It was time to go. Time to get back into her stepfather’s Lincoln Town Car for a 1,300-mile drive home, from Florida to Canada, and Raechel Brown could barely tolerate what she was doing. “I’m going to shove these kids back in the car,” she thought to herself.
She didn’t. Instead she forced herself to say goodbye to her twin 16-year-old sons, Chase and Sydney, leaving them in the care of a couple she had just met two days earlier. Racked with doubt and guilt, she knew in her gut that taking her beloved boys to this strange place was the best chance to do right by them.
“It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” Raechel says. “It was totally unnatural, leaving your kids in another country with people you don’t know. I cried the whole way back.”
Raechel can say that now, with the gift of knowing it all worked out, as her boys star in the football revival at No. 17 Illinois—running back Chase, an unlikely Heisman Trophy candidate; safety Sydney, a captain of the nation’s No. 1 defense. But none of that was visible six years ago. She chose an option that broke her heart but gave her boys a chance to dream.
So she drove away, back to London, Ontario, where the family had lost their home. Chase and Sydney had to leave to pursue a future that included high-level football and greater stability. Canada was a hard place for players to get noticed by U.S. universities, and the family’s monetary situation had deteriorated.
Raechel says she became ill after the birth of her daughter, Mya, and was unable to work for an extended period of time. Then her father died, and a family member with mental health issues and a drug addiction had used most of the inheritance. “He became mine to try to help, but he couldn’t be on drugs and be in our home,” Raechel says. “The money from my dad went to him.”
The Browns were floating between living in a shelter and with Raechel’s mother. The boys were struggling in school. Looking for an alternative, they were connected by Canadian football talent scout Justin Dillon to a private school in Bradenton, Fla., Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School. It was August 2016, and the boys were about to start their junior year of high school. Everything began to move very quickly.
On a Friday afternoon, Saint Stephen’s football coach Tod Creneti called an old friend, Phil Yates. He was looking for a host family for two incoming players from Canada, of all places. “Oh, by the way,” Creneti said, “they’re really good.”
Phil and Karen Yates were empty-nesters, their two children having graduated from Saint Stephen’s. They had the room in their house, so they said yes to something they hadn’t previously envisioned. “There really wasn’t any question in our minds,” Karen Yates says. “But I remember lying in bed that Friday night thinking, ‘Is this really going to happen?’”
On Monday, Karen and Raechel talked on the phone. On Tuesday, the Browns began their drive down to Florida. On Wednesday, the Browns and Yateses had dinner together at a restaurant. On Thursday, they toured the school and had dinner at the Yateses’ home. On Friday, Raechel said goodbye and began her bereaved drive home.
It would get worse before it got better.
Raechel got back into permanent housing, but money was still tight. And now there was a tuition bill to pay for Saint Stephen’s. The Yates family gave Chase and Sydney beds and meals and transportation to school, familial structure and parental guidance where needed, but Raechel had to come up with the money to pay for school.
“Tuition or paying the rent was the choice,” Raechel says. “So we paid tuition.”
She lost her home a second time, moving back into a shelter. Raechel says she kept some of the reality of her circumstances hidden from the boys, not wanting them to worry or feel guilty.
“It was not something I really told them,” she says. “I just said they couldn’t come home.”
There was no going back for Chase and Sydney, only forward. Tough times and tough decisions have yielded to the current reality—the brothers are starring for one of the breakthrough programs in college football, their mom’s financial footing has improved and once-inconceivable professional goals are now in focus.
For this to become a happy story, it required several ingredients. It took a mother’s sacrifice, the kindness of strangers, a recruiting chance taken, a year spent apart, the prohibitive cost of aviation lessons, a transfer and ultimately the arrival of a new coaching staff that could shake Illinois out of its long malaise. Mostly, it took two boys’ acute appreciation of the opportunity they were given and unstinting effort to make the most of it.
“There was some stuff that pushed us out of Canada,” Sydney says of the family struggles. “That really told us, ‘O.K., it’s time to go. It’s really time to get it right.’ It’s been a journey.”
