Two younger siblings making their mark on the brotherhood that fuels LBJ football team

Before Latreveon McCutchin made his mark as a high school football player, he was a celebrated neighborhood athlete with friends on every street corner.

The area boys would find open fields, courts, alleys, driveways or vacant streets to play whatever sport was in season. They made touchdowns in the fall and baskets in the winter. They also built unbreakable relationships that remain strong today.

This is the story of the LBJ football team, an exceptional urban school built in 1974. It is one of a few Central Texas schools that has been a traditional winner from the get-go. That includes the 2022 team that has won its last five games by an average score of 81-3.

But there is more to LBJ football than lopsided scores and Jaguar tradition. They treat each other like a band of brothers. Lifelong friends. They know they represent their community when they strap on their purple helmets every Friday night during the fall.

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Jahmal Fenner knows plenty about community involvement. The LBJ head coach was a standout at Reagan High (now Northeast) before embarking on a successful college career at UTEP. He came back to East Austin because his roots are deep.

“A lot of the kids on this team grew up together,” Fenner said during a practice break this week. “That’s usually what you see in Texas high school football programs. It’s like a brotherhood. That’s what we have in our program. We embrace that as a coaching staff and the players embrace it as well.”

That includes McCutchin, who is described as a “late bloomer” by his coach. A slender 5-foot-9 linebacker during his freshman season, he has emerged as a sturdy 6-3 defensive playmaker as a senior with a big future ahead of him. His older brother Latrell, a 2021 LBJ grad, is a sophomore defensive back at the University of Southern California.

Latreveon always wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps. He had help with good genes. According to Fenner, his father (Tree McCutchin) and mother (Reyna Lewis) were outstanding high school athletes at Reagan.

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“When I came here as a freshman, people would just call me Latrell’s little brother,” Latreveon said. “I couldn’t do anything but live up to the name he brought here.”

McCutchin recently decommitted from Minnesota. He is weighing offers from Houston, North Texas, UTSA, Navy, Rice, Tulane and Louisiana Tech.

Junior strong safety/wide receiver Fatu Mukuba tells a similar story. His older brother, Andrew, earned freshman All-America honors as a Clemson safety in 2021. This year Andrew recorded first college interception on Clemson’s first play of the season opener against Georgia Tech.

“Our team here is very close,” Mukuba said. “We’ve known each other since we were playing with the Steelers (area recreational team). I feel like we’re going to be even better than we were last year. There are a lot of dynamic athletes out here.”

It will be a tall order to be better than the 2021 Jaguars, the first team in school history to reach a high school state championship game. They finished 15-1 but a 38-21 loss in the Class 4A Division I title game still stings. An upgrade to Class 5A DII this year will make the journey to state a bigger challenge.

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It remains to be seen whether LBJ will meet the 5A challenge. After closing the regular season Thursday night against Crockett at Burger Stadium, the Jaguars begin their playoff journey.

The common thread to LBJ’s recent success is Fenner, a hands-on coach who demands success. He played cornerback at Reagan in 2001 and was also part of the school’s basketball and baseball teams. He was named Reagan’s athlete of the year as a junior and as a senior.

Fenner took over the LBJ program when one of his mentors, coach Andrew Jackson, died after battling esophageal cancer in December 2017 at age 50.

“Coach Fenner is more than just a coach to me,” Mukuba said. “We can go up to him with personal problems, anything that we need to talk about.”

Fenner knows that mentoring young men is part of his job description. He has often said he is most proud of what the Jaguars become after they graduate from high school. The same holds true for LBJ veteran basketball coach Freddie Roland, who boasts more about his former players’ success in the work force than he does about the overstuffed trophy cases in his office.

“Everything here is centered around relationships and bonds and trusts,” Fenner said. “That’s what we try to symbolize at LBJ.”

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Latreveon McCutchin, Fatu Mukuba following in footsteps at LBJ