Along the West Bank of the Mississippi, directly across the way from downtown New Orleans, there’s a levee that rises up beside the riverbank. At the top, about 40 feet up a steep, grassy hill, the skyline of the French Quarter unfurls into clear view over the river.
To run up the levee and gaze upon that view of downtown was something of a rite of passage for kids in the neighborhood. But to the boys trained by Clyde Alexander, it was sacred ground. They called it Mecca, and every week, they came to the same stretch of levee next to an abandoned warehouse where Mardi Gras floats were once built.
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Six years ago, before he was seen as a budding star at USC, Jahkeem Stewart stood at the base of that levee in Algiers on a muggy day, drenched in sweat. He was only 12 years old at the time, much younger than any of the other kids Alexander was training. He also happened to be 6-foot-4 and 360 pounds, bigger than any kid he’d ever seen at that age.
It didn’t require much imagination to see how scouts would one day declare him the rare defensive line prospect worthy of the word “generational.” Or how Stewart’s path, starting that day on the levee, would eventually lead him to USC, where his impact as a freshman was felt as soon as he joined the Trojans’ front.
But Alexander saw enough talent squandered in New Orleans to know that size and strength alone couldn’t ensure a ticket out. It’s why he was skeptical when a local travel coach contacted him, raving about a huge sixth grader he knew had the tools to be great. Video clips showed Stewart’s combination of size, strength and speed was unstoppable.
“The one thing you can’t teach on Planet Earth is size,” Alexander says. “What he has, that’s just God-given.”
What the coach couldn’t see on tape was whether Stewart had the rest of what it took to reach his ceiling.
That’s where the levee came in. Alexander’s athletes would run his pass rushing drills up the hill’s steep incline. That way, when they returned to flat ground, they’d learned to “move at a different frequency.”
The levee also had the power to reveal otherwise unseen intangibles. So before Alexander added any new pupil to his “edge assassins” training program, he brought them to the hill for a workout. Then he’d put them through hell.
Years of sweat accumulated in that soil as Alexander sent local kid after local kid up the levee and onto a college roster. But a 12-year old? Could he really keep up? “My program wasn’t exactly beginner level,” Alexander said.
Defensive lineman Jahkeem Stewart, left, stands beside his coach and mentor Clyde Alexander.
(Courtesy of Clyde Alexander)
Any doubt he might have had disappeared that first day on the levee. No matter how hard he pushed, Stewart kept going. Up and down and up and down he went. At one point, Stewart stepped away to vomit, took a sip of water then immediately returned to the drill.
“It was a telling moment of who he was,” Alexander said. “He just wouldn’t quit.”
When the workout was finally over, Stewart laid on the grass, drenched in sweat, gasping for air.
“So, you coming tomorrow?” Alexander asked him.
Stewart sensed the doubt in his voice. But he came back that next day — and kept coming back after that. Over the next six years, Alexander would help mold Stewart from a 12-year old giant into a defensive line prospect considered by some to be among the best of his generation. Along the way, the two of them formed a bond much closer than player and coach.
“He’s my mentor,” Stewart says of Alexander. “He’s done everything for me ever since.”
Together they blazed a path for Stewart unlike any other top prospect before him, trading the conventional climb through high school football for a professional training regimen that led him to leave high school a full year early despite having played in just 12 varsity football games.
The decision was an extraordinary step and wasn’t without its dissenters in New Orleans. Across college football, not everyone was sure what to think about a top prospect with scant real game experience.
But now that Stewart has landed at USC, glimpses of his extraordinary talent are already showing and the same questions are coming to mind that Alexander wondered back on the levee.
Is Jahkeem Stewart ready for all of this? And if so, how far can his talent take him?
“It didn’t take long for people to know a young Beyoncé could sing,” he says. “It didn’t take a lot of seeing Michael Jackson dance with the Jackson 5 to know that he would be a star.
“Some people,” Alexander says, “they just have it.”
When Stewart first started training with Alexander, he was accustomed to dominating on the defensive line. The problem was, to that point, he’d never needed to work that hard for it. He’d always been bigger, faster and stronger than anyone across from him.
Alexander doesn’t mince words. “Jahkeem was extremely lazy,” he said. “He didn’t know how to work.”
But he’d learn quickly with Alexander, training alongside much older, more mature players. Mostly because he had no other choice. On the levee, there were no accommodations made for the youngest among them. If anything, Myron Green says, it was probably the opposite in Stewart’s case.
“He was a big baby at first,” said Green, a 6-foot-5, 305-pound defensive tackle who was seven years older than Stewart and playing junior college ball at the time.
Defensive lineman Jahkeem Stewart, left, stands beside his coach and mentor Clyde Alexander after the Under Armour All-America Game at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Fla.
(Courtesy of Clyde Alexander)
“We had to rough him up, toughen him up. Every drill, we tried to beat him.”
By the time Stewart reached the eighth grade, when Alexander first unleashed him on the camp circuit, the tables had clearly turned. Stewart’s body was transformed. He was two inches taller and 60 pounds lighter. And he’d spent the past year learning the game at a level far beyond his peers. He had pass rush moves at his disposal and a first step that was lethal at his size.
So that summer, a dozen or so of Alexander’s “edge assassins” packed into a rented sprinter van packed into a rented sprinter van for a traveling camp tour. They called themselves the “Jump Ball Boys”. And wherever they went, Stewart seemed to turn heads. Green remembers one trip, to Oxford, Miss., when Stewart “took over the whole camp.”
“He was 13 going against seniors,” Green says, “and he destroyed everyone.”
During another camp, Alabama coach Nick Saban stopped the entire proceedings to ensure he could watch Stewart’s one-on-one pass-rush reps. He ended up offering Stewart a scholarship afterward.
“After Nick Saban gave him the stamp, I didn’t really need to hear anything else,” Alexander says.
Defensive lineman Jahkeem Stewart, left; then-Alabama coach Nick Saban, center; and coach Clyde Alexander pose for a photo during a visit to the Alabama campus.
(Clyde Alexander)
Had Saban not retired, Alexander wonders if Stewart might’ve ended up at Alabama. But before he’d even enrolled in high school, Stewart had his choice of almost every major program in college football. Most recruiting sites already considered him to be the top prospect in his class.
He was all set to enroll that next fall at IMG Academy, the prep football factory in Florida, when Hurricane Ida tore through his family’s home that August, changing his course. Instead of leaving for Florida, he moved in full-time with Alexander and chose to enroll at St. Augustine High, where Alexander was an assistant.
But transfer rules barred him from playing varsity football as a freshman. So St. Augustine did the only thing it could do to get Stewart game experience: It played him on junior varsity.
The results were predictably ridiculous — and, in a few cases, borderline dangerous.
“He looked like a literal man amongst boys, like someone had let a wild animal loose,” Alexander says. “The offense literally couldn’t run a play.”
Most weeks they had to sit Stewart by halftime.
“Whenever I went out there, these little kids were getting hurt,” Stewart says. “I’m looking at their mommas, and their mommas are looking at me, like, ‘You’re a freshman!?’
When he was finally cleared to play varsity the next season, the results weren’t all that different. As a sophomore at St. Augustine, Stewart piled up 85 tackles and 20 sacks. They had to limit his reps during the week so St. Augustine could practice its offense.
To that point, Alexander said they never discussed Stewart skipping his senior year and reclassifying to the class of 2025. It was exceedingly rare that defensive linemen opted for that route, given the physical maturity required of the position.
But it was impossible to ignore how easy it looked for him as a sophomore. Alexander had always gone to great lengths to keep raising the bar for Stewart — whatever it took to keep him from getting complacent. So when Stewart came to him curious about reclassifying, he knew he couldn’t hold him back.
“If I didn’t think he was ready, I would’ve shut that down,” Alexander said. “But you’re playing in the hardest division in the state and you literally just ran through it like a hot knife through butter.”
St. Augustine wasn’t as supportive. Alexander says he believes that the school deliberately dragged its feet, making it as difficult as possible for Stewart to leave early.
The situation got ugly. Then finally in August, after the season had already started, Stewart’s bid to reclassify was officially denied by the school.
So he left St. Augustine. Coaches from some of the country’s best football programs burned up Alexander’s phone, offering Stewart spots on their own rosters.
Stewart chose to stay in New Orleans, enrolling at Edna Karr High, Alexander’s alma mater in Algiers. He still hoped that he might play that season.
When the final word came down, Alexander brought Stewart to the top of the levee. They sat together on a bench overlooking the Mississippi — and both of them cried.
The Louisiana High School Athletic Association had ruled him ineligible for a second time due to its transfer rules. His high school career was over. It would be another year before he suited up again for a football game.
The news was devastating. “Like my life was being taken away,” Stewart says.
But after a week or so, Alexander came to him with a plan. They would double down on training. If he couldn’t play a final high school season, they would spend that time preparing like he was already a pro.
So while Edna Karr’s team practiced, Stewart worked on his own in the weight room. A nutritionist crafted him a diet plan. A movement specialist worked on his body mechanics. He saw the same chiropractor as NFL stars Joe Burrow and JaMarr Chase, and he even got obsessed with hyperbaric chambers — eventually buying one for his apartment at USC with his name, image and likeness endorsement money.
USC defensive lineman Jahkeem Stewart recovers a fumble during the Trojans’ loss to Illinois at Memorial Stadium on Saturday.
(Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
To refine his craft, in addition to sessions with Alexander, Stewart began studying and training with BT Jordan, the pass-rush coach who works with NFL stars Maxx Crosby and Micah Parsons, among many others.
Jordan doesn’t typically train high school players. But he knew the first day with Stewart that he was working with something special — and not because of his freakish measurables. During one session, he watched Stewart offer pass rush suggestions to an eight-year NFL veteran … who actually took his advice.
“I ain’t never seen a high school kid that smart,” Jordan said. “It was shocking to me.”
As far as Jordan is concerned, he had nothing left to learn from dominating high school offensive linemen. In fact, he thinks sitting out his last season “was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to (Stewart).”
Eric Henderson felt the same. A native of New Orleans and a former high school teammate of Alexander, he’d been following Stewart’s rise since well before he was hired as the Trojans’ defensive line coach. When he was considering leaving the Rams staff to join USC in early 2024, he called Alexander with a request.
“Hey look,” Henderson told him, “if I come (to USC), I’m gonna need the young fella.”
Just before the official announcement, he called Alexander again. “When can you get up here with him?” Henderson asked.
They’d encountered coaches throughout the recruiting process who fawned over Stewart and his potential. But Alexander knew Stewart needed someone who demanded more from him, like Alexander always had.
There were other reasons to sign with USC, too. Among them a significant NIL deal, as well as a chance to build a brand in L.A. like that of his role model, Shaquille O’Neal. But their trust in Henderson tipped the scales.
“Greatness doesn’t come from being comfortable and he’s as tough on Jahkeem as anyone,” Alexander said of Henderson.
Glimpses of that greatness have been on display ever since. Teammates have marveled at his pass-rush skills. Coaches have raved about his football IQ.
USC defensive lineman Jahkeem Stewart and teammates react after making a play against Michigan State on Sept. 20 at the Coliseum.
(Luke Hales / Getty Images)
“When I go to heaven, I’m going to ask God why he didn’t build me like that?” joked defensive line coach Shaun Nua.
Added Henderson, “I mean, the things we’ve seen from this kid already, you’re like, ‘What the hell?’”
Last month, against Michigan State, Stewart burst into the backfield so quickly during one play that the running back had just received the handoff as he leveled him. It reminded Alexander of Stewart’s junior varsity days.
And to think, Alexander says, he still has so much higher to climb from here. He thinks back to the first time he met Stewart, as a 360-pound sixth-grader, before he’d seen Stewart run the levee.
That night, over dinner, Stewart told him he planned to win a Heisman Trophy, a feat no defensive lineman has ever accomplished. After that, he said, he planned to make the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Perhaps, at the time, it all sounded a bit far-fetched for a 12-year old. “But,” Alexander says, “the thought never even crossed my mind to tell him that’s not possible.”
He’s seen no reason, in the six years since, to start thinking any different. Not when Stewart just keeps climbing, outpacing any reasonable expectations along the way.
“It might sound crazy, since technically he’s still supposed to be in high school,” Alexander continues.
“But some kids, they’re just special, man.”
