Inside the cavernous gym sitting inconspicuously off Sixth Avenue North just west of downtown Birmingham, athletically gifted young men and women sprint intensely through drills, jump atop ridiculously high wooden boxes, crack pitches inside a netted batting cage, and squat, deadlift and power thrust bars laden with iron.

Leonard Stephens, owner of the massive Step-by-Step Sports Training facility, sees himself in each of them. He sees what was once his journey in their dreams.

Coach L, as he’s known by everyone, is a 34-year-old married father of three children. Yet you’re likely to find him at his gym any day the door is open because he doesn’t want any “Stepper,” as he calls those who train with him, to experience the kind of loneliness he endured in his youth.

“I see myself in every last one of them,” Stephens says. “That’s why it’s tough for me to take a day away from them. “I’m scared that they feel alone, too. Even if mom and dad are there, I don’t leave it up to mom and dad to be there for them. I feel like I owe it to them to be there, too.”

Stephens sees their life challenges because of his own, as the son of a 16-year-old mother who gave up a promising basketball future to care for him and an 18-year-old father who was “more or less in the streets.” Growing up, he yo-yo’d between mom in Collegeville and dad on the south side of Bessemer and in the Brown Springs and Gate City communities.

“She did the best she could to raise me,” Stephens tells me one recent afternoon inside his office at the facility. “She worked two jobs. I grew up with my mother, but I also feel like I grew up with a big sister.”

He sees the athletic potential of those there, sees their possibilities and promise because he once possessed them, too. Until he didn’t.

Until, as a speedy freshman running back at Jacksonville State, Stephens shredded his knee in 2011. He was the first in his family to go to college directly out of high school without obtaining a GED. Which is maybe why, in part, the 73-mile journey from home was still a leap.

“Football was my outlet,” Stephens says. “Being the first person in my family who had success at that level in sports, I don’t think I had the push I needed. I wasn’t as locked in as I should’ve been and ended up tearing my ACL, MCL and meniscus all at the same time.”

Stephens sees, too, the pain in his young clients — physical and emotional. Because he held onto his own for so long.

“A lot of people looked at football as a place for pain, I looked at it as a place to release pain,” Stephens says, quietly. “I was an angry kid, and I would either fight or take it out on somebody on the football field.”

Because he sees himself in them, maybe they see themselves, too, in Stephens.

He is perhaps the region’s preeminent trainer of young athletes — a true influencer in this unique time of seismic change in collegiate sports. Starting as young as five years old, clients train with him and his staff for football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, soccer, track and field and even boxing.

Last year, Stephens and his staff trained most of the starters for the Alabama 6A state champion A. H. Parker Thundering Herd, as the Birmingham school won its first-ever state title.

Coaches and recruiters from top football programs nationwide regularly pilgrimage to the facility. Kalen DeBoer (Alabama) and Hugh Freeze (Auburn) have visited, as have Kirby Smart (Georgia), Brent Venables (Oklahoma), Josh Heupel (Tennessee), Butch Jones (Arkansas State and Eddie Robinson (Alabama State).

Step-by-Step football clients are peppered throughout most major conferences and some have drawn teammates to Birmingham to train with Stephens. Four years ago, a talented group helped elevate the program on social media as players from the gym earned college commitments. Coaches started posting about the gym on social media: #StepbySteptoAuburn, #StepbySteptoTennessee.“It became a thing,” Stephens recalled.

Twelve members of that group are prepping for the upcoming National Football League draft. Among them are Auburn defensive tackle Jayson Jones, Colorado safety Cam’ron Silmon-Craig, Southern Methodist defensive tackle Mike Locket, and Alabama State teammates safety Amon Scarbrough and cornerback James Burgess.

“My guys,” Stephens says. “Guys who’ve been with me at least from high school through college. Guys who truly embody Step-by-Step, from how they help people, how they handle business every day, how they handle academics, how they handle everything.”

AN ABSENT FATHER

Some debts are hard to repay. Almost impossible.

Stephen’s pain and loneliness stem from his relationship with his father, from the man’s sporadic presence in his son’s youth. From broken promises. If he retrieved Leonard for the occasional weekend, the boy would spend most of those days with his paternal grandmother.

“I’d wake up on Saturday mornings, and see him laying next to me, but two hours later he’s out the door and I’d see him the following day before it’s time for me to go back to mom.”

Grandmother was a praying woman. She took her grandson — “I was a little red-headed boy” — to the first service at First Baptist Church in East Lake, to Sunday School, then to the second service. They ate dinner at church, then went to Bible study, Sunday School prep or choir rehearsal.

“I was at church from about 7:30 Sunday morning until about 3:30 in the afternoon because she had to get me back to my dad and he’d take me to my mom,” Stephens says with a laugh. “My first introduction to God was through my grandmother.”

Stephens’ maternal grandmother was also a “heavy prayer.” He credits his success “as a businessman, as a father, as a husband” to her answered prayers.

She died at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her death was officially attributed to pneumonia contracted following quadruple bypass surgery. “We think it was COVID,” he says.

She lived directly across the street from Leonard and his mother and cared for him while her daughter worked. It was a dangerous community, Stephens told me.

“Shooting and different stuff would be going on,” he said. Once someone tried to kick in the door. Stephens, his siblings and his grandmother pushed the couch and other furniture against the door. He recalled “leveraging some furniture on my back and my foot against the sofa so nobody would kick the door in.”

Some debts are hard to repay. Almost impossible.

Last year, Stephens paid in full.

Paid with a multiplicity of emotions, with growth, understanding and “a lot of wins I didn’t realize were wins until moments of death forced me to reflect,” he said.

His clients’ success didn’t prevent Stephens from being hard on himself. “I’m always looking at what I didn’t do or what I could have done to make this better, and don’t look at the reward of what I’m actually doing to help kids.”

Because he had so little help himself. Even as his father sought to reconnect in his son’s later years, Stephens wasn’t always receptive. When Step-by-Step opened on the west side six years ago in a neglected building that needed much work, his father occasionally dropped by to help paint.

“I couldn’t process it then as help,” Stephens says. “I was looking at it like, ‘You need to do this because you didn’t help me do nothing else.’ I also viewed it as being his neighborhood where he got respect from the drug game.”

In more recent years, his father often reached out again. “Can you bring me some food?” he would ask.

“Most of the time I would take him something to eat, but didn’t stay because I was busy at work, taking kids on college visits,” Stephens told me. His father also became more intentional with his grandchildren — Stephens’ children — sitting on his back porch with them when his son brought them over.

When his son felt he had the time.

“A lot of it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but a lot of it was because I didn’t want to,” Stephens confessed. “I was a 33-year-old man holding on to stuff for 33 years.”

He began to see the need to let go last June when his father went into the hospital. Over the next months, his health precipitously declined. A seizure. Brain surgery. There were some good days, some worse. Then pneumonia.

“It’s probably one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever experienced,” Stephens says. “I went from having communications with somebody in the last two weeks of their life to someone who wouldn’t talk at all.”

Before his father stopped speaking, Stephens walked into the hospital room. “You looking good,” his father said, though struggling to breathe. Stephens thought dad was flirting with the nurse behind him. “Pop, you trippin’,” he said. “I’m talking to you,” the father said.

“You never told me that before,” Stephens quickly replied and almost immediately regretted.

“I felt guilty for telling him how I felt,” he said. “Sometimes somebody can try to express an emotion or do something for the very first time, and if it’s not received the right way, it can make them put a guard up and feel like they don’t want to ever say it again. In that moment, he was saying, ‘I’m proud of you.’ I was like, ‘In 33 years I’ve never heard this.’”

Later that day, Stephens’ father said to his son: “Don’t leave me.” A tear rolled down the man’s cheek. “I love you,” he added.

“That’s the first time he ever told me he loved me sober,” Stephens says, “and I felt it.”

Later Stephens’ father was sedated and put on a ventilator. He never woke up.

In the room soon thereafter, the son spoke to the father. “I know you can hear me,” Stephens said. Then he paused. “I told myself, ‘You’ve got to forgive him. Not just for him, for you.”

“Man, I forgive you,” he said to his father. “You’ve been the best dad you know how to be. Your dad wasn’t there for you. I love you.”

“For me to say I love you to him,” Stephens told me, “I was like, ‘Dude, you spent 33 years of your life holding onto anger of the little boy. You couldn’t even realize that over the last three years of his life, he’d been trying to spend time with you. So, all of that not feeling wanted, feeling abandoned, feeling like he didn’t love you, that he didn’t care about you — he was trying to show you that. But you were so stuck on pain from your past that you blocked yourself from it.’

“In that moment, I learned a life lesson: Try to have way more grace for people. Have grace for people that mean something to you and try not to hold a grudge because it’s not worth it.”

His father died on August 31, after 33 days in the hospital.

“I’m just like, ‘Jesus, 33’….L, you’re 33.”

Stephens didn’t cry for his father, not until later, after telling his grandmother and her brother, “He’s gone.”

“Thank you,” the uncle said, “for being strong enough to be there by yourself and handle it.”

By yourself.

That’s when Stephens broke. “My problem has never been what to do or not do,” he said. “It’s always feeling abandoned and feeling alone. In that moment, I felt like I did my whole life — when playing with cousins who were with their dads — I’m alone. I just have Granny.

“I have an abandonment issue, feeling abandoned by people I feel are supposed to have my back.”

“Alone” reared again at the funeral. Stephens comforted his grandmother as she broke down over her son’s casket — her “baby boy,” he told me. Once she returned to her seat, Stephens remained standing by the casket. “In front of everybody just watching me stand there,” he remembers. “Alone.”

Following the funeral, Stephens’ grandmother told him her son had called her every day. “You gonna call me?” she asked.

He did, every day. On Thursdays, he called from the Hueytown cemetery where his father was buried. She was the only person he spoke to while there. “She was the only one who made me feel comfort when I was there,” he said.

In his last years, Stephens’ father, who had not attended day-long church with his mother and son, often carried a Bible. “Sickness,” Stephen says, “brought him closer to God because God knew He wanted him with Him.”

Two-thousand-twenty-four wasn’t done.

Two weeks after her son’s death, the Saturday after her grandson’s October birthday, she had a stroke. “Granny missed her boy,” Stephens says.

Every year, she had called and sang “Happy Birthday” to her grandson. Last year, the rendition was shorter. Stephens chalked it up to age. “Not realizing,” he says now, “it was short because that was the end.”

For about a month, she was nonresponsive. Nonetheless while visiting her, Stephens said he spoke to her while rubbing her hand. “I kept saying, ‘Granny, Granny,’” he recalls. Once, she squeezed his hand, scrunched her shoulders, moved a little, then stopped. “That was her last time moving,” he said. “I’m the last person she responded to.”

Stephens cried more for her than for his father. “That sucks to say,” he admits.

THE NEGOTIATOR

Not surprisingly, because they do see so much of them in him, the Stephens trainees trust him. Trust him beyond developing their physical skills to help them navigate the new, ever-evolving economics and revolving door of college sports.

While not an agent, he’s negotiated with several college collectives — donor piggy banks that raise funds and pay athletes.He’s also launched Step-by-Step Sports Management and the Step-by-Step Foundation. So far he’s taken on two clients: Jones from Auburn, and Alabama defensive freshman lineman Jeremiah Beaman.

“Because my guys are my guys, I utilize information that I know to help them,” he said. “One leverage I have as a trainer is schools are going to want to have a relationship with me for years to come because I’m not going to stop having kids. We’re producing kids every year and our guys are top five, top ten in the country, it creates enough leverage for me so when I call a school to see how one deal worked out for a guy we can grow from there.”

Step-by-Step doesn’t receive any portion of an athlete’s collegiate payments, Stephens told me, but earns fees from management clients to produce events such as camps, charitable giveaways and other appearances.

The foundation has also hosted “Let’s Talk” mentoring events and a podcast to convey lessons for Steppers’ lives beyond the gym or playing field — lessons layered by his faith.

“If you don’t have true faith, if you don’t actually believe, if you don’t actually process things, then you won’t have clarity,” he says. “People pray for clarity, but they don’t always want to take the necessary steps to gain clarity.

“In this season of my life, God has said, ‘I’m gonna let you go through this storm, because ain’t nothing else I’ve done been able to get your attention, to show you that you can’t do this on your own.”

Last Christmas, the Step-by-Step Foundation produced the Big Beaman Bike Giveaway on behalf of Beaman, whom Stephens has trained since ninth grade.

“He’s like, ‘Coach you do that stuff; let me just play football,” Stephens says. “I called his mom and daddy. They said, ‘You do that stuff. We’re Just gonna be parents.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa, hold on. This is my first client.’”

BLOODLINE

Stephens only has one photograph with his father, taken when he was a toddler. Before his grandmother died, he asked for a photo of her husband, whom he’d met only briefly when a young child. His name was not Stephens. That was the last name of her first husband.

Bloodlines can be complicated, we all know. Stephens learned in the last couple of years that his biological grandfather was Eugene Jones. “Everybody knew Eugene,” Stephens says with a laugh. “Eugene was a big-time running back in his day, my dad was a running back. I come from a generation of running backs.”

He keeps the photo on his nightstand. He’s grateful that his grandmother remained alive long enough to “complete a puzzle nobody else could complete.”

A puzzle whose pieces he often sees now in the lives of those who train and dream with him just west of downtown.

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.