When Darius Randell made his Minnesota United first-team debut in the U.S. Open Cup in May, text messages lined up on Loons academy coach Justin Ferguson’s phone.

The theme: He did it!

At age 17, Randell became the youngest player in club history to score a goal for the top team, and the 1-0 win over Louisville City propelled the Loons in the national tournament. Then more milestones stacked up.

By the end of the May, Randell had signed a homegrown contract with the Loons through 2026, made his MLS debut in the 4-2 loss to San Diego at Allianz Field on June 14, and on Wednesday, took the field for a second cameo in a 3-1 win over Houston in St. Paul.

“It’s crazy how things work out,” Randell told the Pioneer Press.

For MNUFC, this is a big deal. The Loons have totaled only four homegrown players across nine MLS seasons.

Goalkeeper Fred Emmings was the first in 2020, but the 21-year-old St. Paul native hung up his gloves last year after suffering concussions. Forward Patrick Weah came next in 2021, but MNUFC declined his contract option last fall and the 21-year-old from Minneapolis has played in nine games for Atlanta United II in MLS Next Pro league. Defender Devin Padelford signed in 2022, but the 22-year-old from Maplewood has made only three MLS appearances for the Loons this season.

MNUFC’s academy suffered from its decision to shut down operations during the pandemic, resulting in an exodus of top players to other MLS systems. After a reboot, the club’s leadership feels as though its high-school age teams have been improving. Still, MNUFC needs to increase its number of homegrown players to provide a return on the investment in the academy and development team MNUFC2.

In addition, as a medium-sized market with perennially low spending on first-team player salaries, developing its own talent lessen would mean the Loons are less reliant on the draft and intraleague trades, and can save money on international transfer fees.

None of that, however, has affected Loons head coach Eric Ramsay’s decision to play Randell.

“It won’t be token-gesture minutes, nor minutes from the perspective of publicity around young players,” Ramsay said before Randell’s MLS debut two weeks ago.. “He can definitely go and make a mark.”

Randall has totaled only nine MLS minutes, so most of his ability at that level has only been on display in training sessions.

“I think probably the biggest compliment I can pay him is, if you were to ask most of the more-senior players which player they wouldn’t want to be one-v-one against in a big 20-by-20 space, it would be Darius,” Ramsay said. “I think that level of aggression with the ball, his athleticism, his change of pace (is) a really good starting point for a young player.”

Academy coach Ferguson had a similar first impression of Randell. Before joining MNUFC in 2021, Ferguson was a youth coach at Salvo in Woodbury when they played a Boreal team featuring a 14-year-old Randell.

“The ball went backwards off a kickoff,” Ferguson recalled. “Some kid picked up the ball, dribbled pretty much my whole team and scored. … (My) immediate reaction is kind of, ‘Who is that?’ ”

Freguson was then hired by MNUFC and worked to bring Randell and other Boreal standouts over to the Loons. Randell, who was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and moved to Brooklyn Park at age 11, initially joined the Loons’ Under-15 team in 2022. One of his earliest highlights came at the Generation Adidas Cup.

“He turned two Manchester United players inside out at the halfway line and played a ball in behind, and we ended up tying the game and winning on penalties,” Ferguson said.

The following year, Randell joined Ferguson’s U17s. The head coach challenged the young star.

Randell boiled the message from Ferguson down this way: “On U-15s, you could do whatever you want, you get the ball, just dribble through everybody and do whatever you want. But (on U-17s) I don’t think you’ll be the best player.”

“And that kind of hit me up: ‘OK. Let’s see about that,’ ” Randell added. “I didn’t take that as a bad thing. I do understand what he’s trying to say. Like, things is not gonna be easy, so I’ve got to keep working my way.”

As he continued to climb, Randell hit some growing pains with MNUFC2, including his first training session where new teammates were running and passing circles around him. Last year, Ferguson said Randell was deflecting to older, more-experienced teammates too much and needed to be more assertive.

Before his game-winning goal in the Open Cup, Randell wasn’t doing well in school and was told if he didn’t improve in the classroom, he wasn’t going to play. He did what was asked of him and after playing, he texted Anne Moelk, the club’s head of player well-being, to thank her for making him go to his tutoring lessons.

“It shows his character, but it also shows the support that he appreciates he’s getting,” Ferguson said.

While Randell has made it to the MLS team, he’s still a teenager living at home with his mother in St. Michael. He has a ton to still figure out and a lot riding on his shoulders.

“He’s not a finished product yet,” said Ferguson, now MNUFC’s head of methodology. “I think people expect these 17-year-olds to be kind of Lamine Yamal (the teen sensation for Barcelona and Spanish national teams) who just come on to the world, and they already have it. That’s really not the journey for the majority. (Randell is) going to come on and he’s going to continue to improve and grow into, hopefully, who he can become.”

By JEFF MARTIN, Associated Press

A performer at Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance in February has been arrested after holding up a Sudanese flag with the message “Sudan and Free Gaza,” Louisiana State Police announced Thursday.

The performer, Zul-Qarnain Kwame Nantambu, 41, of New Orleans surrendered to authorities after an arrest warrant was obtained, state police said. He was booked into the Orleans Parish Justice Center on charges of resisting an officer and disturbing the peace by interruption of a lawful assembly.

State police say troopers began investigating shortly after the Feb. 9 game at the Caesars Superdome and found that Nantambu “deviated from his assigned role” and disrupted the halftime show by running across the field with the flag. Security and law enforcement personnel ran after him, and he refused to comply with their commands to stop, state police said in a statement Thursday.

“In coordination with the National Football League, troopers learned that Nantambu had permission to be on the field during the performance, but did not have permission to demonstrate as he did,” state police said.

Related Articles

Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary turned acclaimed TV journalist, dead at 91

Anna Wintour is seeking a new Vogue editor-in-chief but will maintain editorial control

Prosecutors tell judge government plans to initiate removal proceedings against Kilmar Abrego Garcia

‘A purpose in this world’: Older adults fear elimination of program that helps them find work

As ICE raids intensify, how do employers know if their workers are legal?

Neither jail records nor online court records list a lawyer for Nantambu who could be reached for comment.

The arrest comes after New Orleans police said shortly after the football game at Caesars Superdome that the cast member would not face charges. But it was Louisiana State Police who announced the charges Thursday.

New Orleans police initially responded to the disturbance, but Louisiana State Police then took over the investigation, partly due to the performer’s access to a highly secured area, Louisiana State Police Sgt. Katharine Stegall said in an email to The Associated Press.

The NFL on Thursday said it commends the Louisiana State Police for “its diligence and professionalism.”

“We take any attempt to disrupt any part of an NFL game, including the halftime show, very seriously and are pleased this individual will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” the NFL said. “In addition to the ongoing criminal case, the NFL banned the individual from attending any NFL games or events.”

The cast member was among dozens of dancers wearing black outfits. He held the flag in the air while standing on the roof of a car that was a main feature of the hip-hop artist’s performance. He then jumped off stage and ran across the field before being tackled by several men in suits.

President Donald Trump was in the stadium for the game, but it wasn’t clear if he saw the protest.

In a separate case, Nantambu is listed as the victim of a May 17 shooting outside a celebrity boxing event in Miami.

Former NFL player Antonio Brown is facing an attempted murder charge after authorities say he grabbed a handgun from a security worker at the boxing event and fired two shots at Nantambu. Nantambu told investigators that one of the bullets grazed his neck.

By FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died Thursday at age 91.

Moyer died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former CEO of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He did not cite Moyers’ cause of death.

Moyer’s career ranged from youthful Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps, from Johnson’s press secretary to newspaper publisher, senior news analyst for “The CBS Evening News” and chief correspondent for “CBS Reports.”

Related Articles

Anna Wintour is seeking a new Vogue editor-in-chief but will maintain editorial control

Prosecutors tell judge government plans to initiate removal proceedings against Kilmar Abrego Garcia

‘A purpose in this world’: Older adults fear elimination of program that helps them find work

As ICE raids intensify, how do employers know if their workers are legal?

Prosecutor says Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs thought he was above the law as he led a racketeering conspiracy

But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV’s most cerebral and provocative series. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he proved at home with subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.

In 1988, Moyers produced “The Secret Government” about the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration and simultaneously published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The accompanying book became a best-seller.

His televised chats with poet Robert Bly almost single-handedly launched the 1990s Men’s Movement, and his 1993 series “Healing and the Mind” had a profound impact on the medical community and on medical education.

In a medium that supposedly abhors “talking heads” — shots of subject and interviewer talking — Moyers came to specialize in just that. He once explained why: “The question is, are the talking heads thinking minds and thinking people? Are they interesting to watch? I think the most fascinating production value is the human face.”

(Softly) speaking truth to power

Demonstrating what someone called “a soft, probing style” in the native Texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a calm, reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.

From some quarters, he was blasted as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his no-holds-barred approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he didn’t necessarily deny.

“I’m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a “citizen journalist” operating independently, outside the establishment.

Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free rein to throw “the conversation of democracy open to all comers,” he said in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press.

“I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,” he said another time, “but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”

Over the years, Moyers was showered with honors, including more than 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polks and, twice, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton Award for career excellence in broadcast journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.

From sports to sports writing

Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirt farmer-truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him into journalism.

“I wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that by writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around at the newsstand to see what I wrote,” he recalled.

He worked for the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more appropriate byline for a sportswriter, he dropped the “y” from his name.

He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained and preached part time at two churches but later decided his call to the ministry “was a wrong number.”

His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; he wrote the then-senator offering to work in his 1954 re-election campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for a summer job. He was back in Johnson’s employ as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked at the Peace Corps, eventually becoming deputy director.

On the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he held various jobs over the ensuing years, including press secretary.

Moyers’ stint as presidential press secretary was marked by efforts to mend the deteriorating relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its toll and Moyers resigned in December 1966.

Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later, “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.”

He conceded that he may have been “too zealous in my defense of our policies” and said he regretted criticizing journalists such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Arnett, then a special correspondent with the AP, and CBS’s Morley Safer for their war coverage.

AP writer Dave Bauder and Former Associated Press writer Robert Monroe contributed to this report. Moore retired from the AP in 2017.

“Despite decades of harm, the Department of Transportation is pushing a plan to widen the Cross Bronx by adding another highway structure over the Bronx River and Starlight Park, doubling down on the already blatant environmental injustice.”

The Cross Bronx Expressway. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

When America’s environmental first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, championed the Highway Beautification Act in 1965, she understood something fundamental about American infrastructure: roads should serve as a conduit for people, not just cars.

Her yearly drives from Texas to Washington D.C. took her through junkyards filled with abandoned cars and blighted, urban spaces, a sight that remains familiar to New Yorkers today. Her fight to counter the concrete brutality of highways and preserve the natural environment wasn’t just about “beautification,” as many suggested, but about improving Americans’ quality of life.

Today, as the New York State Department of Transportation pushes to expand the Cross Bronx Expressway, it is betraying that vision and the Bronx communities already choking on the highway’s pollution. This National Highway Day urges us to commit to transportation alternatives that nourish Bronx communities, instead of poisoning them. 

The great outdoors have long been under attack, paved over and trodden via the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act which birthed the nation’s interstate system. Situated along Interstate 95, the Cross Bronx Expressway is a product of this legacy. Under Robert Moses, the Cross Bronx carved through working-class neighborhoods of color in the 1950s, displacing thousands, severing neighborhoods, and leaving behind a legacy of asthma, heart disease, and premature death.

It remains one of the most congested roadways and toxic polluters in the nation, sickening residents along the Bronx River, including more than 3,000 at the adjacent public housing complex Bronx River Houses. Now, despite decades of harm, the Department of Transportation is pushing a plan to widen the Cross Bronx by adding another highway structure over the Bronx River and Starlight Park, doubling down on the already blatant environmental injustice. 

This cannot happen. Instead of expanding the Cross Bronx Expressway—a monument to racist urban planning—the DOT must follow through with a version of its second, safer proposal for the Cross Bronx: standard bridge repairs with improvements that the community has long been calling for, reducing traffic by rerouting trucks and cars not headed to the area using regional highways. And if DOT really wants to center our community’s priorities, it will explore options that increase connectivity on the east and west portions of the Cross Bronx, move forward with improvements to the 174th Street Bridge, and support future-looking solutions like “Blue Highways” that reduce traffic on local highways.

Bronx residents have already voiced our concerns: we want bridge repairs without expansion. We want to reduce traffic, not build a new road that will only increase it. We want more green space, not a new highway that towers over a park where children play on two playgrounds, already breathing in too much pollution. And we want our neighborhoods reconnected, not further severed.

NYSDOT knows this—the agency was a partner in the Reimagine the Cross Bronx Expressway report, a community-designed blueprint which outlines real solutions for reducing traffic while improving air quality and green space, and reconnecting our neighborhoods. But their new proposal does the exact opposite.

As Lady Bird Johnson knew way back in the 60s, highway “beautification” wasn’t just that, “it involves much more,” she said. “Clean water, clean air, clean roadsides…and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”

To unnecessarily expand the Cross Bronx Expressway at the expense of clean water, clean air, and our parks wouldn’t just go against her legacy. It would endanger our quality of life in the Bronx— something which too often hinges on the baseless decisions of people hundreds of miles away, with little regard for community input.

This National Highway Day, let’s heed the lessons of the past and commit to a healthier, safer transportation system that connects our communities while preserving our natural spaces. Gov. Kathy Hochul and DOT have a choice: they can rubber-stamp another highway-sized road and spend taxpayer money to further endanger Bronx communities, or halt this expansion, conduct a full environmental review of the plan, and finally listen to the Bronx. 

Siddhartha Sánchez is the executive director of Bronx River Alliance, which works to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor. Jaqi Cohen is the director of climate & equity policy at Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which promotes sustainable transportation, equitable planning policies and practices, and strong communities in the New York City metro area.

The post Opinion: On National Highway Day, Lady Bird Johnson’s Legacy Beckons Us to Stop the Cross Bronx Expansion appeared first on City Limits.