What’s Bigger Than Soccer?

Where It Started

I’m Nick Weeks. I’m the boys soccer coach here in Brainerd, and I wear about five million other hats besides that—but this is the one that matters most for this story.

I heard about Smiles for Jake right away, because Jake was part of our program.

My own path to coaching took a while to get here—starting out helping with goalies a couple hours a week, coaching JV2 for a few years, and working my way up to head coach after that.

I knew Jake through that world. He was too good for JV2—he went straight to JV. I never got to really coach him myself, but you could feel the impact he had on the kids around him. He was a wonderful kid.

Why This Is Personal

As a coach, losing a kid is personal. Everything about coaching is personal, honestly—you’re trying to connect with these kids, trying to share the love you have for this sport with them. But this is personal in a different way, because it’s one of our kids.

This isn’t a hypothetical kid to me. He actually existed. He was actually on our team. He actually wore the number 10. That’s real. It doesn’t matter if it happened in 1920 or happened yesterday—it’s real, and it’s going to stay real. As the years go by, I think it’s natural for that to start fading a little for people who weren’t there. Part of what we’re doing now is making sure these kids today understand that this isn’t some old story. This is real, and it’s still happening to real families. That’s why it’s personal. You never want to see a kid go.

The Night We Felt It Most

When Jake passed, the team took a hit. There’s no getting around that.

That season, the boys already had one common goal—they were chasing being the first Brainerd Warriors boys soccer team to make it to state. But after we lost Jake, they had another goal on top of that one: how do we support each other, our friends, our families, so this doesn’t happen again.

I still remember what would have been his senior night. It was emotional in a way that’s hard to describe. You could just feel it in the air. They presented his jersey to his family, and the whole gym felt it. It was such a hard thing to go through, and also, somehow, one of the things that pulled that team together in a way I don’t think anything else could have.

Losing It, and Bringing It Back

Honestly, we lost some of that for a couple of years. I think, without meaning to, everybody was trying to forget—not forget Jake, just forget the pain of it. It’s an odd thing to sit with as a coach.

When I became head coach, I made a decision: this is something we need to actively bring back into how we do things. Mental health isn’t separate from what we deal with on the field—we’re dealing with it constantly with these kids, on and off the field both. So we started small. How do we spotlight this? How do we make sure our kids get real training on how to recognize it, not just in others but in themselves?

That’s always the question I come back to as a coach: what’s bigger than soccer? Because there’s always something bigger than soccer, and that’s usually where the real work is.

That’s what I love about this game, honestly—it’s for anybody. We have kids who’ve never touched a soccer ball before and walk on and play for us. And we have kids who’ve basically had a ball at their feet since they could walk. Soccer doesn’t care where you started. Neither should any of the rest of it.

We Are All Jake, and We Know 500 Other Jakes

I don’t think of Jake specifically when I hear “Smiles for Jake.” I think of every other kid I know who’s gone through something. There are so many of them. Families having a hard time. Kids carrying things you’d never guess just by looking at them.

Sports, at their best, are for the underserved kids. That’s where we’re supposed to be. Jake, I didn’t get the chance to know all that well. But I know 500 other Jakes. If we can connect with even one of them, that’s the whole point.

It’s unfortunate that it had to be Jake. That’s terrible. But we’re doing this so there isn’t another one. 

One of our kids, Logan Carlson, lost both of his parents before his junior year—one to a complication from diabetes, one to cancer. It happened right around the time the weight of losing Jake was starting to fade a little for the team, and then Logan’s loss landed right on top of it. He’s one of the strongest, smartest young men I know. He’s given a TED Talk about what he went through. I remember taking our captains down for a US Bank Stadium tour, and Logan and I and two other captains ended up talking for three hours—about life, about what he’d felt, about what a team should be for each other. Those conversations happen all the time. And they come in different forms—sometimes it’s suicide, sometimes it’s cancer, sometimes it’s just how do you support a friend who’s struggling. These kids go through so much more than we did. Us 90s kids, we’d just put dirt on it and call it a day. The conversation looks different every time, but it always comes back to the same question: are you okay, mentally?

The Kids Who Remind Me Why

I could tell you a hundred of these stories.

We had a kid who managed for us, a freshman, full of energy, always having a good time. It wasn’t until one of our fundraisers that I found out he has a disease in his legs and feet, and that every single day, he has to soak his feet in a bath just to get the pain down to something manageable. I had no idea. And this kid still ran the entire length of practice with us, every day, day after day. I think about that a lot.

We had another player who had to re-teach himself how to walk because of a rare leg condition. I had a goalie who could barely stand up when I started coaching her in fifth grade—two left feet, still finding her footing even by ninth grade—and then something clicked, and I watched her make three saves on penalty kicks in a game we still somehow lost. I was stunned. That’s the kind of thing that keeps you doing this.

That’s the part people don’t always see about coaching. It’s not just drills and standings. It’s knowing which of your kids is quietly carrying something heavy, and making sure they know somebody sees them anyway. I tell our parents this at the end of every season: once a worry, always a worry. They’re now part of our family.

It’s not always the head coach who reaches a kid, either. Sometimes it’s an assistant coach who connects with a player in a way I never could. It can take five different people, five different relationships, before a kid finally feels safe enough to say something’s wrong. That’s why we try to give every single kid as many people around them as we possibly can.

This Year, We Gave Them Notebooks

This year we tried something new. In the past we’d do a single training session, maybe two hours, and a Smiles for Jake game. This year, we gave every player a journal.

It’s theirs. I don’t read it, and I don’t want to. They write about how practice went, how they’re feeling, whatever they need to get down on paper. They keep it after the season is over.

There’s a stigma that journaling is somehow a “girl thing,” and I think that’s just wrong. It’s a human thing. It’s a healthy way to release thoughts you don’t have anywhere else to put—including the hard ones, the days that aren’t good days. My real hope with this is that these guys grow up understanding that writing your feelings down isn’t weakness. It’s just something people do to take care of themselves.

“Journaling is such a human thing to do. It’s not just a girl thing—it’s a people thing. My hope is that these guys grow up understanding that.”

A Night Just for Awareness

Every year we hold a Smiles for Jake night at one of our games. This year, the game is Thursday, September 24th. It’s simple, honestly. The mascot comes out, the team wears their Smiles for Jake shirts, we play a message about 988 a few times so kids hear it and remember it. We let the other team’s coach know ahead of time, so it becomes something bigger than just our own sideline—a little bit of cross-community awareness.

We don’t ask for money. It’s not a fundraiser. It’s just a genuinely beautiful night of soccer, doing something Jake loved, and reminding everybody that it’s okay to not be okay—cliché as that sounds. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve gotten to do as a coach.

What I’m Chasing This Season

On the field, we’ve got some realistic goals this year. We’d like to land a fourth or fifth seed heading into sections, finish somewhere in the middle of the conference, get back to around .500 as a team. We’ve got a solid group of kids, and it’s already been fun watching how this year’s group comes together—every year the dynamic is different.

But if you ask me what the goal actually is, every single season, it’s not about the seed or the record. My goal every year is to make sure we connect with every single kid—that they feel seen, wanted, and loved. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Winning is good. But my job, and the job I try to empower every one of our coaches to do, is making sure every kid on that roster knows somebody’s paying attention to them as a person, not just as a player.

What’s Next

I think the next step for Smiles for Jake is getting more student-led movements going, especially starting at the middle school level. Right now that’s the piece I think we need to get better at—not just relying on staff and coaches to carry it, but giving students real ownership of it themselves.

I don’t know if that mindset exists yet throughout the rest of the school outside of sports. I think there are pockets of real effort, but not enough yet—and I don’t think that’s anyone’s fault. I think it comes from coaches, it comes from teachers, it comes from people empowering other people to do good things. If we can empower students to do good, that empowers their parents to do good too. I think it’s a domino effect, a ripple that just keeps going once it starts. There’s always more that can be done. It’s hard—teaching is so much harder than coaching, honestly, and I feel for every teacher and counselor doing this work without the built-in connection a locker room gives you for free.

I’d also like to start a real mentorship program someday—something where older players are paired intentionally with younger ones. It sort of happens naturally sometimes, between grades, without anyone planning it. I want to be more deliberate about it. I haven’t gotten there yet. Between everything else on my plate this season, I’m honestly a little overwhelmed just keeping up—but it’s something I want to build.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to with all of this, honestly: purpose. These kids need a purpose. Soccer gives a lot of them theirs. For someone else it might be football, or golf, or photography, or whatever club pulled them in. But it’s purpose that keeps a kid tethered to something instead of drifting. That’s what we’re really trying to give them—not just a game, but a reason to show up, and people who’ll notice if they don’t.

If I’m honest, I’m still searching for my own purpose too, some days. I found a piece of it through photography. I found a piece of it through coaching, through this sport. Maybe I have too many purposes, if that’s even a thing. But that search never really stops for any of us, kids or adults. I think that’s exactly why we keep doing this work.

How You Can Help

If you want to support this work, get involved with a Smiles for Jake event near you, or ask how your own team, club, or school could bring something like this into what you’re already doing. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s a night, a shirt, a message repeated a few times so it sticks. Sometimes it’s just handing a kid a notebook and telling them it’s theirs.

Smile on,

Nick

If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out. It’s okay to not be okay. Support Smiles for Jake’s mission by donating, volunteering, or bringing a Smiles for Jake night to your own team or school.