Family Ties

Pilgrim's Grant has football roots

Posted 10/23/14

Darren Grant knows the ins and outs of the Pilgrim football team’s defensive scheme better than most. He’s also a captain as a junior, one of the clear leaders of an improving team. …

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Family Ties

Pilgrim's Grant has football roots

Posted

Darren Grant knows the ins and outs of the Pilgrim football team’s defensive scheme better than most. He’s also a captain as a junior, one of the clear leaders of an improving team.

Considering his football mentors, it’s no surprise.

Darren’s father, Bob Grant, is a longtime coach who’s now serving as Pilgrim’s defensive coordinator. Darren’s step-father, Chris Wrench, who’s coached for nearly a decade with Warwick PAL, is also on the Pilgrim staff as an offensive assistant.

“It’s kind of like a legacy,” Darren Grant said.

Athletes typically leave family coaches behind once they hit the high-school ranks. When Wrench and Bob Grant joined the Pilgrim staff last year, Darren got a double dose.

It was different in the beginning and everyone’s hyper-aware of avoiding favoritism, but mostly, challenges have been few and far between. It’s been a positive for everybody.

Wrench, who played high school football at La Salle, started coaching with Warwick PAL’s youth program. His main focus has always been the offensive line, and Darren has always been a skill player. When Wrench joined the Pilgrim staff, the setup was the same. He coaches offensive line. Darren plays linebacker. They talk football at home – Darren lives with his mother, Jennifer, and Wrench – but there isn’t much interaction on the field.

“He just started playing some tight end, so I deal with him a little bit,” Wrench said. “But honestly, I don’t coach him much directly.”

When Grant is at linebacker, it’s different – and it’s where the football legacy really shines through. Bob Grant is a defensive guy through and through, and Darren is following in his footsteps.

“Sometimes we’ll be talking about defense, and he’ll say I know his defense better than him,” Darren said. “For my knowledge of the game, I think it’s an advantage.”

Darren considers playing in his dad’s defense a privilege. It was something his older brothers, Robert and Jerome, both did when Bob coached at a high school in Massachusetts.

To continue the tradition, Bob hooked on at Pilgrim despite the fact that he lives 89 miles away in Belchertown, Mass., and teaches in Bloomfield, Conn. He makes his three-state drives daily.

The road to Pilgrim began for Bob when he took a break from his high-school coaching duties to be there for Darren’s Warwick PAL games.

“I just wanted to watch,” he said.

When the league needed a coach, Bob was asked to help out. He later returned to the Bloomfield High School football team but made the journey back to Warwick last year, joining head coach Tom O’Connor’s staff at Pilgrim.

“It’s hard,” Bob said. “I like being dad and my whole intent was just to watch. We have a rule – I’m coach on the field, and in the car, I’m dad. I have to wear two hats.”

But it’s been fun, too. Darren had two interceptions in a win last week and is one of the team’s leading tacklers.

And together, the Grants are helping lead a rapidly-improving defense. The Pats have given up some big scores in games that got away from them, but they’ve played well in a pair of league victories. Against Narragansett last week, the unit pitched a shutout in the second half, paving the way for a fourth-quarter comeback and the team’s best win of the season.

A veteran line and a strong linebacking corps have led the way for the defense. It’s been a team effort.

“We executed when the other team didn’t,” Darren said of the Narragansett win. “Nobody got down. We came through together.”

The defense will get perhaps its toughest test this week, when the Pats visit unbeaten Middletown. The Islanders have out-scored league opponents 149-36.

“The Wing-T, they run it to perfection,” Bob Grant said. “It’s all about deception, so we have to be totally disciplined. Everybody has a key, everybody has an assignment. We have to stay disciplined. We’ve got to contain them.”

It won’t be easy, but Pilgrim will keep pushing no matter what happens. The goal is to make the playoffs and take a big first step in a major turnaround.

The family is on board.

“We’re trying to turn this program around, turn it into something to be reckoned with,” Wrench said.

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