Homeless.

The sheer thought of the word makes you shudder and immediately count your blessings.

For Fort Worth Arlington Heights’ Leslie Adindu, it is his reality.

A family dispute culminating in his father’s move to New Orleans left Adindu without a place to live in Fort Worth.

The 19-year-old found himself living in a shelter.

It’s at this point where this story could go one of two ways: Adindu, down on his luck, could have simply thrown up his hands, torn up the cards he’d been dealt and faded into the background.

Or, or, he could have authored one of the most inspirational stories you’ll ever hear.

Guess which path Adindu chose?

“He didn’t know how to put pads on”

Arlington Heights defensive line coach Charles Perry won’t soon forget the first time he laid eyes on Adindu, who had moved to Texas from Nigeria with his father in the fall of 2019.

It was during PE class when Perry noticed a well-put-together 6-foot-1, 190-pound kid he didn’t recognize. Perry approached him about playing football; Adindu was more interested in soccer.

After some convincing, Adindu wound up playing junior varsity football as a junior on the defensive line.

“He didn’t know how to put the pads on,” said Arlington Heights head coach Phil Young. “He didn’t know the rules of the game, it was a clean slate.

“Think about it, you come across the world, to a new country, to play a new game. It’s tough and he just worked and worked, and he made some great strides as a junior.”

Then COVID-19 interrupted everything.

“We tried to keep tabs on our kids, do at home workouts and such, but we lost Leslie,” Young said. “He disappeared; we couldn’t reach him by cell phone, no one saw him, we thought maybe he just went back home to Nigeria where his mother still was.”

Adindu hadn’t gone back to Nigeria at all. It was around this time when he had the family dispute and his father moved to New Orleans.

He was homeless.