How the Middle of Nowhere Made Danny Woodhead an NFL Somebody

North Platte, Nebraska, is smack-dab in the middle of nowhere.

Denver is about four hours to the west. Omaha is roughly the same distance to the east. In between: ranches, prairie and Nebraska's Sand Hills, a vast dunescape left over from ancient glaciers. North Platte is remote, even by Nebraska standards. The big high schools from Omaha and Lincoln don't like to travel there for games. College recruiters rarely find their way there.

North Platte is an easy place to romanticize as the absolute middle of Middle America. Buffalo Bill Cody owned a ranch there. The historic Lincoln Highway cuts through the middle of town. World War II soldiers whistle-stopped in North Platte on their way to and from combat. North Platte sounds like part of the forgotten America of back roads and railway depots.

"The place where Danny Woodhead comes from is not for wusses," wrote ESPN.com's Elizabeth Merrill a few years ago. "The temperature hovers around 15 degrees below zero at dawn Wednesday, causing a frozen fog to settle over the Platte River and prompting a news piece on how to keep the cows warm. Breakfasts at the local diner are served with a blob of gray gravy, a giant sausage and a stern cardiologist's warning." 

Courtesy Jacob McCarthy

For Woodhead himself, the North Platte mythology can go a little too far. "It wasn't the stereotype that everyone thinks: You live in Nebraska, you slaughter your own cattle, then make your steaks from it," he said.

"People always ask me: 'Were you, like, a rancher or a farmer?' For being in North Platte, Nebraska, I was considered a city boy. I knew nothing about farming, nothing about ranching. I played sports and hung out with my friends."

"City boy" does not quite fit Woodhead, the Chargers running back who still slips the occasional "golly" into interviews. Woodhead is a product of North Platte, a small town where boys grow up to marry their ninth-grade sweethearts, eight-hour bus rides are part of everyday school life, and a three-sport all-state athlete can go all but overlooked by the NCAA, and then the NFL, for being a few inches too short and, perhaps, a few miles too far off the beaten path.

Pop Warner Options

Danny Woodhead was precocious when it came to sports, particularly football. "I remember Bobby Humphrey," Woodhead said when asked about his early football role models. Humphrey was a Broncos running back who had his last good season in 1990, when Woodhead was five years old. "I watched football from a young, young age."

Woodhead also played football from a young age. Childhood friend Jacob McCarthy remembers winning three local Pop Warner championships with Woodhead before the boys even reached their preteens. Woodhead was the quarterback, McCarthy the running back.

"Being from Nebraska, we did a lot of options, iso and sweeps," McCarthy said. The eight-to-10-year-old Woodhead, like the current Woodhead, was elusive, fiercely competitive and one of the smaller players on the team.

Though his father was an elementary school teacher, Woodhead was home-schooled, as was his older brother Ben and two younger siblings. Their mother did most of the teaching. Sports helped Woodhead make friends in the community.

"I knew people because of sports, and because my dad taught a lot of my friends," Woodhead said. "If people ask me if that was a positive or a negative, I would say it's 100 percent positive. I would do the same thing over again."

Those youth-league championships established a pattern for the Woodhead brothers, McCarthy and a small group of other young North Platte athletes and close friends. Autumn belonged to football, winter to basketball, spring to soccer. In the summer, Woodhead painted schools and houses with his father and vacationed on Lake McConaughy for a few days, but football camps and soccer tournaments ate up many summer weekends.

"It wasn't like now, when there are 10 tournaments per summer," Woodhead said. "It was four or so. But that's four weekends that you are traveling and staying places. After a while, you just want weekends at home."

In between school sports and summer sports, the boys played football in rocky sandlots and basketball in driveways. "There wasn't a lot to do in our town," McCarthy said. "If you weren't playing sports, you were at home, doing homework and going to bed."

Or perhaps you were on an endless bus ride to play more sports.

Community Essence

Wikimedia Commons

North Platte exists primarily because of its remoteness. The town was established by a Union Pacific railroad engineer looking for a place where trains could stop for water between the towns on the Missouri River in eastern Nebraska and the foothills of the Rockies. The town began as a "Hell on Wheels": Bars and brothels sprung up to serve the immigrant laborers building the tracks, then everything moved down those tracks to the next construction spot, leaving behind a dusty little community of settlers. Buffalo Bill built his ranch in North Platte so he could easily load his Wild West Show onto railroad cars and travel east.

North Platte is still a railroad town, with the giant Bailey Yard in the middle of the city. North Platte's history and identity as a place to stop briefly on the way to someplace more important became firmly established at the start of World War II. Ten days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, soldiers began passing through North Platte, heading west from army camps in Little Rock to unknown perils in the Pacific Theater. When trains stopped in North Platte for water and maintenance, volunteers from the town began providing meals and gifts (cigarettes, magazines) for the soldiers.

The famous North Platte Canteen was born. Volunteers from North Platte and nearby towns provided turkey dinners to soldiers passing through on Thanksgiving, called or wired messages home and performed other acts of kindness for the young men bracing for combat. The Canteen operated until 1946, providing the same services to victorious returning soldiers.

Jim Whitney, Woodhead's high school soccer coach, said the World War II experience defined North Platte. "It probably goes back to the North Platte Canteen. There's that spirit here, and everybody works together."

"It's the essence of a community," Whitney said. "I think that's where Danny got a lot of his attitudes."

Whitney remembers Woodhead and his siblings being heavily involved in their church, mentoring younger students in high school, and volunteering with the elderly. "This was in between being a tremendous student and an outstanding athlete," Whitney said.

It's a wonder Woodhead found time. North Platte is the only Class A high school in its section of Nebraska. Bus rides to road games in Omaha or Lincoln routinely took four hours each way, often on weekdays during basketball and soccer season. The players might leave school to pile into the bus at 10 a.m., get home at 1 a.m., go to school the next day, then do it all again two days later.

The long bus trips made every road game an endurance test, but they came with fringe benefits. "In soccer, the boys and the girls traveled on one bus together," McCarthy recalled. "That's how guys got girls a lot of the time."

Woodhead's wife, Stacia, was a North Platte soccer player. They met in ninth grade.

"My best friend and her best friend were dating. Next thing you know, we ended up dating," Woodhead said.

A few weeks later, Danny and Stacia attended the homecoming dance together. Eight years later, they were married.

North Platte did offer a little more for teenagers to do than go to school and form lifelong bonds during bus trips. It's a town of 25,000, with a multi-screen movie theater and fast-food restaurants. It also hosts NEBRASKAland, an annual fair featuring a rodeo and concerts. Woodhead remembers seeing Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Journey and other national acts when they made a stop in North Platte. 

It's not exactly Hell on Wheels, or even Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. But North Platte remains a common place to stop for a little hospitality in the middle of nowhere.

Field, Court, Track, Pitch

Nebraska cities are just big enough to have newspapers and just small enough for high school stars to regularly appear in those newspapers.

Danny Woodhead began making headlines as a high school sophomore in 2001. North Platte's star quarterback and running back were injured. Ben Woodhead, a senior, moved from receiver to quarterback. Danny moved from slotback to tailback. The brothers led the Bulldogs to the state championship game.

"It's more than I ever expected this year," Ben Woodhead said at the time. "With Danny, it's like a dream."

Coutesy the North Platte Telegraph

McCarthy recalled a defining moment from that season, a semifinal game in which Millard North lined up for a fourth-quarter field goal that would have ended North Platte's season. Coach Bob Zohner sent Danny Woodhead to block the kick. "He came off the corner real hot and caught part of the ball," McCarthy recalled. "His brother Ben received it in our end zone and returned it to our 40."

With 40 seconds left, Ben threw to Danny to get within field-goal range. "The throw was behind Danny, but he makes some crazy, behind-the-head catch," McCarthy recalled. McCarthy then kicked a 35-yard field goal for a 24-21 win.

Watching the Woodhead brothers work together on the gridiron was nothing new for older North Platte residents. Mark and Kent Woodhead, Danny and Ben's father and uncle, starred for the Bulldogs in the mid-1970s. Both then moved on to Chadron State College, a small-town, small-time program in the northwest corner of Nebraska.

North Platte lost to Millard West in the state final. Ben Woodhead went on to Chadron State. Danny attended a football camp at the college. Some prep teams attended the camp as a group, but Danny arrived alone. Chadron State coach Brad Smith assigned him to the Rapid City Central team from South Dakota.

"Their coach told me: 'I've got some good running backs. I don't know if we can get him many reps,'" Smith said. "Well, the very first team scrimmage we had, Danny carried the ball three times and I think he had over 100 yards. The coach looked at me, rolled his eyes and said, 'Can I take him back to Rapid City with me?'"

David G. Pierre/Associated Press/Associated Press

Smith wanted to reunite the second-generation Woodhead brothers to play for his Eagles. He knew the University of Nebraska was recruiting Danny, but only as a kick returner. Chadron State did not offer full scholarships at that time, only half scholarships and tuition deferment. Smith decided to make Woodhead the first person in the school's history to earn a full athletic scholarship.

"Danny was so special that we knew he would not let us down one bit," Smith said. "Of course, he didn't."

Woodhead accepted the scholarship. He then returned to the hardwood and the soccer pitch at high school. Woodhead averaged 25.1 points per game as a shifty basketball guard in his senior season. He had run track in his junior year to drum up recruiting interest, posting some excellent 100-meter dash times, but track was not as helpful or as fun as Woodhead hoped.

"People always say, 'Run track for football,'" Woodhead said. "But out of all sports, soccer might have been the best sport for athleticism."

Job Vigil (Courtesy North Platte Telegraph)

A return to soccer as a senior brought one final set of high school headlines. Woodhead led North Platte to the state tournament with 16 goals and seven assists. Trailing 3-0 in the final minutes of a tournament game against powerhouse Lincoln Southeast, Woodhead fed one teammate an assist, then scored on a header on a throw-in by McCarthy. Lincoln Southeast prevailed, but Woodhead was named the male Prep Athlete of the Year by the Lincoln Journal Star.

For Woodhead, abandoning the camaraderie of soccer and his lifelong friends to focus exclusively on football, even with a full scholarship and 2,000-yard season in his back pocket, made no sense.

"The funniest thing these days is parents having their kids play one sport," he said. "To me, that's the most ridiculous thing in the world. Let kids play as much as they want. Then they don't get burned out from sports. The best thing for me was playing different sports."

Keeping It Simple

Having been in the NFL for six seasons, played in 10 postseason games for three teams and caught a touchdown pass in Super Bowl XLVI, Woodhead has come a long way from what he jokingly calls his "glory days." But friends and former coaches who keep in touch with Woodhead and his family still recognize the passionate, fun-loving, competitive underdog with the no-frills Nebraskan personality.

"That's who I am," he said. "Even if I grew up in New York City, I would just hang out at a buddy's house. I'm a pretty simple guy."

It's hard to imagine a New York City-raised Woodhead. He was shaped by North Platte: the tight-knit community; the long bus rides to anywhere; the dedication to siblings, friends and teammates instead of narrowly focusing on individual goals; the old Canteen emphasis on doing little things that can make a big difference for others.

"We're proud of him, not just because of what he has accomplished, but because of what kind of person he is," said Whitney, whose children now coach soccer at North Platte, as he did when Woodhead was there. "People get tired of reading all the negative stuff about athletes. When they see people like this, they get pretty darn excited about him. That's a credit to his parents and grandparents."

"We all grew up wanting to be somewhere different," recalled McCarthy, who went on to play football at the University of Montana and now works at a family care center in Denver. "None of us were real happy with being there. Now that I am older, I realize how good we really had it, all the close people that we had. All of my best friends are still from North Platte. It's a tight group of people there."

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.