you know that it’s special because it doesn’t happen all the time,” Dablé says. “You have a lot of runs, and short gains and everything, so when you have a big pass and a big play, you understand.”

Dablé calls football his father. His biological father wasn’t around as he grew up, something he was OK with until he was 19 and rudderless. He had dropped out of his university psychology program and was working in fast food when he joined the Grenoble Centaures, his local team.

The machinations that wear down some players invigorated Dablé. He spent hours, daily, watching clips on NFL.com. He watched so much American football that he learned how to speak English from the commentary. His 6′4 frame is prototypical in the United States, and mammoth in France where football doesn’t usually attract many of the best physical athletes. With the Centaures, he had several coaches teaching him the game, hands on, no translation needed.

Dablé became a specialized big play weapon.

“The mindset and the lessons that you get from football, and the game of football is so similar to life,” Dablé says. “It tells you not to give up, and to have a plan, and help each other, have each other’s back.”

Dablé’s first career reception was a slant he housed in his first game in front of a crowd made up of friends and family. The first big game he played was in front of 7,000 people for the Élite division championship against the Flash in 2011, in which he caught another touchdown.

“It’s like practice is the way it works,” Dablé says. “Whether it’s one person or 100,000, that’s the same. You just have to do your job.”

In 2011, Dablé watched a man who looked a lot like him go No. 4 overall in the NFL Draft. A.J. Green was 6’4, 211 pounds, with a 4.5 in the 40-yard dash — like Dablé, or close enough. He set his eyes on the more competitive German league, joining the Berlin Rebels, then the New Yorker Lions, Europe’s preeminent club. In two seasons, Dablé caught 145 passes for 2,437 yards, and 32 touchdowns. He won two German titles and the Euro Bowl — Europe’s Super Bowl.

In early 2016, the NFL called. His agent had forwarded Dablé’s tape to the NFL United Kingdom office, where it found former Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora, now working as a league ambassador. Umenyiora brought Dablé to London the next day for a workout, then — upon confirming that Dablé was the same athlete he saw on tape — told him to take a trip to Florida to train for the NFL regional combines.

The Giants hosted Dablé for a tryout two weeks later, then signed him right after. He was wanted. His mother cried. He couldn’t stay on the roster, but he knows now that he belongs to a class of people who can call themselves the best in the world at something. His future is in football, and he says he will only play it at the highest level before heading off to the sport’s peripheries, into coaching or broadcasting.

“When you get to a certain level, it’s harder to go back down,” Dablé says. “It’s going to be boring.”

Dablé misses the kinship of small-time French football and where it has brought him. It’s hard to make friends with NFL players, especially as a complete outsider, he admits. Rosters turn over rapidly. Some cliques have been in place since high school when many professional players remember playing against each other.

But returning would be like admitting he needs the coddling of a parent. France doesn’t get the external attention that mounts pressure and creates prestige.

“Because really a game of football is just four quarters,” Dablé says. “What’s happening is advertisements and a show — before the game, the tailgate, and all the family comes and they have a barbecue together — that dynamic that brings the game of football has to happen in France so that it can grow.

“Because even in France, it’s not called football it’s called American football, so people know it’s American. That’s not our sport.”

The French don’t genuflect. John McKeon, a former NC State offensive guard, played in La Courneuve after a stint with the Helsinki Roosters in Finland. He thought he had a chance to make the NFL as a 38-game starter who had helped protect Philip Rivers. When he didn’t stick, he said “oh shit” and went abroad. McKeon had NFL size, but his new teammates stood up to him.

“A lot of these guys are paying to play, they come in after work, after they’ve had a long day at work, they’re tired,” McKeon says. “There was this defensive end who I think played Division II or Division III ball here in the U.S., but he was a French citizen. … He comes in right off that bat, head down, trying to take out the new American kid, who they’re paying to be here.”

McKeon now runs American Football International, a website chronicling American football as it is played outside the United States. Joining the Flash allowed him to go to places like Moscow, Barcelona, and Vienna. Culturally, it felt more like football as he wanted it to be.

“It’s that community aspect — ‘I’ve played next to this guy for five, 10 years,’” McKeon says. “We love the game, we love each other, it’s not because I’m getting paid a lot of money. And that kind of goes back to why I fell in love with football. I was disenfranchised with college.

“College is not a friendly sport. College is a professional sport.”

Formal American football has existed in France for more than 30 years now, despite its barriers to entry. Few major sports are as unintuitive, or require so much space, expensive equipment, and bodies. Marc-Angelo Soumah remembers when teammates used to play in motorcycle helmets. “[We] didn’t know much about the game, but we had a lot of enthusiasm,” he says.

Soumah was a Flash player in the 90s before joining Browns training camp as a 29-year-old wide receiver in 2003. He later became president of the Fédération française de football américain (FFFA) and is now head coach of the second-division Fontenay-sous-Bois Météores. He once had to work an entire summer so he could buy his own equipment. Back then there was just one supplier called Trocasport, and cleats, a helmet, and a full set of pads could cost $2,000 in French francs.

American football was too expensive to be played on a whim back then. Today, newcomers to American football can afford to play more casually. Xavier Mas, head coach of the two-time defending French champion Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône Cougars, has noticed that his under-19 players seem to have different motivations than he did.

“Some of these kids, they only have two practices, and they are like asking for, ‘Do you have this type of glove?’“ Mas says. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, you don’t even know how to play football and you’re already talking about how you will look on the field?’

“I’m trying to find a football player and not a model.”

The clubs do a good job of managing themselves, but they lack strong central organization. The FFFA doesn’t have the resources to do much more than sponsor the teams in France. The most equipped organization in Europe, the International Federation of American Football (IFAF), is a farce of leadership disputes and dysfunction, exemplified by the 2015 IFAF World Championship.

In France, club-level caretakers like Lacam-Caron, Sirouet, and Mas are the most competent drivers of the sport’s development. They are first-generation football players, so their stake is personal. They are inclined to protect what they feel is best about American football, even if it means neglecting attention and profitability.

The word “American” in the name of the sport works against it. The French are notoriously wary of anything they think might impinge on their cultural identity. The government has been trying to beat back marauding vacationers for decades, and has resisted the English language’s global takeover. Media coverage of American football largely centers on head trauma and domestic abuse scandals.

French football clubs have agreed on a few small gestures to distinguish themselves. There’s a reason the name of the France’s championship game — Le Casque de Diamant, the diamond helmet — is not a “bowl.”

“I am French,” Soumah explained in a 2015 interview. “For me, if I call it a ‘Bowl,’ I’m going to have the impression of copying the Americans. A French name shows that it is appropriate [for France].”

The growth of the sport would accelerate if international players started popping up in the NFL — say, if Dablé or Vikings receiver Moritz Boehringer from Germany became American football’s Tony Parker and Dirk Nowitzki, respectively. The NFL is understandably hesitant to invest in an unstructured system, however, leaving the sport to moveat its glacial pace toward mainstream relevance.

“Players are here for passion, because they love the game,” Soumah says. “And that’s the way we play it, for the guys next to them, for their coaches.

“You know Bill Belichick, ‘Do your job?’ That will never work in France.”

On Nov. 13, 2015, 130 people died in terrorist attacks around Paris. Three explosions occurred near the Stade de France where an international friendly soccer match was taking place between France and Germany, just four kilometers away from where the Flash de La Courneuve play their home games. Two Flash players worked at the Bataclan, the night club where 89 people were killed. They both called in sick with the flu that night.

La Courneuve doesn’t get many visitors. It has one of the highest rates of violent crime in France, and has become associated with acts ofterrorism that have taken place in the last year. Many of the perpetrators had been living in Paris banlieues like La Courneuve. France, like many Western nations, is dealing with a rise in racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Lacam-Caron brought his players, many of them Muslim, closer together after the Nov. 13 attacks. Insulated them. The Flash quickly set out trying to get updates from every member of the club to make sure no one had been hurt or victimized. They organized discussions between players, coaches, and the organization’s board to iterate in no uncertain terms that it did not equate “Muslim” with “terrorist.”

“We then refocused on the practice of sport, our social actions, and the organization of [activities] in order to ensure that our members think of something else, and do not fear.” Lacam-Caron says.

La Courneuve as France sees it — and as the world thinks of it, when it thinks of it — is different from how its players and fans know it. The insularity of France’s American football programs has served them well as both a barrier against negativity and a force of communal and personal growth. That incubation means that football in France won’t be big business like the NFL soon, or ever, but it also preserves what’s special about it.

The sport has defined itself in marginal places that are more beautiful and welcoming because football exists in them. The questions of what is “French” football and what can “French” football become assume there isn’t an answer already.

“Very quickly, we understood we have a role on the society, we were the connection, we were an example, and we can do something,” Lacam-Caron says. “We had a mission. And the sport was a secondary goal for us.”

In the middle of Dixon Hall at Tulane University, on a dark stage, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu sighs before a tired crowd.

He’s done this so many times. So have they. There’s always a speech to give about the violence in this city.

New Orleans is sick, drunk on violence. If that was never understood before, it was clear on April 9, 2016 at 11:31 p.m. when Cardell Hayes tore open Will Smith’s body with eight hollow point bullets, seven to the back. And 18 days later, the day before Hayes would be indicted, Landrieu laments that this disease ravaging the Big Easy often prevents folks from remembering that there are two sides to every shooting.

“His death leaves a wife alone, his children without a father, his teammates in shock and a hole in the heart of a hurting city,” Landrieu said about Smith. “It has been rightly said about all these murders that tragedy is on both sides of the gun. In this case, on the other side of the gun is Cardell Hayes. He’s in jail. But he has a family, too. And a 5-year-old son.”

There is silence in the hall.

Will Smith was a football deity in a city starved for hope. He anchored a defense that delivered a Super Bowl on the heels of Hurricane Katrina. Smith is a symbol for a team that accomplished the impossible when good never felt like a reality in New Orleans. He was a football phenom that mattered to this football-fevered city.

He was beloved by politicians. He befriended cops. He was a philanthropist. When a man of his stature gets killed, people rush to his defense and to his story.

But here’s the reality of that night in April: Two men, two outsized New Orleans personalities, had a bad night that escalated in the worst possible way. People aren’t made in absolutist terms. No man is really a saint. Those killed aren’t rendered wholly good by death just as those who take a life aren’t necessarily in a perpetual state of evil. That’s not human nature.

When you live in Louisiana, where nearly half of the households in the state own guns and gun homicide rates are three times higher than the national average, you can’t expect that those carrying won’t fire when provoked. That’s not human nature either.

Not for Will Smith, the man painted as an immortal, and not for Cardell Hayes, the man rendered a ruthless vigilante.

That telling is only half the story.

“One life lost, many more lives changed forever, swallowed by a cycle of violence that came and went so fast it was almost a dream or in this case a nightmare,” Landrieu said, disrupting the peace in the auditorium.

“And a city is left to wonder why.”

Joe W. Brown Memorial Park holds Victory Field where Cardell Hayes and the Crescent City Kings played football in New Orleans. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

The man who shot Will Smith to death was just trying to get home that night. That’s something he really wants you to know. This was before the three-car crash, before some pudgy man ripped off his shirt and started swinging, and before one of the most fearsome defensive players New Orleans has ever seen spilled onto the concrete, dead.

You probably know him differently by now, though. Or at least you do by his mugshot: This 6′6, more than 300-pound black man — round-headed, a thumping beard and waving dreads — known as Cardell Hayes. His hood in the Ninth Ward calls him “Bear,” naturally. He looks like one.

On April 9 last year, the night he shot Smith, Hayes woke and sold his last pit bull puppy. “Bullies” as he calls them. He breeds them by the book; even does the artificial insemination himself. He played with his son, Cardell Hayes Jr., or CJ for short. Hayes ran some errands, went to football practice, and then hit his favorite neighborhood spot by night’s end.

Lance’s Barbershop sits down Ursulines Avenue in the Treme neighborhood. It’s a haven for Hayes, a calm place to ease his mind after a day driving a tow truck, dealing a pit, or pouring cement.

Dwight “Whitey” Harris frequently leapt on Hayes’ back when Hayes would enter, “It’s like man versus Bear,” Whitey says. “When I attacked him he picked me up by my ankles.”

Lance Rouzan usually orders some extra-large pizzas while barbers trim heads. It’s frequently busy. Late night Saturdays in New Orleans tend to get like that.

A pocket in Hayes’ jeans vibrates. Kevin O’Neal, his best friend, had been calling all day. Rouzan and the boys saw his face crack a grin. “What’s going on?” one asked. House party. Uptown.

Some high school friends were having a get-together. Hayes would scope it out. He’d call if it was worth a drive.

It turned out to be a bust. Maybe 20 people showed and were playing Pictionary. It was lackluster enough to head home early.

The problem was that O’Neal rode to the function in Hayes’ Hummer. They had to go back to the shop to retrieve his truck. That much is indisputable. How the next part goes, though, depends entirely on whom you’re talking to.

One of the corridors where Will Smith and Cardell Hayes’ vehicles collided. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

Right after 11 p.m., the duo zoomed down Magazine Street. The Hummer jolted. A Mercedes SUV was behind them. Hayes pulled over. The Mercedes sped away. The Hummer drove after it. Maybe Hayes could get the license plate. He had already been in an accident once, and insurance ain’t cheap.

Hayes will tell you he tried to call 911 while chasing the Mercedes. The prosecution insists Hayes is a liar. Hayes says he tried to pump his brakes during the chase but accidentally hit the car. The prosecution says he rammed that SUV.

A man named Richard Hernandez exited the passenger’s side of the Mercedes. Hayes says he didn’t leave his car until Hernandez charged at him and ripped off his shirt. Prosecutors reluctantly agree. Hayes also says Hernandez wrapped a “shiny object” in the shirt and swung at him. Prosecutors say Hernandez wasn’t the aggressor.

The contested points of that night haven’t found any resolution in the months since. You’ve probably heard different versions of these depending on which lawyer’s mouth said it. How Hernandez’s actions made Hayes get his gun. How Hayes claims Smith hit him “three or four times” in the face. And how, maybe, the Smith party taunted him for not using that pistol.

“Nigga, you got your gun? Well I’m gonna get mine and I’m gonna show you what to do with it,” Hayes, under oath, recalls Smith yelling.

“What else can I think other than he’s trying to kill me?” Hayes says. Still, at that point, Hayes hadn’t drawn. Smith started fighting with his wife, Racquel. She pulled him from the scuffle. She reminded him of their kids waiting at home: Lisa, Wynter, and Will Jr.

The Smith family finally reached its vehicle. The Hernandez family had run away. Will Smith then reached into his car. The whines of police sirens are about to blare down Felicity and Sophie Wright Place.

Hayes raised his pistol while he beggedSmith not to grab his gun.

“Please don’t do this, bruh,” he can be heard saying on video from last summer entered as evidence. “Please, please don’t do this.”

Racquel shrieked in the direction of her husband. “No, baby, no.” Hayes insists that he didn’t wanna pop this guy.

“I didn’t have nowhere to run,” Hayes says. “If I turned and run, I’ll get shot and killed”

Hayes saw the man turn. A bang. Hayes released eight shots. As the smoke cleared, bystanders could only see a giant crying next to a dead body. He bellowed into the night, praying an ambulance would answer his calls.

Across town, Nandi Campbell’s phone started ringing. The lawyer got a midnight call from bounce artist Big Freedia. Hayes made national news. Homicide by shooting. Road rage turned murder in New Orleans. Somebody had to go find Nandi’s cousin.

Campbell saw Hayes in a police interview room and told him for the first time that Smith, a Super Bowl champion, was the man he killed. Hayes couldn’t believe it. He used to watch Smith’s game tapes and study his moves as budding defensive lineman. He idolized him.

Hayes crumpled next to Campbell.

“My life over with,” Hayes said. “They gonna make me look like I shot and killed this man. I looked up to Will as a football player.”

“No, baby. Ya life not over,” Campbell said in a New Orleans drawl, placing a hand on his back. “Don’t say that.”

Hayes is not innocent in the realm of moral court. He killed a man and may have maimed a woman. But Hayes isn’t denying that he killed someone — he’s arguing that he was within his right to do so.

Formerly named Thurgood Marshall Middle School, this is the Mid-City building where Bryant Lee says he met Cardell Hayes. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

The state of Louisiana wants Hayes to fry on the plantation fields of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That has become evident over the 246 days between the killing and Hayes’ conviction.

That might seem like an eternity. But not many people in New Orleans have seen a man go down as fast and surgically as Hayes. In 2015, there were 16 murder trials in Orleans Parish. The average time from arrest to trial was 3.2 years. The shortest was two years.

Hayes was arrested overnight. He was indicted in 18 days. He received a bond near $2 million an hour after. He was sent to trial eight months later. Then he was convicted after a six-day trial under the first sequestered jury in over four years in a parish that couldn’t afford it. That’s how much the state wanted justice for Will Smith.

Attorney Peter Thomson, who represents Smith’s family, said days after the killing that Hayes was a “cold-blooded murderer,” that he intentionally rammed the Mercedes, that he was “deranged.” New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael Harrison said hours after the killing that the NOPD vowed to “build a strong case,” allowing the prosecution of Hayes to be done to the “fullest extent of the law.”

Saints quarterback Drew Brees spoke for five uninterrupted minutes on his former teammate’s death. He called the violence an “epidemic.” He said he thinks the young men feel like they have been abandoned, or are lacking family, or are lacking a father. At one moment it was drugs. At another, it was gang violence. He was sad for New Orleans, and angry at New Orleans, and taking wild swings at making sense of it.

“What that tells me is that the person who’s pulling the trigger in many cases has no regard for the life that he’s about to try to take,” Brees said. “He also has no regard for his own life, because there’s consequences with that and they have to recognize those consequences.”

New Orleans head coach Sean Payton said “our city is broken” the same week because his former player got killed, and he even called for an end to guns.

Defense attorney John Fuller presented himself as the only man with a difference in opinion. Hayes retained the up-and-comer who took the high-publicity case to bolster his own practice and profile, delaying a criminal court judgeship in the process. In Fuller, Hayes had a gem, one of the most intimidating, eloquent, problematic, God-fearing black defense lawyers the South has to offer — or at least one who didn’t mind leaning into that role.

Fuller got to work quickly, spoon-feeding the city a defense based on a vice familiar to New Orleans: corruption. It was evident in the investigation of Hayes’ case, or at least, that’s what Fuller was selling. And to sell that, he needed a big audience. So he started his months-long sermon in the pulpit of the media.

“Cardell Hayes,” Fuller said to gathered TV cameras on a dreary April afternoon four days after the shooting, “was tried and convicted before I got out of church Sunday morning.”

My Redeemer Missionary Baptist Church is where Pastor Sha’Teek Nobles, a family spokesperson, says Cardell Hayes was a member. It sits off S. Claiborne Avenue in Central City. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

In the eight months Hayes spent behind bars awaiting trial, not many cared to look into the man behind the late-night mugshot or the man he killed. The Saints lost a soldier from their defensive line. All anyone knew was that some rogue gunslinger killed him in cold blood.

Stray blogs said Hayes did security for the Saints, which was never true. USA Today said his “bullies” are “loyal, protective and potentially dangerous—characteristics that apparently Hayes shares.” Sports Illustrated capitalized off that rhetoric, running a story titled “The Saint v. ‘The Thug.’” Tyrann Mathieu, an NFL defensive back and former prep star here, said on Twitter that April that Hayes was a “hating ass coward.”

“Everyone starts on the side of the Saints,” Derwyn Bunton, New Orleans’ chief public defender said. “The sentiment, overwhelmingly, was that folks assumed Mr. Hayes was some hot-head thug that killed a beloved member of the community.”

Racquel Smith’s husband was that beloved member of the community.

“I don’t want sympathy,” Racquel said during trial. “I want justice for my husband … He loved New Orleans. He loved the people and the community and he did so much for the community. We loved it because we both came from humbling beginnings. It was us.”

“Would you exaggerate or leave out parts of what would happen to preserve the memory of your husband?” Fuller asked her on the stand.

“No, sir,” she said.

“Would you do anything to save his public image?” Fuller said.

“No,” she said before circling back. “I know the truth.”

Racquel Smith testified that she didn’t believe her husband had a temper, though it was reported in 2010 that he dragged her by her hair out of a Lafayette, Louisiana, nightclub. She says she doesn’t remember how much he’d drank, but on the night Smith was killed, blood tests showed he was three times past the legal alcohol limit.

Will Smith died with gunpowder residue on his hands.Of the two bullets that hit Racquel, one bullet’s origin can’t be conclusively proven — it’s still embedded in her leg. She testified that a doctor told her it was too risky to remove. But no one attempted to either prove her claim or negate that claim. Her testimony went unchallenged.

Presented with a chance to finally dispute the corruption narrative that Fuller fed the media — that the case had been manipulated to get quick justice for the local celebrity — Racquel didn’t waver. She told you. She didn’t want empathy. She just wanted justice. Regardless if, like she admits, she never saw the person who shot her.

If it’s worth anything, though, she swears it was Hayes.

“No one sympathized for me. He was putting lies about my family,” Racquel said.

“You are reading all these horrible things, that are false, and you don’t say a word?” a prosecutor asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” Racquel said.

“Did you wait to tell these ladies and gentlemen of the jury your story?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes ma’am,” Racquel said.

“Is this the first time anyone showed any sympathy for your case?” the prosecutor asked.

“Absolutely,” Racquel said.

This is the last place cardell Hayes lived, as provided by public record. It sits in New Orleans East on Morrison Road. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

Hayes made his home deep in the Ninth Ward, a place plastered on network news during Katrina when the levees broke. His last known residence leads you down Morrison Road, in New Orleans East.

It’s a fleeting oasis here, narrowly missed by tornados that struck nearby in early February 2017. Small homes with overgrown bushes dot opposite sides of the canals. It’s working class renewal sprinkled amid desolation. A shotgun duplex here. An orange spray-painted X there.

Hayes’ house is big enough for him and his girlfriend, Tiffany, to raise CJ in. The neighborhood is lively. School kids yell and run down sidewalks in the afternoons. Girls in colorful barrettes hoot for “Angel” or “Rosie” or “Tyrell” or “Kevin.” It’s a normal hood for a middle-class family.

Down Crowder Boulevard there are a slew of gas stations and markets separating highway entrances from exits. You can get fried chicken by the bucket and gas past dusk. If you’re really hungry, a smaller stand by one gas pump sells fresh po-boys.

Ten minutes east, Hayes laced his cleats in Joe W. Brown Memorial Park. He played for the Crescent City Kings, a development team the papers don’t even waste ink on. Plenty remember “Bear” as CJ’s father, Dawn Mumphrey’s son, Genitra Mumphrey’s brother, a familiar face at Lance’s, a football star from Warren Easton High School, a businessman, and much more.

Warren Easton High was where Cardell Hayes became a touted defensive lineman, rising up recruiting websites as a top-50 recruit in Louisiana. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

Leonard Brooks, 42, helped raise the boy from these blocks. Brooks, who says he’s Hayes’ uncle, has been choked up by the proceedings. Hayes is a churchgoing boy, he says, a role model to Brooks’ other, younger family members. No one’s denying he killed Smith. But  few seem to recognize that this may have been self-defense.

“All they want to do is bury my nephew,” Brooks said. “As God as my witness, I would trade places with him so he can be with his family because, I know, in my heart, he was protecting himself.”

Bryant Lee, a store owner, met “the real silent dude” at Thurgood Marshall Middle School. They went to college and sweated in football camps together.

Lee had a brother who got locked up way back. A middle-class man could go insane counting the bills. He asked Hayes for advice, and Hayes gave him $1,000. When Lee tried to return the money, Hayes laughed it off. You can’t give back a gift.

“That’s just not his character. He’s a loyal dude. He’s family-oriented and giving. He’ll give you his last,” Lee said about Hayes’ portrayal. “If I was in the situation, I would’ve done the same thing. Out here? It’s kill or be killed.”

Five years ago, Casandra French saw him at a brass band parade.

Hayes was introduced as “the man with the American bullies.” Her husband desperately wanted to get a litter together. They needed the extra cash. Hayes was big in the game. So he handed her husband a hound and stuck around to help get their litter together.

Soon they were doing inseminations. And their daughter got a scholarship to play second baritone at Alabama State. Due to his unasked kindness, she now has spending money.

“Because of him, now we’ve had six litters and that’s what keeps us going,” French said from the front seat of her car. “He was never a troublemaker. I just pray for the man. The glimpse I have of him is a very good person. To do what he did, he’d have to be pushed.”

Lamont Simmons met him on the gridiron at Victory Field. Simmons played a few steps behind him on defense. Hayes came on the team midseason a year or so ago. He learned the plays in two weeks and gave the team the lift it needed. Hayes’ push got the developmental gang to a championship game.

Between those lines, Simmons learned about “Bear.” He saw a doting father who brought CJ to practice and let his boy ride his shoulders and play in his dreads. He befriended a man who coached his son in pewee kickoffs and kissed him whenever he could. He understood the mild-mannered giant that “led by example” and broke up fights as Simmons threw haymakers at opposing offenses.

“He was a mediator, he was always calm, except during a double team,” Simmons recalls.

It’s the weight of all of this that momentarily had Joe Howard in knots on a bench outside one of the court hearings last year.

Howard went to high school with Hayes. His wife’s sister is a friend of the family.

“He doesn’t have that aggressive nature that was put out,” Howard said with a huff. “But that’s with anything. A black man goes to jail, the public sees the mugshot and you are automatically labeled.”

The corner of Gravier and S. White St. sits Orleans Parish Prison, a holding cell blocks from where Cardell Hayes was tried in December. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

The Orleans Parish Prison is an uninspiring behemoth of a building. It’s not a last stop. It’s a holding cell, a nationallyknown repugnant penitentiary.

OPP is just a peek at the hell Angola offers.

The Life and Legend of Leadbelly describes Angola as a place thatkneels defendants in courtrooms upon sentencing. It’s America’s largest maximum security facility where 85 percent of prisoners never leave. “One of 10 inmates” annually get shanked there, according to the book. It sits in the middle of nowhere on a bend by the Mississippi River. The only things around for miles are an airstrip, a rodeo, and a radio station.

This is what Hayes had been grappling with in the months leading up to trial. At worst, he’d stay caged in Angola on a life sentence for second-degree murder. It’s possible that in Louisiana — the only state besides Oregon where all 12 members of a jury don’t have to unanimously agree on murder — that he could’ve gotten a reduced sentence. Negligible homicide isn’t the worst bid for killing a football king down South. At least he’s alive.

At best, like his lawyers said, he’d go not guilty on all charges. He’d walk free after a few days of court. But with the way Hayes’ case was handled, that option seemed further away each passing month.

Parties surrounding the case didn’t understand why the defense was failing. Plenty thought the overconfident Fuller was to blame. One lawyer close to both the prosecution and Fuller said the defense attorney could have received bad information from his client.

“He looked kind of silly when he didn’t come out with [any] video,” the lawyer said after Fuller didn’t present additional evidence during a Nov. 7 hearing. Fuller had been publicly promising video evidence that Billy Ceravolo, a former NOPD captain and friend of Smith, moved a gun from Smith’s car. It was a key piece of the corruption narrative that titillated observers into thinking there’d be an actual showdown between the sides at trial.

Another lawyer, who is close to the defense team, walked around between the lulls of court and asked, “Why doesn’t he just show this video?!” before offering his smartphone, which replayed an inconclusive video of an unidentifiable man at the scene of the shooting. Fuller introduced no such video at trial in April, and Ceravolo explored bringing a defamation suit against him.

The prosecution hinted at those missteps during trial. They asked O’Neal, Hayes’ best friend, when he testified about comments he allegedly made describing Fuller as a “sell-out,” a “nobody,” harping on a feeling that family and friends expected Hayes home months ago. O’Neal didn’t hide it. He hated the legal system, Fuller, and the timeframe that kept his companion confined to a cage.

“I’m heartbroken and tore up,” O’Neal said. “It’s extremely OK for me to be emotional.”

If you’re Fuller, you want justice to work as slow as you remember, with no rush to judgment. He pleaded in court for months to move this trial back. Who could possibly get convicted eight months after killing a man?

“I cannot, in good conscience, say I’m going to (delay),” Judge Camille Buras saidin Septemberwhen Fuller asked to move trial after the NFL season, hoping to ensure a fair tribunal for his client.

“That does not, to me, seem like a good legal reason.”

An emptied park in Cardell Hayes’ neighborhood where the effects of Katrina still linger. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

“I don’t know how we can automatically make these assumptions that are so vulgar about black men,” Dyan French Cole or “Mama D,” a Seventh Ward resident protesting Hayes’ arrest on the corner of Tulane Avenue, said one December morning at the start of trial. Surrounded by half a dozen protestors, she pointed toward the criminal court where Hayes prepared for the week that would decide his life.

“They are guilty when they walk up these steps, not after they go inside.”

This much is a given here: Louisiana’s criminal justice system is in need of reform, and New Orleans along with it. Cole’s refrain is a common local opinion about Hayes’ case. New Orleanians empathize with him — not many, but enough to garner attention. They’ve seen plenty of “Cardells” before. They’ve seen black boys disappear into a courtroom only to never return. Hayes isn’t the first and won’t be the last.

Harry Connick’s 30-year run (from 1973-2003) as the former district attorney is one cause for their angst. A southern Democrat that used music to leverage political power, the “Singing District Attorney” ran an office laced with controversy when he wasn’t humming at nightclubs in the French Quarter.

The U.S. Supreme Court chastised his regime in a 1995 opinion, describing an office culture that repeatedly failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. In that case, a man spent 14 years on death row and was nearly executed before missing evidence exonerated him. He called his predecessors weak, “moral midgets” and received dozens of misconduct complaints.

Leon Cannizzaro, the current DA, came in 2008 billing himself as a reformer. Yet in 2011, he was asked why his office mishandled a murder case by not turning over evidence. Cannizzaro responded that the defense counsel never asked for it. “If he doesn’t, we aren’t obligated to give it to him.”

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Henry Glover’s charred body was found in a roadside Chevy, having been burned by NOPD officers after they’d shot him. Two days later, cops shot six unarmed black people on Danziger Bridge, killing a 17-year-old boy and a 40-year-old man. Both resulted in police cover-ups.

A Justice Department attorney called these crimes the “most significant police misconduct” prosecution since Rodney King’s beating. Eleven years later, the city paid more than $13 million in a civil rights settlement.

That’s why Byron Cole was outside of criminal court most of the sweltering summer. Cole wanted to personalize this case. He felt the need to watchdog this system. He, Simmons, O’Neal, and many others marched with signs and megaphones. They broadcasted their message over live streams on Facebook. They passed out white “Free Bear” T-shirts with a bear’s face on the front and dreadlocks raining from its head.

This wasn’t just that they thought Hayes was being prepared for a ludicrous trial in a kangaroo court. He was the son of New Orleans they saw themselves in the most.

“We live under a stranglehold in New Orleans, man,” Cole said one day in November. “It’s really just status quo racism. Modified black laws. Modified Jim Crow.”

More recently, the community was stung by similarities between Smith’s shooting and that of Joe McKnight, a rushing powerhouse and national mega-recruit killed by Ronald Gasser one parish over in early December. The makings of Gasser’s case are similar to Hayes’ — a local football hero gunned down in an act of road rage — except for one detail. Gasser, who is white, left jail 24 hours after he shot a former NFL player. After public outcry, Gasser was charged and indicted. Hayes, who is black, hasn’t been home since April 9.

The McKnight shooting’s aftermath enraged Hayes’ family and friends. One day, it led to a heated argument outside of court.

“We just watched a white man execute a man in cold fucking blood. Cold fucking blood, stood over him, witness are out there saying what they saw,” O’Neal said on a video which was posted to Facebook, with Simmons behind him and Big Freedia to his left.

“This man is at home, bruh! This man is at home. Cardell Hayes was attacked by Will Smith, as well as Will Smith’s entourage, and he’s sitting in jail for murder. For murder! He’s sitting in jail for murder with a $1.7 million bond and don’t none of y’all give a fuck about that.”

The prosecution doesn’t understand the fuss. “What happened in Jefferson Parish has nothing to do with this case,” prosecutor Laura Rodrigue said, to which Buras nodded during jury selection.

“Whatever happens in this case, it won’t reveal anything new to me,” Chuck Perkins, a local radio host said from his studio in October. “The only thing it’ll do is reconfirm that there are different legal systems for us black folk and the wealthy or the white.”

A man runs out of Orleans Parish Criminal Court one December afternoon during the week that decided Cardell Hayes’ life. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

The second floor of the courthouse in Mid-City sings from the scuff of prisoners’ shoes sliding across tile. Men and women in orange jumpsuits shuffle through wooden doors along the hallway during the week of Hayes’ trial.

New Orleans courts are more picturesque than most. The roof is decorated with Victorian chandeliers. Parthenon-style oak columns balance Buras’ stand, which is anchored by Louisiana and United States flags with two angels dancing on the flagpoles.

“That’s what this was, this was murder!” prosecutor Jason Napoli screams in his closing argument. “April 9 was an execution on the streets, and the only verdict in this case is guilty as charged.”

The families are separated by a center aisle, the Smiths on the right, Hayes’ family on the left. During testimony, a member of the Smith family had flashed a middle finger at O’Neal. Hayes’ family had the tendency to laugh during Racquel Smith’s emotional three hours on the stand. Another night, there was a minutes-long staring contest as court let out after a long, contentious day.

The Smith family has a police escort. Racquel Smith is accompanied by crestfallen women wearing goose egg-sized diamond rings. On each arm are battered-looking NFL men.

Hayes’ family and supporters carpooled or came on the bus, arriving with their own expressions of grief etched on their faces. A lot of the time during the trial, bailiffs kept them from entering the court. It was a fire hazard to have that many people on one side of the room.

Racquel Smith cried during the swings of the trial. Her kids had lost their dad. She’d lost the love of her life. And by her and her friends’ accounts, Hayes was evil. He purposely pulled the trigger and put those bullets in her legs. Sending him “back to the streets,” as Napoli says on that last day of trial, was not an option.

“The most important evidence in this case is buried with Will Smith. Those are his wounds,” Napoli says before crying in front of the jury. “Will Smith played defense for this city. He was defenseless that night. Now it’s your turn to play defense for him.”

The crescendos of the prosecution draw ire from Hayes’ supporters. Many of them believe the truth was thrown aside to get justice for just one family in the case: Hayes was legally allowed to carry in this state, one with Stand Your Ground laws. That he drew and fired at a threat didn’t make him devilish. It made him Louisianian.

“Don’t throw away this boy’s life like this. You owe this family more than that,” Fuller says to the jury. “We have the rich and famous and the poor and the powerless. Don’t jump to conclusions. This boy deserves to be treated like everyone else.”

By the time court recesses, each side thinks it won. Fuller shakes old women’s hands, leads the gathered public in prayer, yucks it up with bailiffs. The prosecution surely doesn’t mind Brees hugging Cannizzaro midcourt as a horde of Saints stars sit and comfort Racquel Smith.

The heaviness of this case weighed tangibly on family. The mornings grew to afternoons and crept into nights. They spent every day, at times 14 hours, in court for a six-day trial reliving the night that changed everything.

One of those evenings, Hayes’ mother, Dawn, ducked to St. Bernard Avenue for a quiet meal. In the months her boy had been behind bars, she’d lost a lot of weight, Bryant Lee said. Fair-toned with skin the color of sweet potato pie, Dawn Mumphrey’s hair is graying around her temples.

At the only table in the joint, her head shifted between a window and her hands.

“You gotta eat something, grandma” a waitress said.

“I’m trying,” she replied. “But I can’t hold anything down.”

The place started to close as Dawn finally picked at her plate. Her pupils grew red. Her voice cracked, and she whispered as the shop grew empty.

“I pray for strength,” she sniffed. “I know he’s coming home. I just know it.”

Another corridor where Will Smith and Cardell Hayes’ vehicles collided. Photo: Bryan Stewart | Edit: Tyson Whiting

The jury finds Hayes guilty of the manslaughter of Will Smith and the attempted manslaughter of Racquel Smith after five hours deliberating. The verdict comes right as Sunday Night Football ends. Media reports later described how pressured the jury felt to convict. The members wanted to write letters begging for leniency at sentencing.

“In between, there were lots of tears,” a juror told the New Orleans Advocate. “This was gut-wrenching.”

As soon as Hayes is cuffed, his momma glues herself to the mahogany pillars on her left. His pastor tries to hold her as she wails, her body cranking like a metronome. What do you tell Dawn Mumphrey when the state takes her only boy away for good?

“Do you need a drink?” Hayes asks, unable to help her with two bailiffs anchoring him.

Hayes’ family waits in the empty chambers that night sobbing as the Smith family departs with its police escort. Payton flew back from an afternoon loss in Tampa Bay to hear the verdict in person. He bear-hugs former tailback Pierre Thomas, who was with Smith before the shooting, and slaps his hand so loudly it echoed the empty halls.

“We did it,” he said.

Racquel Smith cries into her coat as she exits, her friends shaking deputies’ hands. As they pass, Hayes’ family can’t seem to leave.

They are stuck to this place and their last minutes with Hayes. Rouzan, his friend from the barbershop, has tears wedged in his thick beard. Hayes’ sister, Genitra, had been smiling all week and running around with CJ, Hayes’ son. Now she ducks under a pew.

Lawyers from each side bolt out of doors from different angles of the courthouse. Fuller, who beamed every time the spotlight was on him, left through one side door downtrodden, trudging into the darkness surrounding the building. The prosecution, content that their version of justice has been delivered, darts out of a different side door with smiles earned after an emotional battle.

“This was the murder of a hero,” Cannizzaro says hours later, explaining that his office wants Hayes, 29, to serve 60 years. “Mr. Hayes is not going to hurt anyone ever again.”

A deputy slams the doors behind Hayes’ family members as they drag themselves down those main courthouse steps. Big Freedia fought off cameras so Dawn and Genitra could sprint to a nearby SUV.

With two families destroyed and the courtroom battle finished, it is finally clear that justice is not the same as recompense. “There are no winners in a situation like this,” Deuce McAllister, a former Saints running back and close friend to Smith, tells cameras outside as he walks out with Racquel.

The only lights left shining are the red twinkles from an ambulance speeding down Tulane Ave. Camera crews spinning the news are met by a group of citizens at the place that had sent so many of them away over the years. People parked their cars in the middle of intersections. They cried into Snapchat apps and live feeds as the news spread around New Orleans.

A middle-aged man in a hoodie walks up to the courthouse from the dark. He begins yelling at ESPN’s cameras, beseeching them to “tell the truth.” When asked, the man declines to give his name, only identifying himself as “a concerned citizen of New Orleans.”

“That was a good kid. Y’all know what it was. This is a set-up and a game.”

He pauses.

“Cardell Hayes was guilty when he walked up those steps.”

Drones are the leading weapons of the new age of impersonal warfare. They have been touted as being more efficient, accurate and cheaper than using foot soldiers, with the cost of human lives decreasing dramatically when a pilot can kill his target from behind a computer screen thousands of miles away. As such, they have been labeled “the most humane form of warfare ever.”

From up close, though, that gloss of humanity looks like a sham. In October 2013, a Pakistani teenager, Zubair, testified before Congress about the consequences of drone strikes. He and his sister had been wounded by a drone the previous year, with the precision strike also killing their grandmother.

“I no longer love blue skies,” said Zubair. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey. When [the] sky brightens, drones return and we live in fear.”

For a pilot like Conrad “Furadi” Miller, flying drones is a job. He’s in his chair, goggles strapped on. “When you put your goggles on, your eyes convince your brain that you’re not sitting in a chair anymore.” The goggles provide a video feed from a camera mounted on the drone so that the person sitting in the chair feels as if they’re in the cockpit. Because the brain can’t distinguish between what the body is experiencing in reality and what it’s seeing through the drone’s sensors, the pilots, for a moment, experience that most ancient human desire: to fly.

Photo courtesy the Drone Racing League

They’re transported into a seemingly infinite expanse, divorced from gravity, a world of boundless potential. Drone pilots become intoxicated with the peace that comes with being an insignificant speck within the clouds, free from the burdens and troubles of the world below. They float, fly, twirl with complete independence. The first few moments of piloting a drone provides an experience of true freedom.

“If I’m freestyling with a drone, it’s relaxing and I feel totally free,” said Furadi. “I can fly around trees, do whatever I want and just be creative. It’s very stress-relieving.”

Stress relief might not be what one associates with drone operation, but there’s an important catch: Furadi isn’t a military drone operator. He’s a professional drone racer.

On the days that they fly, four drone pilots sit inside a cavernous arena barraged by intense, strobing lights. They wait for permission to launch. When the signal arrives, they push up on the throttle of their controller  — the left stick —  to fire the drone’s propellers.

This begins a delicate challenge of touch and precision. Push too hard and the drone flies out of control, but too gentle and the pilot will find themselves playing catch up from the start. Seeing all four drones come to life in unison feels surreal. It’s like watching a swarm of dragonflies rise, luminous, into the smoke. They catch their bearings for a fleeting second, then swoop off towards their first target. Unlike their military counterparts, their goal is to score points, not kills.

The best drone pilots compete in the Drone Racing League.

Unlike the four other professional drone leagues — International Drone Racing Association, Drone Sports Association, Freedom Class, MultiGP — the DRL provides stock drones for its pilots. The use of stock drones ensures that one’s ability, and not discretionary income — enabling certain racers to buy more expensive and powerful parts — determines who wins and who loses. The replenishable stock of drones also opens up the opportunity to hold races in denser, more intricate and dangerous courses.

The CEO of the DRL, Nick Horbaczewski, hopes that his league becomes “the Formula One of drones.” In truth, he’s pushing for even more than that. Horbaczewski revealed that he wants drone racing to change the perception of drones in the public sphere. Horbaczewski is creating a world in which drones are associated with FPV goggles, roaring crowds, bright lights and double helixes — not war.

DRL venues include stadiums, abandoned malls, the Bell Works tech lab, and a supposedly abandoned UFO crash site. The courses are packed with twists, turns, double helixes, voms, sharp cuts and roundabouts. Imagination is the only limitation to what they might look like. The pilots have to be able to match the aggressiveness of the course design, a mindset that is only possible if the economic anxiety of crashing expensive drones is eliminated.

For Furadi, a former heavy truck mechanic in the Air Force, this is a perfect stage to test his abilities.

“What motivates me as a pilot, is pure competition,” he says. “I want to be the best at it.”

The DRL championships is a gathering of the best pilots available, with each coming to prove that he or she is the best drone racer alive. This is, first and foremost, a competition for superiority and self-validation. The $75,000 prize pool helps, too.

Each event has six races in total with three heats each. Three races for the qualifying rounds, two for the semifinal and then one final race. The qualifying rounds start with 12 pilots. The semifinals cut four from the original racers, and the final is down to the final four survivors. The pilots with the best times overall from each heat in the first two races advance. Only four can fly at once. Points are awarded for each checkpoint that’s passed successfully, finishing the race in the allotted time. Crashing into or missing a checkpoint disqualifies a pilot. The drones are replaced at the end of each race and the person with the most points at the end wins.

Photo courtesy the Drone Racing League

Drone racing is disconcertingly non-linear. Courses are packed full of so many twists and turns that watching a race on television can be nauseating. In the ‘Miami Lights’ event held in Sun Life Stadium, the drones are placed inside the second level of the bowl, with the pilots sitting in a makeshift room above the drones. Once the race starts, the drones fly counter-clockwise around the bowl. They’re huddled together and cautious until the first gate, but break formation the instant they zip through, with each drone accelerating hard and probing for the angle that will get them ahead of the pack. After the first four checkpoints, the drones fly out toward the center of the stadium before a sharp turn takes them into a neon-lit tunnel in the lower bowl.

Inside the tunnel, a string of blue lights has the drones zig-zagging around columns, walls, trash and leftover planks. After dancing past the obstacles, the lights lead them left again, buzzing through another neon green tunnel and back out to the bowl. Furadi, known as an adept technical racer, and widely viewed as a favorite among what is considered the best crop of drone racers, is most at home here. As they exit that concrete jungle, they’re immediately asked to do another about-face to fly into the vomitory underneath. A small hallway then throws the drones into a deadly helix.

Inside, they follow the spiral, attempting to maintain a constant speed and angle while increasing altitude. The helix’s slow, seemingly endless curve can be mesmerizing, and it’s a challenge for pilots to adjust course in time when it suddenly ends and they have escaped into another green tunnel on their right. Back in the bowl, four more neon targets await, and then it’s an all-out sprint to smash into the back box that acts as the finish line.

The concept of the sport is simple enough, but to see it in action is astonishing. Racers, wearing FPV (first-person view) goggles, are able to experience flying through radio transmission with quadcopters that can reach speeds up to 80 miles per hour. These pilots have to maneuver the tiny four-propellered drones inside deliberately treacherous buildings, through deviously small checkpoints, all while jostling for position and being alert to the sudden changes of direction that could lead to a crash. The marriage of ability and technology is stupefying to watch on a screen, and even more so when one is able to see the focus and feel the anxiety of the pilots in-person.

The DRL held its first-ever drone racing simulator competition on January 21, 2017, at Webster Hall in Manhattan, NY. A few weeks before Donald Trump’s administration would order its first drone strikes— a collaborative effort between soldiers and drones that killed at least 25 civilians.  A continuation of the last administration’s penchant for using unmanned aircrafts to eliminate targets. The 12 contestants with the highest scores on simulators were invited to compete against each other in a real race. The prize? A chance to become a participant in the first full season of the DRL, airing on ESPN.

Horbaczewski envisions the DRL as the future of sports. Compared to other drone leagues, he asserts, they have a key advantage: “The other leagues just don’t have the technology that we have. It’s simple as that.” In addition to the improved course design that the use of stock drones allows, the DRL has another impressive trick: advanced, drone-POV camera technology that plunges spectators into the thick of the action.

Since its inception as a sport in 2013, when hobbyists in Australia and New Zealand began racing their custom-built drones in abandoned parking garages and warehouses, drone racing has grown tremendously in a short time. A contract to broadcast DRL races on ESPN shows that it’s becoming big business. Reached for comment on the growth of the sport, ESPN director Mike Volk said that the DRL allows the company to “experiment with new formats and programming that serves a passionate and growing fan base.”

I asked Horbaczewski if he thought it was strange that the sport was transitioning to maturity at almost the same time as military drones. He had. In fact, he had even talked about the phenomenon with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who asked him to create a website for drone safety.

Photos courtesy the Drone Racing League

Travis ‘Moke’ McIntyre won the first race in his heat with 435 points. He eventually finished second overall despite the winner coming behind him in that opening race. In their second race, Moke had seemed on the verge of taking the top spot. He went through all four checkpoints in the bowl as smoothly as he had before, turned into the tunnel, danced past the columns, walls and planks, and came out the next tunnel flying towards the center of the stadium. He then doubled back and dove, following the blue light to the double helix, fighting off its hypnotic effect to pull off a clean exit. As he danced back to the blinding green tunnel that led to the last four checkpoints, his drone smashed into a wall, spun and fell to the ground, disabled.

“The most challenging part was probably when you came out of the helical, and you have to make a really funky turn into another tight tunnel,” he explains. “And I know at least one of those times, it was full of smoke, and I ended up going through thinking I was fine.

“The smokes parted and I saw nothing but wall.”

Furadi competed in the first heat of the second qualifying race. A competitor, ‘RekRek’, had the best liftoff, dropping Furadi into second place immediately. As he buzzed through the first gate, the announcer praised him as a pre-race favorite: “Furadi is a leader in the FPV community —  inspiring to many — known for his technical knowledge and clean flying style.”

On cue, Furadi’s drone, coming in way too high after taking a too-wide angle on the approach, clipped the top right of the second checkpoint. The commentator had barely even announced the approach of the second gate before he yelped in surprise.

Spaztik went down as RekRek and Hazak navigated the double helix. With just four checkpoints left, Hazak, who had begun to push his speed to risky levels in order to overtake his opponent, suddenly peeled downwards and into the seats. His competitors’ aggression clearing the field, RekRek then finished the race unchallenged.

Photo courtesy the Drone Racing League

In the hair-trigger world of the arena, the blanket peace of drone freestyling is shredded, replaced with the dread, thrill and anxiety of extreme sports. Since their goggles makes drone pilots feel as if they’re inhabiting their machines, the prospect of a sudden crash takes on a new edge. The shock of the drone actually slamming into the wall draws a response that can feel as immediate as if it was their own bodies.

For many, the stress can be too much. Their hands sweat and shake, which makes it difficult to handle their drone controllers. And as they pilot their machines at high speeds, their bodies tense up, unable to separate the reality being fed into their eyes and the safety of their seats. Dropping people into alternative realities for lengthy periods of time has been shown to have unfortunate side effects: ‘Simulator sickness’ has caused pilots to suffer nausea, anxiety, eyestrain, headaches, sweating fatigue, general discomfort and much more.

But for some pilots, like ‘FlyingBear’, the total immersion and higher stakes makes the races that much more fun: “If I’m racing, it’s a completely different mindset. There’s adrenaline, there’s anxiety — my nerves are on fire. And it’s really exciting.”

Military drone pilots know those feelings of adrenaline and anxiety. Though war by unmanned aircraft has a veneer of detached impersonality, the conductors of these humane bombings still deal with stress disorders as often as their colleagues on the ground.

The worlds of military and racing drones are starkly different. In the neon riot of an arena, drones are vehicles for sport and fun. Harmless. That innocence extends to many other uses of drone technology as well. Jeff Bezos, for instance, envisions a fleet of Amazon delivery drones. Scientific drones, like the Tempest, can chart mountains in minutes or explore the deep sea.

This remove from the brutal reality of drone warfare is only possible with an immense privilege. Taking tools of war and developing them for science, convenience and entertainment is only plausible in the countries staring at the aftermath of drone strikes through a console rather than their own eyes. Drone racing is exciting, fast, and beautiful. But for some of the world, drones will always be associated with combat.

Photo courtesy the Drone Racing League

There’s a dissonance, then, to watching the racers control their drones and train in simulators which could very well be used as preparation for their military counterparts. Most sports have some hint of the martial, of preparing for war. Drone racing in 2017 is tacitly training for armed conflict. The racers are preparing, on a small scale, to pilot machines used in wars that are happening far beyond their bubble.

For now, the destiny of elite drone racers still lies within the sport. If they’re good enough, they can win prize money and notoriety.  They use their talents to try to build a large following. They travel across the world on the back of that fame. But it’s not difficult to imagine an ambitious racer deciding to use his talents for his country instead of on a course. And it’s not difficult, either, to imagine their country reaching out first.

It’s an unseasonably warm late-October day, and the 22 players on Quinnipiac’s reigning back-to-back national championship women’s rugby team are squished onto their practice field. You can’t tell while they’re stretching — there’s enough room for the normal toe-touching and quad-pulling — but when the team starts to run through its passes and handoffs, you see that something’s off.

A scrum half lobs the ball to a back, and instead of the usual juking left to right, the back always runs north-south. The players are handcuffed by the space here, and they’re so used to it they don’t even think about running outside.

This is the third field they’ve used over the last five years. It’s got bent goal posts that have already been moved once and likely won’t survive a predicted second move. It’s also 30 percent smaller than the fields where the student-athletes will play during away games. Quinnipiac’s rugby pitch is so inhospitably narrow that it forced the team to play all of this season’s games on the road.

It’s pretty there, at least. The field is nestled below the hills of Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Conn., which provides a spectacular backdrop of foliage. The rugby athletes all wear Quinnipiac white and blue, offsetting the surrounding trees bursting with fall color.

Senior Abby Cook likens it to Villanova’s men’s basketball team trying to prep for a repeat by practicing on a halfcourt. Except instead of being cut on the horizontal, Quinnipiac’s pitch is cut vertically, a challenge that affects how Cook and her teammates strategize. “We had to adapt by starting all our breakdown plays on the sideline that would typically be started in the middle of the field,” Cook says.

The too-small field is only one of the many challenges faced by this young team at a university that historically has faced legal troubles relating to how it manages women’s sports. Only two years before Quinnipiac’s rugby team was formed in 2011 — the second Division I women’s rugby program in NCAA history — the university found itself embroiled in a Title IX case of its own making.

In 2009, the university decided to eliminate men’s golf, men’s outdoor track, and women’s volleyball in an effort to save money. On its face, the moves seemed strictly motivated by cost cuts. But the school’s female students already lacked participation opportunities comparable to the men on campus. Quinnipiac quickly learned that it couldn’t cut a women’s team without a fight.

Five volleyball players and their coach immediately sued in federal court, claiming the school was in violation of Title IX, the 1972 federal statute that prohibits any school that receives federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex. The following year, a judge sided with the volleyball team. “Quinnipiac University,” U.S. District Court Judge Stefan R. Underhill wrote in July 2010, “has violated Title IX … by failing to provide equal athletic opportunities to its female students.”

The volleyball team was saved.

The school then spent the next few years appealing the decision, losing repeatedly. Finally in 2013, four years after the original suit was brought, Quinnipiac agreed to settle. As part of that settlement, the newly formed rugby team ended up playing a starring role in the court’s demands for how Quinnipiac needed to fix its wrongs. Yet today, the school is still struggling to meet its legal obligations, like providing rugby with an appropriate field.

The settlement was a big deal. “We got a major victory for Title IX,” said former Quinnipiac women’s volleyball coach Robin Sparks at the time. “This isn’t just a win for the female athletes at Quinnipiac, but for all female student-athletes across the country.”

The National Women’s Law Center reacted by thanking “the brave young women at Quinnipiac who took a stand,” because, its director wrote, “all female athletes at the university will benefit, and schools nationwide should take note of how the legal issues were resolved.”

Hope was the result; change seemed to be on the horizon.

It’s been over three years now. Gender equity in sports remains an issue at the vast majority of universities and colleges across the country, and how the Department of Education will enforce Title IX under the new Trump administration is unclear.

Deadlines have come and gone, and Quinnipiac has made enough improvements to show progress on paper. But in reality, what progress it has made did not come easily, not even with a courtroom win. The coaches and players on the women’s rugby team have had to remain vigilant in the fight for gender equity on their campus. They have continually pushed their school to do the bare minimum of what is required, despite the university having a court order and Title IX mandating those requirements.

Nearly 45 years after Title IX was passed, we are still asking why it is so hard for schools to create gender parity in sports. Quinnipiac, perhaps, offers the perfect case study. If a school like Quinnipiac — relatively small in size, punished for its prior behavior, and under the microscope because of it — struggles to get this right, what does that mean for everyone else and for Title IX as law in practice?

Quinnipiac is far from alone in how it struggles to meet gender equity in sport. Title IX passed in 1972, and as the National Women’s Law Center’s Neena Chaudhry told SB Nation, “If you look at the numbers at the beginning of Title IX and now, of course we have made a lot of progress and we see more women Olympians now. But I think that sometimes obscures what’s really happening at individual schools.”

The reality at most universities and colleges is that 45 years later, the battle for equality is still being waged. “We can look at numbers. We can look at cases. We can look at what we hear from people on the ground,” Chaudhry says. “We know there’s still a lot of work to do.”

A recent Vice Sports report, using the data schools must submit to the Department of Education under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA), found that “many NCAA Division I athletic programs may not be fully compliant with Title IX” because universities have disparity in athletic aid between men’s and women’s programs, low participation rates for women’s sports, or are “overstuffing the rosters of inexpensive sports such as women’s rowing and counting the male practice player opponents used by many teams as female athletes.”

These kinds of inequities exist on the high school level as well, with girls of color receiving the fewest opportunities to play school sports.

Dr. Donna Lopiano, former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, echoes these findings. She estimates that “80 to 90 percent of most institutions are out of compliance with Title IX.” At the least, because the Quinnipiac volleyball players sued, “there is now court precedent in terms of how courts will treat schools who purposefully use these mathematical manipulations, that they shouldn’t be given the fruits of their lies,” Lopiano says.

Under Title IX, to achieve gender parity between men’s and women’s sports, universities and colleges have to meet one of three different requirements: 1) equity in participation opportunities for both men and women; 2) scholarships offered proportionally based on the number of male and female athletes; and 3) comparable overall treatment of women’s and men’s sports (including but not limited to quality and maintenance of locker rooms and facilities, equipment and supplies, access to practice fields, publicity of teams and events, the quality of coaching, academic tutoring, traveling budgets, etc.).

In 2009, when Quinnipiac cut its women’s volleyball team, the administration tried to replace it with competitive cheerleading. Then-Director of Athletics and Recreation, Jack McDonald, said at the time that Quinnipiac would “continue to provide gender-equitable and competitive opportunities for the greatest number of male and female student-athletes in these fiscally challenging times.”

During those times, according to local reporting, Quinnipiac was in the midst of “a building boom,” including “a new, $52 million hockey and basketball arena” while also “freezing senior management salaries, ending job searches, and reducing operating budgets by 5 percent.”

That same year, John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac, was one of only 36 presidents across the country to make more than $1 million in salary, bringing down $1.8 million in total compensation. To this day, he remains one of the highest paid university presidents in the country.

Title IX allows universities three different checks to prove that they are providing enough participation opportunities for female athletes. First, a school can show that the number of opportunities is proportional to the number of women on campus (i.e. if the full-time undergraduate student body is 50 percent women, 50 percent of the athletic opportunities must be for women.)

Second, it can demonstrate a history of expanding opportunities, though that standard is hard to meet since it requires continually adding sports and teams. Third, a university can prove that it’s fully and effectively meeting all the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex so that there is no outstanding demand for more.

Of the three Title IX requirements, Quinnipiac argued that it was meeting the first –– proportional participation opportunities for both genders — by swapping volleyball for competitive cheering and maintaining equitable numbers in other sports, offsetting the big money men’s sports like hockey and basketball with a large women’s track and field team.

The court rejected that claim since the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which oversees the enforcement of Title IX, has never approved competitive cheerleading (or its cousin, acro-tumbling or stunt) as an acceptable sport to count as participation opportunities.

Quinnipiac also argued, like most schools do, that it was meeting participation opportunities for women under the third “fully and effectively” option –– satisfying all the women’s demands for more participation opportunities. This, despite leaving a team of volleyball players without a sport to play.

Lopiano served as an expert witness in the case, testifying that the school was purposefully miscounting “the number of participants in every sport in order to misrepresent what the female participation gap really was.” Lopiano told the court that Quinnipiac was double- and triple-counting female athletes so that a single woman competing in multiple sports would get counted multiple times. A judge did not agree with the extent of miscounting but ultimately found that Quinnipiac’s participation numbers were intentionally inaccurate.

On top of all of this, the court found that the disparities in how Quinnipiac funded men’s and women’s sports amounted to inequitable treatment. Since universities often can’t fund all sports at the elite level, the NCAA allows Division I schools like Quinnipiac to divide teams into three tiers of funding. With its 6,703 undergraduate enrollment, QU must divvy up $26.5 million in athletic expenses among 21 teams spread throughout all three tiers.

The tier one teams — ice hockey and basketball at Quinnipiac — get the most publicity, have the biggest market draw, and receive the most substantial funding, with descending levels of funding in tiers two and three.

The tier system solves budget constraints but easily creates inequity if unchecked. “Title IX says is that it’s OK if you want to treat sports differently,” Lopiano adds, “but you have to have the same percentage of male and female athletes within each one of those levels of competition. So it would have to have the same percentages in tier one, two, and three for men and women,” which Quinnipiac, she says, “didn’t begin to do. There were more women in pauper than there were second tier, first tier.”

After the court ruled in 2010 that Quinnipiac was in violation of Title IX, Lynn Bushnell, Quinnipiac’s vice president for public affairs, released a statement saying that the university would be adding women’s rugby as a varsity sport in 2011. In November 2010, it hired Becky Carlson as the program’s first head coach.

But by the time it settled in 2013, most of the disparities identified in the original court case remained and so had to be addressed as part of the settlement’s consent decree. At its most broad level, the school was not allowed to cut women’s teams and had to provide more scholarships to female athletes and better benefits to their teams.

More specifically, the school agreed to “ensure that its Title IX coordinator is trained concerning gender equity in athletics,” to “spend at least $5 million to improve the permanent athletic facilities used by its women’s varsity sports teams … so that they are comparable to the facilities provided to men’s varsity sports teams in the same tier,” and are obligated to “elevate two … women’s teams to tier one.”

The court said that both men’s and women’s ice hockey and basketball counted as these “sports of emphasis,” but that Quinnipiac needed to also elevate women’s field hockey and another women’s sport, which it had to determine within six months of signing the decree, to tier one. Over the last three years, it has elevated women’s soccer and men’s and women’s lacrosse to that level. Additionally, as part of the decree, the school is not allowed to retaliate against anyone who helped with the litigation.

Women’s rugby was mentioned repeatedly throughout the decree. The team was 2 years old when the school agreed, via the decree, to “upgrade the quality and condition of the rugby pitch to ensure that it is safe for practices and competitions.” The pitch should be “the maximum dimensions allowed by the International Rugby Board [100m x 69m],” level, “not contain holes, dangerous rocks, or other hazards,” and be “maintained to a quality comparable to the varsity soccer fields.”

The team would get at least nine full scholarships, have a full-time head coach and full-time assistant coach, and “compete in at least two-thirds of its regular season against NCAA varsity rugby teams.” Quinnipiac also promised to “make a good faith effort to promote women’s rugby as a varsity sport.” The decree promised similar treatment for the women’s track and field team.

Both sides agreed on a “referee,” Jeffrey Orleans, to oversee the implementation of everything laid out in the settlement. Orleans’ job is to implement and monitor compliance, provide annual written updates to the court, and make recommendations to Quinnipiac for it to comply properly.

The entirety of the decree was in effect through June 30, 2016. The referee will remain in his position, though, until June 30, 2018, because the school has until then to make all of the improvements to facilities on campus. But once the referee is gone and the consent decree is no longer the guiding document, Title IX will still be in effect and Quinnipiac, under federal law, must continue to strive for gender equity among its student athletes.

After the case was settled, Lahey went around to the various schools on campus to discuss the overall state of the university which, on the heels of the landmark settlement, included a discussion of how Quinnipiac would become Title IX compliant.

Associate Professor of Journalism Rich Hanley was at one of these forums and recalls that Lahey felt the judge in the case had used wide judicial discretion. “[He] mentioned broadly that it was the judge’s interpretation of Title IX that led to the decree. I think he thought it was open for debate in terms of the decree. He was obviously going to follow it,” Hanley stresses.

In his final full report in July 2016, Orleans wrote that “Quinnipiac has made substantial compliance progress during the course of Decree,” noting the women’s rugby championship in the 2015-2016 season as one example of the women’s teams’ “recent competitive achievements.” He conceded that “changes and additions to the senior administrative staff, and development of that staff’s advertent focus on Title IX are still in progress.”

As for the rugby pitch, Orleans wrote that Quinnipiac had pursued the city of Hamden’s permit processes “consistently” but that it had taken longer than expected. The school originally predicted that the new facilities for rugby would open in fall 2015; those have been pushed back to fall 2017. He also wrote that as he had “expressed in prior Reports … Quinnipiac has fulfilled its Decree commitments for supporting women’s rugby,” including “promoting the growth of women’s rugby as a Division 1 varsity sport.”

When the bar is low, any step over it seems like a success. Many felt that the bar was on the ground at Quinnipiac when the original Title IX suit was filed in 2009. Progress has been made, as the court-appointed referee attests. But frustrations still abound for the Quinnipiac women’s rugby team over the seven-year battle to get the university to meet its legal obligation.

Back on its too-tiny field on that late fall day, the team starts off practice with a number of stretches, led by the captains.

Coach Carlson walks among the players, encouraging them and pushing them to do more than a purely physical workout. As stretches turn into plank poses, Carlson quizzes her athletes on general trivia — everything from the Civil War to what the fastest fish is (It’s the sailfish, for the record.) Carlson is an acolyte of the DiSC coaching method— Dominance, influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness — which uses individuals’ personalities and personal assessment to achieve the greatest success on and off the field.

She credits the methodology for creating a team culture which vaulted a team of walk-ons from a 3-6-1 record in the program’s first season to 15-1 in its second. It’s also made Carlson an internet target for relying on assumptions regarding athletes’ behavioral traits.

Dressed in navy track pants and a gray Quinnipiac T-shirt, her blonde hair pulled back from her face, Carlson is making a point. She wants her athletes to know she’s as invested in making sure their brains are working as hard as their bodies.

After warm-ups and a quick 10-minute scrimmage, the team gathers around Carlson, who wants to go over their loss to Central Washington two days before. “Why weren’t we effective during the last game?” she challenges. After a bit of contemplation, the players begin calling out responses that analyze themselves as much as their play.

“It feels weird to say that — we lost,” one admits.

Carlson has the team run through one of the plays that cost it the game against Washington. As the athletes fall into formation, Carlson runs right along with them, just as passionate, just as invested.

They win their next game against Vermont’s Castleton University by an astonishing 213-0.

A month later, in November, Quinnipiac takes the rematch against Central Washington— the national championship game — 46-24. Like in its last title game, Quinnipiac is the road team because its miniature pitch isn’t suitable for hosting championship games.

QU’s women’s rugby team played all but one game of the 2016-17 season on the road (The lone “home” game was at Southington High School, located a half-hour away.)

“I recruited fast, outside wings that use the width of the field to put points on the board,” Carlson explains. “But during our practice, you would see that players would be making shorter passes and are more bunched together,” due to the lack of space. “We had to change our game plan basically. We’ve always been a team that scored our points from the outside. If you look at this year, we scored our points from the inside. It’s statistically proven.”

The lack of a regulation-size home field not only limits the team’s strategy, but it has impacted the support it has seen from its university fan base, a blatant disregard for the portion of the consent decree which requires Quinnipiac to increase the dimensions of the pitch to the maximum dimensions allowed by the International Rugby Board.

Bill Roskopf’s daughter Emily is a sophomore on the team, and he’s astounded by what he sees as the school’s sexist treatment of the rugby team.

“Women’s rugby was forced to give up their field because ‘it’s just women’s rugby,’” he says. “If there was a NCAA men’s rugby team on campus that used the same game field, there is no way the university would have asked them to play a 100 percent road schedule. Of course there is no way to prove this, but it’s my hunch. If the university built a new ice hockey arena, they wouldn’t ask the team to play 100 percent on the road while they built a new arena … no way that would happen.”

Emily still has two more years to play for Quinnipiac, so she is passionately invested in whether or not her team has a home field to play on. Rugby is everything to Emily and the main reason she’s attending Quinnipiac. “[Rugby] defines who she is and how she spends her time,” Roskopf says of his daughter. “Emily was heavily recruited by most top-tier college rugby programs. Because she knew she wanted to play in college, she only considered schools with NCAA or Division 1 rugby programs.”

When it came to choosing Quinnipiac, Emily says that a big part of her decision was Coach Carlson. “When I was on my recruiting trip, I was really impressed by the team culture and expectations. Coach Carlson knows what each and every one of her athletes is capable of, and she pushes them to be the best that they can be.”

It was a fight to even get that space to themselves. Before the consent decree, during the team’s first season (2010-11), it was given time on Quinnipiac’s intramural field 1. The space (which was the largest one the team has been given to date at 39.6m x 13.7m) is considered a “rec field,” and any club team that reserved a timeslot was able to play on it. Carlson recalls leading practices and intramurals squads were converging on the sidelines, waiting for rugby to finish. The field was also not level and contained holes, rocks, and other hazards that made practicing on it difficult.

The following year, the team was moved to a smaller field 2 than the first, at 33.5m x 15m; another with holes and rocks. The team had to share this field from 2011 to 2013, despite Carlson frequently emailing and taking her concerns to the athletic department in person.

“I pointed out to the lawyers that we were the only varsity team sharing our field with intramurals, and the lawyers included it in the decree,” Carlson says. Finally in 2013, the school dedicated the field solely to women’s rugby, a stipulation specifically prescribed by the consent decree.

The second field was still too small to be used to host games, and Cook remembers that this field was particularly perilous. The International Rugby Board, the NCAA standard, requires a 5m safety minimum around a pitch’s edges that the field barely accommodated before the grass ended. “[If] you tackle[d] people out of bounds,” Cook explains, “we would literally tackle them into a gravel road if we went too far.”

After winning its first national championship, the team was relegated to the smallest field yet 3: a 33.5m x 14.8m space that was formerly used for men’s soccer practice. Due to the size, it is unusable as a regulation rugby field.

The school’s plan is to eventually give women’s rugby the 36.6m x 21.3m men’s soccer field 4 after necessary renovations are made. Quinnipiac has recently been given the OK from the town of Hamden to start construction on a new 1,500-seat stadium for the soccer and lacrosse teams. But the school had a difficult time with its application, facing resistance from Hamden’s residents, many of whom oppose building a stadium so close to Sleeping Giant State Park.

One of the main reasons that the men’s soccer team is in need of a new field is because the current one — which women’s rugby will supposedly inherit — has flooded several times in the past year due to poor drainage. In 2013, when Carlson was told by the university that it planned to repurpose the soccer field for rugby, she met with John Copela, QU’s head groundskeeper, to discuss the potential move.

According to Carlson, Copela told her that “it would not be a smart move to put rugby on the soccer field without renovations including full resodding and drainage installed due to flooding and heavy foot traffic crossing to other athletic fields.” When Carlson asked Copela if he had any insight about what the future plans were for the rugby team, she says that he advised her that he had seen “nothing that included rugby up to that point.”

When Carlson noted these concerns to QU Vice President Mark Thompson via email in September of 2013, he said he would do some research and get back to her, but never did. According to Carlson, when she met with him to initiate some follow-up after her email, he stated that neither he nor the athletic department “were aware the soccer field required any upgrades.”

Yet, a year earlier in 2012, an article for The Chronicle reported that“… several times over the past few years the field has flooded and forced both the men’s and women’s teams to cancel their upcoming matches.” But McDonald commented to the paper that the men’s soccer field was part of their “master plan” and that fixing the flooding problems would be addressed.

Still, the flood-prone pitch, which needs resodding, would be an upgrade. “It’s better than the field that I have played on the last three years in the sense that it’s gonna be regulation-sized and it’s going to be able to seat 50 or so people” in metal bleachers that run alongside the field, she says.

But she’s also realistic about the state of that field and what it will take for it to be up to par. If “they replace the grass and stuff, it might be,” she hesitates, “I don’t know. It’s not what the soccer team is going to get up in the new construction area because they’re going to have gorgeous stadium seating and locker rooms and just great stuff.”

SB Nation reached out to Quinnipiac University’s Athletic Director Greg Amodio, Deputy Director Sarah Fraser, Associate Athletic Director of Sports Information Ken Sweeten, and President Lahey to learn more about why the school has taken so long to fulfill many aspects of the consent decree as they relate to women’s rugby. However, we were not given a chance to ask any questions and instead were given the following statement by Sweeten on Amodio’s behalf:

“The university complies with Title IX and is committed to the equitable treatment of all male and female student-athletes, which includes women’s rugby,” said Greg Amodio, director of athletics.

Despite this statement, the women’s rugby team still does not have an adequate field. Recent graduate Tesni Phillips remembers when she began playing for the women’s rugby team during her freshman year and how the team had to share a locker room with women’s cross-country, while the men’s ice hockey and basketball teams had multiple locker rooms for themselves.

After taking the next two years off from rugby, Phillips returned for her senior year to find that rugby finally had its own dedicated locker room. “It was still really, really small,” says Phillips, noting that it was just one of the things that made it seem to her that the administration wasn’t particularly interested in looking after the team.

“It’s about the size of, like, two living rooms and with a bathroom attached that has three showers, two stalls, and three sinks,” Cook says of the team’s current locker rooms. It might have 35 lockers, she guesses, but probably more like 30. Since the team is currently made up of 22 players, “that locker room fits my team now alone.” But a full rugby roster is 30 athletes, and as it stands now, Cook says, “If we carried 30 kids, there’s no way we would have all fit in that locker room.”

There are other challenges, too. The consent decree has specific language that outlines QU’s responsibility to promote the sport both internally and at large. But Carlson and her players have been demoralized by the lack of support for their athletic success.

When the men’s hockey team made it to the coveted Frozen Four (but lost out to North Dakota, coming in second), it was celebrated all over the school, from a congratulatory school-wide email sent out from Lahey to a variety of Frozen Four spirit gear for sale at the school store.

Compare this to when the women’s rugby team won its first national championship in 2015.

It was if the team didn’t even exist. Plans for a billboard congratulating the team contained misspellings and never materialized. The most recognition it received, according to Carlson, was when QU administration gave the rugby team gold XXL T-shirts, although the acronym of its league (the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association) was misspelled.

There was no congratulatory email from President Lahey, and the school store didn’t sell any rugby championship gear, driving Carlson and her team to set up an online shop themselves where they sold over $2,500 worth of merchandise in a weekend.

In the Quinnipiac Chronicle’s “Latest With Lahey,” a Q+A with the president, from April 20, 2016, President Lahey was told that “the rugby team posted on social media, upset that Lahey had emailed the student body about Quinnipiac making the Frozen Four when he did not send an email when rugby won its national championship.” He was then asked what he would say to the women’s team. His answer deflected the direct question and did not answer why he did not acknowledge the team’s championship win:

“We have 21 sports and rugby is still an emerging sport, actually, but I love them all. When they win a national championship, I think that’s great, but I would say, again, the amount of media coverage–it’s not a question of my recognizing a team, I recognize all our teams that do well and I call coaches after games and talk with them–so the point that I really was communicating about the men’s hockey is the amount of national coverage that they gave the university….I try to look at not just the team’s athletics in terms of their success on the field, or on the ice or on the court, or wherever it is, but what it is doing to extend the good name of Quinnipiac far and wide. And I think if you use that as the standard and that’s what I was really thanking the team for and congratulating them.”

We asked Carlson if she had ever heard from President Lahey personally, either after a regular season game or the national championship ones. She told us that she has received “zero [calls] to date.”

According to the consent decree, “Quinnipiac will make a good faith effort to promote women’s rugby as a varsity sport and to encourage other NCAA Division I schools to sponsor women’s rugby as a varsity sport with the goal of establishing a Division I varsity women’s rugby athletic conference and a NCAA varsity women’s rugby national championship.” In other words, the school’s promotion and support of women’s rugby, both within the QU community and outside, is not optional.

Back in 2014, Carlson sat down with Jon Alba, then a reporter for Q30 Television, a student-run television station. She spoke at length about the issue of gender inequity when it came to media attention. According to Carlson, the rugby team had an in-person meeting with Sweeten and student media reps around the same time this video clip was released. Carlson says that they did listen to the team’s concerns, but that, in her recollection, they responded by saying that “… women’s sports were of no interest to their readers and that people care more about men’s ice hockey and basketball.”

The students who attended the meeting were tired of being told that nobody cares about women’s rugby and that was the reason it lacked sufficient media coverage. Carlson’s athletes came to the meeting prepared, pointing out the unequal representation of men’s and women’s sports on campus.

What the rugby players asked for was straightforward: They wanted equal coverage of women’s sports at the school, along with equal content within the school paper’s pages. The athletes reminded the media reps that this was a Title IX issue and that they should and could actually make a difference with how they covered sports at the school.

The athletes didn’t stop there. In May of 2016, rugby player and junior Flora Poole wrote an op/ed for The Quinnipiac Chronicle running the numbers when it came to the school supporting the various athletic teams via social media.

“In the spring 2016 semester alone, the handler behind Quinnipiac University’s Twitter account dedicated 415 tweets and retweets on Quinnipiac athletic teams and their achievements. Three hundred and forty-two were dedicated to men’s ice hockey, eight to men’s basketball, one to men’s baseball and 65 to all women’s sports combined. Leading up to its national championship, rugby received four tweets over a period of 14 days promoting its championship. Men’s ice hockey, on the other hand, received 46 tweets in a period of three days covering their quarterfinal against Cornell.”

Poole’s op-ed is poignant, especially in the aftermath of the Title IX case, where Quinnipiac legally needs to be doing better. When we spoke, Poole noted that perhaps her strong words, which called out Quinnipiac for placing men’s athletics above women’s, have had a positive impact.

“In terms of administration, there has been — from the athletic department — more acknowledgement of our games this year. It’s little things really. This year they have been very good with the Athletics Instagram; every single game they’ve promoted us and have done a photo of the day.”

The rugby team created the Fill the Silence campaign last year in response to the lack of coverage. Players posted numerous snapshots and statistics on their own social media pages that pointed to the fact that stories and information on women’s athletics on campus are sorely lacking, especially compared to the men. Cook notes that things have gotten better, but her point of comparison shows just how low the expectations of school support are.

Cook also says that this year, the team received announcements for game days, something that wasn’t always released on time.

“The athletic department has been better this year,” she says. “They haven’t messed up our names in our write-ups, which I know is a really low standard, but take what you can get at this point.”

When the team won its second championship in a row, President Lahey still did not send a campus-wide email, though he did acknowledge the team in a Facebook post. The school paper is covering rugby games with more frequency, and the athletic department seems to be stepping up its sports information game as well. When the team won its second national championship, the Quinnipiac Bobcat’s homepage included photos and a lead story.

Quinnipiac held a pep rally for women’s rugby in December, where the school handed out T-shirts to the student body and feted the team for winning its second title. President Lahey did not attend.

Professor Hanley, who had been present when President Lahey addressed faculty after the consent decree was issued, is also an Athletics Council chairperson for QU and noted in a phone interview that the team deserves better treatment than it’s getting. “Rugby is national champion team. I think they should be treated like national champions. I think those athletes and their coach deserve the red carpet treatment for all they’ve accomplished. They deserve a first class facility.”

Junior Jessica Maricich transferred from Carlson’s alma mater in Illinois, Eastern, which had its rugby program suspended in 2015 due to injuries. She says her passion for the sport and for athletic equity only grew when she began playing for QU and Carlson.

“We don’t get the support I believe we deserve,” says Maricich. “But the team culture and those behind Coach Carlson, we fight for things we deserve. Even though we’re accepting what we have, and making the best of the situation, we’re also fighting for what we deserve — which is something I really like with this team.”

Carlson’s advocacy may have emboldened her players, but she worries that it’s also put a target on her back. She filed an affidavit with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in early 2017, charging Quinnipiac with discrimination and retaliation.

Her affidavit states:

“In stark contrast to its treatment of male coaches, the University failed to provide me and my team access to necessary benefits, resources, and support services — such as adequate practice and competition fields, training programs, equipment, recruitment support, and access to media and publicity – that I needed to carry out my job as head coach.”

Carlson says that when she pushed the administration for these things, she opened herself up to baseless accusations and retaliatory discipline, which impacted her both professionally and personally. As she writes in her complaint:

“… this discriminatory treatment has required me to work more hours with significantly fewer resources, making my job more difficult, forcing me to work more hours for less money, benefits, and personal time relative to male coaches, and reducing my chances for competitive success.”

There are not many court cases like the one that led to changes at Quinnipiac. Suing is expensive and contentious. Coaches don’t want to lose their jobs for speaking up, and players don’t want to risk their playing chances since they are only in school for a few years.

Lopiano says that most schools aren’t interested in doing the work to get gender parity because schools want their “men’s sports program at the highest competitive level” and so they say, we “don’t have the money to give [women] the same opportunity.” Unfortunately for these schools, though, Lopiano adds, “there’s no financial excuse for not complying with federal law.”

Moving forward, it’s hard to say what will change overall, either at Quinnipiac or universities in general. Chaudhry notes that no action is taken on gender equity in sports unless someone speaks up; the Department of Education is not out actively looking for violations. Quinnipiac’s struggles to comply with Title IX remain a problem at other programs.

For instance: Earlier this month, the Seattle Timesinvestigated the reported numbers of women who row for the University of Washington and “found dozens of women who appear to have not been on the women’s rowing team, but whom the UW counted as crew participants in reports to federal officials over the past several years.”

In the end, it will continue to be up to the student athletes and their parents to hold the schools accountable. “[They] are often the ones who are vigilant,” Chaudhry says. “The more they know, the more they can try to make sure their schools are providing equal opportunities.”

The fight might be growing even more arduous. There is currently uncertainty about how the Trump administration — and specifically, the Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos — will handle Title IX. Most of the discussion has been about the problem of campus sexual assault, but the overall concerns that the DOE will not enforce gender equity under Title IX bleeds over into sports, too.

As Lindsay Gibbs recently reported, outside of the main concern that the Office for Civil Rights within the DOE will stop enforcing the law, there are fears about the scope of the law dwindling.

“If DeVos follows through on her plans to privatize education and hold charter schools receiving federal funds to different standards than public schools, as she indicated she would in her confirmation hearing, this could mean that fewer and fewer schools are even required to follow Title IX guidelines at all,” Gibbs wrote.

Still, as the law has been interpreted for years now, Chaudhry says, “schools have affirmative duties. They have to go out and ask their female students; they have to look around and see what’s popular in the geographical region … they can’t just sit back and say, ‘well, we haven’t heard anything from anybody so I guess we’re OK.’”

Beyond that, she adds, “they also have to have a process by which people can request new sports or request that sports that might be club sports be elevated to varsity sports.”

The fight for gender equity in sports at Quinnipiac over the last eight years — both in court and on the ground at the university — is indicative of this overall struggle. It was hard to get the legal victory, and once that was secured, it’s been difficult to get the consent decree enforced to the point of Carlson filing her recent complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.

This is now all thrown into relief against the backdrop of the new Trump administration. Indications suggest that the enforcement of Title IX will not get easier, and perhaps might even become much harder if the Department of Education does not prioritize it as it had done during the last presidential administration.

The hard and troublesome truth of this issue, though, is that female athletes are not asking for much. They want a place to practice free of rocks and potholes, a space large enough to run plays and host games. They want adequate resources like locker rooms that have sufficient space for teams and enough trainers to monitor their health. Often, they are simply requesting that their athletic departments and university administrators care about them and the sports they play — and show it.

Cook, who loves rugby and has given four years of her life to playing the sport for Quinnipiac, gets to the heart of this issue:

“I want [the administration] to be involved in the growth of our program. They’re so disaffiliated from all things rugby that it’s no wonder our student body doesn’t support us. You don’t even talk to us or know what we’re doing.”

Patrick Beverley talks to everyone. Go to a team practice, and his voice can be heard pinging around the floor. Find him after a game, and he’ll turn a weak question around on an unsuspecting reporter. Tell him a teammate attended a Beyoncé concert, something he says he would never do, and he’ll spend several minutes trying to figure out who it was. (It was James Harden, he finally deduces.)

Ninety minutes before the Rockets and the Grizzlies face each other in Houston in early March, Beverley starts talking to me.

“You going to chapel?”

Beverley is upbeat, even buoyant, as he sweeps through the locker room like he owns the place. In a sense, he does: the five-year veteran has seniority as the longest tenured Rocket, drafted in the second round a couple months before the Harden trade. Clearly, he doesn’t want me to feel left out.

I ask if I can be his plus-one.

“Yeah, come along!”

We both know it won’t happen. Media members aren’t allowed within the sacred confines of a pregame chapel service, typically a 10-minute affair involving both teams. But Beverley’s invitation was in good faith. He really wanted me to attend. He tries inviting a few more non-athletes in the room, before giving up and heading out the opposite door.

This expression of faith seems a bit antithetical in the context of the Houston locker room. After all, the Rockets aren’t just known as one of the league’s analytical pioneers, but have fully built their team off unfeeling data. The space where the players reside on game day is a reminder of those beliefs.

A long, continuous LED board stretches horizontally above the players’ lockers, alternatively displaying the league leaders in several advanced statistical categories. Where most teams play chronological footage of their opponent’s most recent game, the Rockets group various plays together, like pick-and-rolls and screens, and even show tendencies for the referee crew assigned to this game. It’s all a reminder that hard evidence is valued.

But faith has its place in the Houston locker room. Without the Rockets trusting that the system will yield results, they don’t believe their 55-win season and No. 3 seed could have happened.

“Our guys believe in our system,” says Monte McNair, the team’s vice president of basketball operations. “We hope there’s some grounding to it with our shot selection and the way we play. But certainly having our players believe not just that their shots are going in, but that their system can take them to the championship, is huge.”

Seconds after Beverley bounds out, Ryan Anderson strolls through the locker room. Where Beverley spills out infectious energy, Anderson is earnest and unassuming. He couldn’t have heard Beverly’s earlier invitation, but he sees me standing standing off to the side and extends a similar offer.

“You wanna go to chapel?”

The Rockets are not just the league’s most surprising team. They are a basketball laboratory conducting bold experiments beyond the boundaries of modern offensive efficiency. These are boundaries, mind you, that the Houston franchise has played a part in establishing over the past few years. This season’s Rockets have shattered three-point records and eschewed mid-range shots even more than years past. The league has been trending in this direction for years, but the Rockets have taken the movement and fueled it with nitrous.

Two seasons ago, Houston set the league’s record for three-point attempts, only to obliterate that record by attempting nearly 500 more this season. They have taken only 579 mid-range shots — inside the arc, outside the paint — total this year, by far the lowest among all 30 teams. In fact, four players around the league have taken more shots from the mid-range individually than Houston has as a team.

None of that inherently matters, except for the fact that it works. The Rockets have the league’s third-best record and would be on course to set a new standard for offensive efficiency if it wasn’t for those pesky Golden State Warriors. What’s fascinating is that the Rockets have doubled down on their offensive approach while retrenching around a singular star.

It was only a year ago that the Rockets were unceremoniously ousted from the postseason by those Warriors after a long, dismal season of infighting and disinterest. Harden and Dwight Howard resented each other, which essentially forced their teammates to choose sides. The reaction once their season mercifully ended could be summed up in a phrase: good riddance.

The team felt it necessary to conduct a top-down evaluation of their entire approach in order to regain their footing as one of the West’s top teams. General manager Daryl Morey has always viewed basketball through a progressive lens, but with a struggling defense and a dismal conclusion, common sense pointed to the Rockets taking a more traditional approach after last offseason’s debacle. Instead, Morey ripped up conventionality, lit it on fire, and launched it into the Gulf of Mexico. Still, McNair told me even the Rockets weren’t expecting the team to be this good.

After chapel, once congregating players revert back from parishioners to competitors, the Rockets launch 42 threes and make 18 of them, pushing Memphis and their traditional big man basketball into a quicker pace than they’re accustomed to playing. The Rockets score 123 points in a double-digit win and that isn’t even Houston’s best ball.

“We can play better,” Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni says post-game.

D’Antoni’s hiring last May put this year’s experiment in motion. You don’t hire the virtuoso who conducted the famed “Seven Seconds or Less” offense for the mid-2000s Phoenix Suns to play conventionally. In D’Antoni’s last two coaching stops with the Knicks and the Lakers, players hadn’t bought all the way into the quick-tempoed dogma. But the success of the Warriors, who played a similar style, inspired D’Antoni to give it another try. With Houston, he found the perfect situation.

“They’d been playing this way for a while and they wanted to go to even another level,” D’Antoni tells me after a shoot-around. “They know that’s what I believe in.”

With D’Antoni on board, the next item on Morey’s agenda was free agency. Morey had no qualms letting Howard walk, replacing him with a platoon of Clint Capela and Nene. He then doubled down on the offensive end by signing Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon, two shooters hardly known as defensive stalwarts.

“This is the team we have,” D’Antoni told the team in one of their first meetings. “These are the weapons we have, so let’s utilize them.”

The most important piece, however, was already on the roster. One of the first things D’Antoni did was broach Harden with the idea of playing point guard. Though the 6’5 guard had consistently handled the ball throughout his career, he had never been given total autonomy over an offense. D’Antoni used every trick in the book to convince him.

“Groveling, begging, I’m old and he felt sorry for me,” D’Antoni says. “I thought it was good for him and his career, but also mainly, because I thought we could win that way. And he wasn’t reluctant at all.”

Two seasons after coming in second in the Most Valuable Player award voting to Stephen Curry, the move has made Harden a leading MVP candidate again. He posted career highs in points (29.1) and assists (11.2) while still tying his most efficient season ever, with a True Shooting Percentage of 61.3. His 53-point, 16-rebound, 17-assist game in December revealed the ceiling of his ridiculous play, but even Harden’s off games still helped the offense.

His presence and playmaking benefit players like Anderson and Gordon, who often can be found spotting up several feet behind the arc. If a defense shifts too far in hopes of containing Harden, he can find shooters within moments. Stay home, and Capela is an effective dunker on the roll. Mess up on defense even for a moment and Harden has his choice between the two. The results have been exactly according to plan: open threes and easy dunks.

“James has really brought out the best in everybody,” D’Antoni says. “He’s the key. You can’t do it without him. You can have all these nice ideas, but it can’t be translated without him. He’s been terrific.”

Instead of standing pat or looking for more defensive help at the trade deadline, Morey dealt for Lou Williams, one of the league’s top bench scorers. The Rockets ramped up their offense even higher, finishing the season scoring even more points and launching more 3s at opposing defenses.

In making the trade, the Rockets said: Screw it, we’ll just score even more.

They have bought in fully to Morey and D’Antoni’s system, putting their faith not just in the numbers, but themselves.

Morey once believed multiple superstars was the only way to a championship. It’s why the team originally signed Howard, and the reason they appeared to be hours away from securing Chris Bosh in 2014 the following summer. That mindset changed and Houston accepted Harden as their sole superstar. Now the second best player on any given night is, “Whoever the other team doesn’t want to guard as heavily,” as Anderson put it.

There is, however, a downside. One game later when facing the Spurs, a likely second-round playoff opponent, Harden has an extraordinary first half before he is swallowed up by Kawhi Leonard in the second. When Harden struggles in the fourth quarter, San Antonio narrowly wins. Harden refutes that the Spurs — or anyone — can bring the Rockets away from their quick-paced, fast-moving style. Houston did manage 110 points in the loss, after all.

“We’re going to get shots,” he says. “We’re going to play our game no matter who we play.”

D’Antoni introduced a mantra into the locker room when he arrived in Houston, and it has stuck with his team all year. So what? What’s next?

As it happened, what came next was another loss, this time back at home against the Utah Jazz. But D’Antoni isn’t flusteredafter the game, and indeed, it was one of only four times all season that the Rockets lost consecutive games. Later, D’Antoni compares his team to a casino table in Las Vegas.

“It’s a little bit like a pit boss,” he says. “You’ll have runs against you. You’ll have people who start winning hands. But your odds are, you keep building hotels. You’re the winner. You’re not going to beat the house. We don’t feel like they’re going to beat us. In one game, yeah, they might win, we might lose a game, this and that. But we think, over the long haul, they’re not beating us.”

That’s the science. But D’Antoni knows as well as anyone that championships aren’t won without all the cards falling in the right order a few times. His Suns teams never even made the finals, something that requires the ultimate convergence of luck, timing, talent and chemistry. Not all of those are factors a team can control.

The myth that jump shooting teams can’t win championships is dead, dispelled by the Warriors (and really, the 2011 Mavericks before them). Jump shots will ebb and flow in the regular season, but the Rockets trust that their mathematically proven strategy will win out over the long run. Threes, after all, will always be greater than twos.

Houston’s three-point approach, the team believes, puts them in a position to beat anyone in the playoffs. The rest is out of their hands, especially against opponents that might be slightly better on paper than them. Catch the Warriors or Spurs on a good shooting night, and anything could happen. Can it happen over a seven-game series? It’s a final test that they only partially control.

That’s why the Rockets allow every player to find their own way to fit into Houston’s scientific, data-driven approach. Basketball can be viewed through numbers, but it isn’t a computer simulation. The Rockets, as brought together by Morey and D’Antoni, push boundaries supported by tangible evidence and are as grounded in mathematics as any team we’ve previously seen. Still, it couldn’t live without the players who collectively provide the team its heart.

To answer the age old question: can science and faith coexist? In Houston, they’re proving it must.

Before the team played San Antonio, I received one more invitation to join the team at chapel, this time from Sam Dekker.

“If you care to join, come on down. It’s a good time.”