By Taylor Brandon
Stadium lights beamed down at Hughes Stadium as Terry High School football players huddled on opposite sidelines watching the 7-versus-7 game. Charlton “CJ” Davis was a sophomore in the fall of 2024. He played basketball and football for the school and on teams outside school with the Amateur Athletic Union. That night, Davis lined up as receiver. After a count, the quarterback snapped, and Davis began the motion for the assigned play.
Davis was sent in as a wide receiver for this play. His goal was to catch the ball from the quarterback and remain open while running the route the team had planned and weaving to get around the defensive back, whose main goal is to protect their own team’s quarterback and wide receiver.
“The DB pressed me and put me into a jam. I was pushing forward, and he was pushing back. But as a wide receiver, I had to move quick to get him off the line,” Davis says.
‘Something Wasn’t Right’
Davis continued to play the rest of the game, not worrying about the impact from the DB, pushing on past the pressure and pain.
Before getting on the bus, though, Davis felt intense pain in his shoulder. “My shoulder felt weird, like something wasn’t right,” he recalls. He looked in the mirror stunned by what he saw in front of him. “My shoulder was swollen; it was the size of a cantaloupe,” he adds.
An average push in football can affect a player physically and mentally. The National Library of Medicine reports about 3.7 injuries for every 1,000 hours spent playing or training. This is a significant amount of hours, and often many football players get hurt more in matches than in training. Football sees eight injuries per every 1,000 hours of playing time.
Davis spent the rest of the summer in and out of the doctor’s office, coming back with different diagnoses every time. This frustrated him. He felt helpless in a time where he was missing out on training and playing football with the team. He also was losing time to start getting ready for basketball season, which he says is his favorite sport.
“One doctor didn’t even give me an X-ray. He told me I just had a sprain,” Davis laments.
It wasn’t until Davis got an MRI from a third doctor that he found his diagnosis: a broken collar-bone, a torn ligament, and his rotator cuff had pushed back in his shoulder, creating pain and leaving a droop formally known as a shoulder ptosis.
“The doctor basically said I can’t play any sports anymore,” Davis says.
‘This Was My New Thing’
The teenager found himself in a spot where he no longer had the passion that had taken over his whole life. Without sports, Davis had a void in his life, but he would soon find a way to fill it.
Between physical therapy and school, Davis had a lot of time to fill. “I noticed a lot of my teammates needed to get publicity for scouts and colleges to see, so I started taking photos and videos of them,” he says. Davis created recruitment videos and flyers of his former teammates going to camp and committing to colleges. Soon, Davis appeared at all of the games and events at Terry, camera in hand. He found something that fulfilled him like sports did.
“This was my new thing. This was something that I had control of and was my idea,” Davis says.
Davis still played football and basketball with his friends from time to time, but he preferred to have the camera with him. He began to do more than sports photography and soon started taking pictures for graduations and events that his friends attended. Davis was creating a career for himself while still being in high school.
“I went from strictly sports to strictly photography,” Davis says.
Davis is now part of the Youth Media Project at the Mississippi Free Press. “I learned about the program from Ava (Washington), actually. She told me about how she learned more about photography and got the opportunity to work,” he says of his 2025 YMP colleague who also attends Terry High. Davis says he wants to explore more about photography and videography during his time at YMP while also learning more about how to create a career.
The 17-year-old wants to continue to work in photography in his future. “I would want to work for the NFL or NBA, or even possibly freelance,” he says. “As long as I have a camera in my hand, that’s all that matters.”
Click here to read more about Taylor Brandon, a second-year Youth Media Project student-mentor who wrote this piece.