It was a Thursday afternoon, just weeks before the start of the 2025 season, when Coach Robert Garrett settled into a worn chair in Crenshaw High’s cramped training room. The space was cluttered and far from perfect, but it buzzed with purpose and grit. Garrett, in his signature shorts, ball cap, and black shades, carried the quiet authority of a man who commands respect.
“Ain’t too many people that look like me, with Black pigmentation, who’ve won 300 football games,” he said with a shrug. Just 10 wins shy of that milestone, the Crenshaw football coach was closing in on a rare feat.
“But right now, I am the winningest coach in CIF LA history,” he added. “And nobody in your lifetime will ever beat that record. I’m going to win 300 games. Only way I don’t is if I die-and the Lord won’t let that happen.”
That clarity, confidence, and unshakable belief in himself and his program have carried him through decades of adversity. This season, however, is testing him in ways no record or football game ever has.
Crenshaw football has endured the impact of a shrinking school. Where the Cougars football team once drew from thousands of students, enrollment has dropped to below 500, forcing Garrett to field rosters of barely 20 players against teams sometimes three times that size. “Last regular-season game, I played King Drew. King Drew’s got over 70 kids on their team,” he says.
He points to gentrification, the rise of charter schools, and a decades-old busing program that siphoned kids out of the inner city. The result is a program undercut at every turn yet still expected to uphold Crenshaw’s storied reputation. Garrett doesn’t waste energy railing against the inequities. “Who am I going to tell? Everybody got eyes like I got eyes,” he says, though the frustration is real. “I just need some players.”
Despite dwindling enrollment and systemic neglect, Garrett keeps coaching. Last year, his team barely had enough bodies to fill a roster. “We’ve got 18 players. It’s tough,” he says. “Hell, Lincoln Riley wouldn’t coach here. Jim Harbaugh wouldn’t coach here. Bill Belichick wouldn’t coach here with 18 players.” His voice strains, but his resolve doesn’t. “Perseverance,” he says. “You heard of perseverance?”
That resilience was forged long before he ever wore a whistle. “It’s called character, brother,” Garrett says, recalling lessons from his mother, who, as he puts it, “had an eighth-grade education but a PhD in life.” Growing up with eight brothers and hand-me-downs, he learned hard work and gratitude early. “I was grateful for those summer jobs. I could buy my own shoes. I know the struggle.”
Those lessons followed him onto the field. At Thomas Jefferson high school, he became an all-city offensive guard and team captain. “I made the line calls and helped the young quarterback with plays,” he remembers. By his senior year, he was drawing up plays on the board and doing what he calls “some quasi-coaching with the line during the week.”
“I wanted to coach. I wanted my own program-to work with kids, to help them. Because I know how I came up. I didn’t have too many mentors. I just wanted to help kids be better.”
His clarity left little to chance. Garrett took over Crenshaw’s B football team in 1986. By 1988, he was co-head varsity coach, and in 1992, Crenshaw won its first city title under his guidance.
But his influence went far beyond wins and banners. Coach Garrett left a lasting mark on players like Daiyan Henley, now a third-year linebacker and team captain with the Los Angeles Chargers, who still keeps in touch with his high school coach. Asked whether Garrett was a hard coach to play for, Henley doesn’t hesitate: “A thousand percent,” he says with a laugh, recalling the intensity and high expectations that shaped his time under Garrett.
“He was tough, caring, and stern. He’s someone I could definitely depend on… whether it was football or just life stuff,” Henley recalls. “He speaks his mind, and as a teenager, it’s hard. You don’t come across many truthful adults, and G is 100 percent truthful,” Henley admits with a smile. “He’s going to tell you the truth-what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling. You have to deal with it and make adjustments, because nothing he says is meant to hurt your feelings. Everything he says is to make you a better man. And I mean that-not just a better player, but a better man.”
By Henley’s senior year, he had no college offers, and his dreams of playing at the next level were slipping away. Garrett refused to accept that. “G man was like, ‘We have to get you an offer because you are the best athlete on our team,'” Henley recalls. Garrett put him all over the field-corner, safety, receiver, running back, even kicker-forcing scouts to take notice. “That was really why I got my one offer,” Henley says. “I had played quarterback my whole life, but he had me everywhere. I was still the starting quarterback; I just played different positions.” It was a relentless push, a calculated strategy-and, Henley believes, the difference between leaving high school overlooked and earning a college opportunity. It was a pattern for Garrett, who has spent decades turning raw talent into college and professional players.
Henley’s experiences illustrate one side of Garrett’s approach: the hard work, honesty, and mental toughness he instills in every player. For Garrett, however, success isn’t about individual stories-it comes from the deliberate, often unseen work that shapes a team from the inside out.
Before stepping on the field at Crenshaw, players must memorize and recite a six-stanza mantra called State of Mind. It’s taped by the training room door-faded, worn, but immovable, like the man who put it there.
The mantra opens with a challenge: “If you think you are beaten, you are. If you think you’ll lose, you’ve lost.” It closes: “The man who wins is the man who thinks he can.” For Garrett, it’s a philosophy he embeds in every player.
“A lot of kids here are in special ed. Educators have made them believe they can’t excel because of whatever learning disability tag they have,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s bull. You could do whatever you choose if you want to do it.”
He pushes players to defy the limits others have placed on them. “A lot of kids say, ‘Coach, I can’t do it.’ I say, no problem-no helmet, no pads. One hundred percent of them find a way. Not too many people do it like I do, because I want your mind, body, and soul.”
Garrett has led Crenshaw high school to seven Los Angeles City Section championships and one State championship, but when asked about his most fulfilling moment, he smiles and tells the story of meeting NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
“I had tickets to the Super Bowl in 2018,” Garrett recalls-the year after he won the Don Shula NFL high school Coach of the Year Award. “The morning of the game, I get a call: ‘Roger Goodell wants you and your wife to be his guest in his booth.’ At first, I thought someone was joking, but when I realized it was really his office, I said…yeah?”
For a coach who started simply wanting to work with kids, being honored by the NFL carried undeniable weight. “Because I know how I came up,” Garrett says. It was a moment when the highest office in the sport looked back at a high school coach from Crenshaw and said- you belong.
That reassurance is now being tested. Coach Garrett hasn’t been on the sideline to start the season and is out indefinitely. While details remain unclear and no reports indicate wrongdoing, due process must be respected. In a recent phone call, Garrett summed up his career-long commitment: “I have opened and closed for LAUSD for the last 45 years. I am the first one on campus and I’m the last one to leave.”
For a man whose life has always been defined by showing up, his absence is striking. Even so, Crenshaw has opened the season 3-1-a testament to a program whose identity remains intact even without its leader. Whether Coach Garrett returns to the sidelines this season or not, the foundation he built ensures the Cougars continue to play with the same grit, belief, and perseverance that have defined his career.