Kentucky was his dream school. After a tragedy, UK senior would settle for no less.
.jpeg "Zach Johnson, right, and his sisters Madison, bottom left, and Brittany, top left, lost their mother, Cindy, center, to a drug overdose during Zach’s seventh-grade year of middle school. Zach now is a senior football player at the University of Kentucky.")
Zach Johnson isn’t the first player who comes to mind when reflecting on the contributions of the 2020 Kentucky football team’s senior class. Heck, he’s not even the first senior specialist that fans would name (hello, Max Duffy).
But Johnson has been indispensable in a variety of roles in practice and on special teams. A former walk-on who earned a scholarship ahead of his sophomore season, he’ll play in his 44th career game, and his 36th straight, when the Wildcats take to Kroger Field for the final time this year on Saturday.
This season, in games, he’s primarily been a kick returner. He leads UK with 11 returns for 228 yards, his average of 20.7 yards per return ranking just outside the top 20 among all FBS players with double-digit returns. He recorded a career-long 58-yard return at Georgia last season, and in years prior gained a reputation as a hard-hitting tackler against opposing return men.
He’s listed on Kentucky’s roster as a defensive back, and in practice lives up to that designation on the scout team. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary, and it’s something at which he’s excelled enough that head coach Mark Stoops says a spot on next year’s team is open for Johnson if he wants to take advantage of the NCAA’s blanket eligibility waiver and come back for a sixth year in 2021.
“Here’s a guy who just goes to the scout team every day and he does it with a smile on his face and busts his tail to give ‘em the best look he can all day, every day” Stoops said during his radio show this week. “Yet then he goes out and has an impact (in games) because that’s his role. He accepts his role, he knows his role. ... We really look up to Zach and respect him.”
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His ‘Why’
Johnson, along with two of his sisters, grew up with their mother, Cindy, in California, Ky., a town in Campbell County whose total population hovers around the 100 mark. From the sounds of it, a good portion of them are Kentucky fans.
“Her whole side of the family bleeds blue so we would always sit there and watch the Kentucky football games and Kentucky basketball games,” Johnson told the Herald-Leader. “For Christmas we’d get UK gear from our grandparents and everything, so growing up I was a huge Kentucky guy. My mom, she’s the reason that I’m here today, because she really instilled all that in me and told me that I could one day come play here.”
By the time he was in middle school, Johnson had moved in with his father. Cindy struggled for years with an addiction to drugs, including painkillers. Johnson doesn’t know exactly what killed her, but Cindy died from an overdose while he was in seventh grade.
He was at football practice when it happened.
“I got home from practice and my dad and stepmom were just sitting on the couch in tears,” Johnson said. “I had no idea what was going on. You never think that day is gonna come when you hear news like that.”
It devastated him. Johnson was barely a teenager but was aware of what his mom had been going through, and of the toll it took on his family.
He thought she was on her way to recovery, though.
“She’d been clean for a couple months before she actually overdosed,” Johnson said. “I thought that we were kinda behind it, maybe, and things had maybe taken a turn for the better, but there’s always that itch that can turn out for the worst.
“And unfortunately it happened, in her case.”
Few teammates knew about his mother’s passing prior to a team meeting last season, held amid a losing skid, in which a few players spoke about their “why” in terms of playing football.
“That was pretty big for me, ‘cause I don’t really talk about it too much,” Johnson said. “Nobody ever thinks that you’re living without your mother or father. It’s not normal.”
Johnson will graduate in December with a degree in health promotion, and hopes to work in medical sales. He hopes to start volunteering with children who’ve experienced, or who could experience, the same heartbreak he did at a young age.
“If you look at me, I took my tragedy and turned into, I guess, the best-case scenario I could,” Johnson said. “I need to get into more of that.”
Senior Day
Johnson played prep football for Colerain High School in Cincinnati, lettering his final three years and starting for part of his junior season before doing so all of his senior season.
At that level he was recruited as a running back. Army and Navy both sought his services, in part because Colerain ran the triple option and they felt he’d be able to play right away at their academies. He had a spot at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., which has a Football Championship Subdivision program and is among the top-ranked academic schools in the country, waiting for him as well.
Those options weren’t afterthoughts, but Johnson knew for a while where he wanted to be, even if it wasn’t on scholarship. He followed his heart to the place his mom would have most loved watching him play.
“When she passed away, I just felt like I owed it to her and the rest of my family to try and fulfill that dream,” Johnson said. “Not only for her, but myself, too.”
Johnson walked on at Kentucky as part of the 2016 recruiting class, which featured two signees at his position who would go onto big things — A.J. Rose and Benny Snell. Jojo Kemp and Stanley “Boom” Williams also were still on the roster upon his arrival, so touches in the backfield were far from happening.
He worked with the running backs for two years before former special teams coordinator and safeties coach Dean Hood, now the head coach at Murray State, identified him as a hidden gem who could be deployed on special teams. The rest is history.
It isn’t the role he originally envisioned, but it’s his.
“For young guys coming in, they might look at special teams as something like, ‘Why am I on this? I want to be playing on offense, I want to be playing on defense,’ but at the same time, if you’re excelling on special teams, it makes the coach trust you more to put you on the field on offense and defense,” Johnson said. “You just gotta embrace that role and do what the team needs you to do, and eventually everything you reap is gonna come back to you and you’ll end up being successful.”
Cindy won’t physically be there on Senior Day, but she will take the field Saturday, just as she’d done 43 times before, when her son trots out there and does whatever UK’s coaching staff asks of him.
“It really taught me to step back in life,” Johnson said. “ … It made me a stronger person, but there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about her.”
Next game
South Carolina at Kentucky
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
TV: SEC Network
Records: Kentucky 3-6; South Carolina 2-7
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Series: South Carolina leads 18-12-1.
Last meeting: South Carolina won 24-7 on Sept. 28, 2019, at Columbia, S.C.
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This story was originally published December 1, 2020 at 4:28 PM.
