Inside Mk Young's Year Away From Football, Journey Towards Pastoral Leadership

Nashville—991 miles from Vanderbilt’s FirstBank Stadium, Makhilyn “MK” Young got up from his hunch over a toilet at Greater Ideal Baptist Church in Midland, Texas, and let his adrenaline take over for a second. Young failed to avoid getting Clorox in his mouth while he scrubbed, but he could hardly notice.

Young’s “brothers” had some adrenaline of their own in that moment as they were in the midst of taking down No. 1 Alabama in a 40-35 upset that would eventually put them at the top of the world. The former New Mexico State running back had been through all the ups and downs with most of Vanderbilt’s key contributors on that day, but instead of joining them in a field storming he turned his phone off and got back to scrubbing.

Young says that the unglamorous posture he took on that day and the 2024 season as a whole was symbolic of him giving a year of his life to God. The now Vanderbilt running back would wake up each day, get the keys to the church’s Life Center, open the doors and do whatever he had to do in order to help.

Some days Young’s role would be to strap on a pair of latex gloves and clean bathrooms like he did on the day of Vanderbilt football’s biggest revelation. Other days he would clean gym floors and make sure all the little things were tied up around the facility that he says is “pretty big.”

Young’s role on Oct. 5 was to prepare the bathrooms around the facility for the Oct. 6 Sunday-morning services, but he felt as if he could take a break to watch his “brothers” wrap up the biggest win in Vanderbilt’s program history. A part of him could still envision himself out there making an impact for the program he committed to the previous spring and had since been vaguely absent from.

“I was excited more than anything,” Young told Vandy on SI. “But, it was definitely hard. It’s just like ‘man, I want to be out there.’ You’re always like ‘man, I want to be there.’”

Young knew that he had to be where his feet were rather than in Nashville–where he went through the motions of Vanderbilt’s second fall camp scrimmage on Saturday night–though. He had to embrace it, too.

The Midland, Texas, native says he spent his year away on a mission trip in his hometown of Midland, Texas, and attended seminary school in order to become officiated as a pastor. By the end of his year away, Young had already been called upon by his lead pastor to preach a “few” sermons.

“God spoke through me to speak to the congregation,” Young said. “It was the best feeling in the world. That’s my joy.”

A responsibility such as leading the congregation requires a deep level of study and a committed relationship with God. The responsibility changed the priorities in Young’s life. Rather than putting stock into his performance, he had to be fully-immersed in developing his lifestyle into one that exemplified his faith.

Young says that most of his teammates don’t know about the sermons he’s preached and his subsequent eloquence as a speaker. The ones who have paid attention can feel that something impactful happened in his faith life throughout his year away, though.

“He has an amazing relationship with Christ,” Vanderbilt tight end Eli Stowers said. “He allows that to kind of guide what he does in the game, in the way that he works, in the way that he lives life.”

Perhaps most of Vanderbilt’s players could figure out Young’s background as he delivered a message on the first night of its fall camp, but the Vanderbilt running back doesn’t need them to know that.

He believes that his testimony and what he believes God has done in his life is better than any sermon he could give. The Vanderbilt running back has been down, but his mission work and year away from football taught him that the hope he has shouldn’t be determined by his circumstances.

“Even if somebody’s listening to this, you’ve probably gone through a time in your life where nothing in your life is making sense, everything is going wrong, every door is being closed,” Young said. “I would say shift your perspective. Stop looking at the square and look at the cube. There’s always different perspectives to different things and it’s just like ‘open your eyes and just rely on the Lord.’ That was how I really got this far.”

MK Young took a year hiatus, but now he's not taking anything for granted. | Vanderbilt Athletics

Perhaps Young wasn’t in a position to speak those words confidently this time a year ago, but here he is on the field after Vanderbilt’s second scrimmage of fall camp offering encouragement to anyone who would listen.

This time a year ago, Young was working on coming to terms with the reality that he’d have to sit out of the 2024 season after committing to Vanderbilt out of the transfer portal. While Diego Pavia, Stowers and a good chunk of Young’s former New Mexico State teammates were taking the field as power-five players, he would be stuck watching from afar.

“When I first found out, that hurt me,” Young said. “It was like ‘what? I gotta sit out? My mind was blown. I actually couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t fathom it. It was crazy. I never expected that to happen.”

Amid speculation that Young’s absence was related to grades or academic credits, he says that the reason he missed initially was related to his mission in Texas and that “you’re gonna hear a lot more” speculative reasons as to why he was absent in 2024.

While seemingly everyone was speculating about Young’s whereabouts, he was clocking in to do his work around the church at 8:00 A.M., heading to class at 11:30, “shooting” up to his girlfriend’s house to pick up his daughter Adaleah when he got out of class at 12:15 and taking care of her until his girlfriend got off work at 4:00. Somewhere within, before or after that schedule, Young would also find a time to get with his trainer to do on-field work and to get into the weight room.

“I was always doing something,” Young said. “It was like boom, boom, then I tried to get a lift in the morning before I went into work. Then I went into a community thing. It was just a blessing.”

Young believes his time was spent best as he dropped off his daughter and drove back to the church to be there at 6:00 for kids Wednesday Night Bible Studies and after-school programs.

The Vanderbilt running back has heard plenty about the generation behind him being “lost,” but he doesn’t believe that. He believes that they need investment from people who care for them. As a result, he’s been intentional about doing what he can to teach and to build relationships with kids in his hometown.

“I just feel obligated to pour into them every chance that I get,” Young said. “I pray every night and I decree every night that a revival will come to my community.”

Young was as active as he’d ever been as he went through seminary and learned homiletics of Christianity as well as theology that he hadn’t yet taken in, but it appeared to an outside viewer as if he’d disappeared.

Whenever someone would catch Young, he’d often get questions.

“Where are you going?” People would ask. “What are you doing?”

Young knew that no matter how he explained his situation, that certain people wouldn’t understand why he made the decisions he did. Perhaps it was difficult for the former New Mexico State running back–who was a three-star prospect as a high schooler and appeared in 11 games as a freshman in college–but he would have to lose his pride. He wasn’t that guy anymore, at least for now.

He had to embrace the idea that some people would never understand the path he was on.

“I had to humble myself,” Young said. “It’s weird because you go from being a good running back in Midland, then you go to a mission trip. It’s like ‘what are you doing?’”

The last time some of Young’s New Mexico State teammates had seen him was in their New Mexico Bowl loss to Fresno State. Their idea–as well as his–was that a chunk of them would all be migrating from Conference USA to follow offensive coordinator Tim Beck and head coach Jerry Kill to the SEC.

In a way, the nearly 14 hour flight symbolized a journey to stardom for Pavia, Stowers, backup quarterback Blaze Berlowitz and rotational running back Jamoni Jones. Those four pieces of New Mexico State’s turnaround weren’t supposed to be there, but they were. They had to leave a man behind to get there, though.

Young stayed in touch with his former teammates, but he was stuck 993 miles away watching them on TV each week.

“It was hard on him,” Stowers told Vandy on SI. “A year away from the game for anybody that loves the game, it’s gonna be hard. I was just trying to rally around, support him and tell him that God’s got a plan for him.”

Young believed what Stowers was telling him, but he’d rarely experienced living a life without football at the forefront. The former New Mexico State running back worked his whole life to get an opportunity to play somewhere like Vanderbilt and had finally earned an opportunity to accomplish what he said out to do before it was stripped from him.

He decided that at some point he was going to stop feeling bad for himself and see the “cube” rather than just the "square." Once the Midland, Texas, native did that he saw his time away for what it was.

“I would say it was a blessing being able to sit out, be with my daughter,” Young said. “At first I was obviously questioning a lot of things. I was like ‘why this?’ ‘Why that?’ I just couldn’t see the bigger picture at first. Now it’s like I honed in and strengthened my faith on Jesus and my faith in the Lord has just been astonishing to get me this far.”

“Taking that year off actually helped me mentally and spiritually more than ever.”

Walk around Vanderbilt’s facility next to Young each day and his change is evident. The Vanderbilt running back always appeared to have faith, but now he speaks Jesus in his daily life. He often slips into talk of how he’s been blessed or what he’s learned theologically.

Young isn’t perfect, but he’s noticeably different to those who saw him at New Mexico State and are now around him.

“I think that he’s continuing to grow up as a person and he’s a father now, he takes all that very seriously,” Vanderbilt offensive coordinator Tim Beck said. “He’s got a beautiful daughter. I think he’s a great teammate, all the kids love him and he’s really meshed well with coming here, especially with the running back room. Everybody seems to like him and knows that he’s all business when the ball is snapped and he goes, but he’s a great christian young man that has really fit in here well.”

As Young wakes up each day and goes about his business in the year following his absence, Pavia can see that there’s a little something extra propelling him to perform.

“He’s got a daughter,” Pavia said. “So, he’s got something to work for.”

Young jokes that he “needed to work on” his patience and that as a result “God gave” him a daughter seemingly to force the issue. He’s since had to spend the last calendar year refining that patience and learning how to balance being a football player and a pastor with being a present father.

The Vanderbilt running back describes his 13-month old daughter as his “heart” and “one of his biggest blessings.” She also woke him up to the realities in his life without speaking a word.

“I love that girl, I love her like nobody’s business,” Young said. “She lights up the room. You see her and she’ll cheer you up. She’s always smiling, dancing. She’s changed my whole perspective on life for the better and I needed that.”

All of a sudden Young failing to record an explosive play or putting the ball on the ground in his increasingly important practice reps doesn’t sting for as long as it used to. Young is still described as a “real hard worker” and “dedicated to the process” by Vanderbilt receiver Junior Sherrill, but whenever he gets home it’s almost as if a switch flips.

It’s almost as if the competitive edge and chip on the shoulder mentality that’s gotten Young to this point is paused for a few moments as he sees his daughter smiling at him while he walks through the door.

While Vanderbilt running backs coach Ghaali Muhammad-Lankford coached Young at New Mexico State, he told him it would be this way. Perhaps Young didn’t see it then as he and his girlfriend were expecting, but he sees it now.

“When you have kids, you think they care about you having a bad practice?” Muhammad-Lankford said. “They don’t care. They just want to see their dad. They want to have their dad. You can’t short them that because you had a bad practice.”

“I have that same mentality with my daughter,” Young said while referring to Muhammad-Lankford’s wisdom. “She lights me up.”

Young was fighting back the urge to cry as he stood off to the sideline at FirstBank Stadium, looked around and thought about the reality of his situation relative to what it was this time a year ago.

It’s not just Young’s deep-dive into the Bible, daughter and girlfriend that fulfills him anymore. It’s football, too. The place that looked like a far-off dream land to the Midland, Texas, native while he spent time away from the game is now his home stadium.

“FirstBank Stadium, this is a blessing,” Young said. “This is a blessing, for sure.”

Young knows that he can’t take the blessings in his life for granted, though. He loves football too much to do that, anyway.

As Pavia and Stowers wake up for Vanderbilt’s fall camp at 5:30 A.M. each morning, they may hear two feet stomping on the ground repeatedly off the distance as Young–who moved in with them upon his arrival on Vanderbilt’s campus–is there jump roping and getting a workout in before his day starts.

The way the Vanderbilt running back goes about his business is jarring, even to those who have seen him up close for years.

“The way he puts in work, I’ve never seen somebody do it,” Stowers said. “He’s wired in that way that he wants to do whatever he can to be successful in this game.”

“I love the way he works,” Pavia said. “That’s what inspires me, makes me go harder.”

Now that he’s in the position he’s in, Young feels a responsibility to take advantage of his opportunity. He’s felt what life is like without the game he loves and doesn’t want it to be that way again for a long time.

Perhaps his greatest desire on the field is to inspire, though. Whenever someone jogs out there for the first snaps of the game, it’s often an anxiety-inducing string of seconds that forces an element of mindlessness and focus on the task at hand. Young finds that whenever he gets the “blessing” of taking an SEC field in pads and a jersey he has something else in mind that gets in the headspace to compete, though.

Young remembers the kids that he served each Wednesday night in Midland, Texas, as well as all the kids from his hometown who want to do what he does.

“Where I’m from people don’t make it to Nashville, Tennessee, at FirstBank Stadium and Vanderbilt,” Young said. “When I’m out there I don’t really think about myself. I don’t just think about my family. I’m thinking about those kids who are in middle school, those kids who have dreams and those kids who watched me on Friday nights, who looked up to me, who cheered my name, who wore those jerseys in Mildland. I’m doing it for them.”

Every time Young goes back to Midland he’s reminded of the duty he has to serve the kids that he’s invested in each day by working each day to improve his skillset and production.

He tells those kids that with an adequate amount of work and belief, they can accomplish what they want to in life like he has. A better way to convey his message is to show them, though.

“It’s just like I’m teaching them, I’m showing them what the Lord can actually do,” Young said. “Oftentimes we forget who’s looking at us. I’m not just doing this for me. If I was just doing this for me I would’ve burnt out by now, but I’m doing it for them just to show them there’s a way.”

Those who have seen Young each day as Vanderbilt winds down fall camp and prepares for its Aug. 30 opener against Charleston Southern believe that he’s equipped to do enough on the field to make the kids that look up to him proud.

“He’s going to have a great season,” Stowers said.

“He’s doing a really nice job of just continuing to learn and doing some really nice things for us,” Muhammad-Lankford said. “I’m excited about where he is.”

Young isn’t forgetting where he came from as he’s being showered with praises from those who know him best, though.

He still remembers cleaning toilets and gym floors. He still dives into his Bible as often as he can. He still remembers the kids from Midland, Texas. Young knows that there’s more to life than football. Perhaps it took a figurative punch in the face to fully develop into this version of himself, but here he is on the field like he always thought he’d be.

Now he’s not taking it for granted.

“It smacked me in the mouth,” Young said of the year away. “You start looking at life from a different perspective. I remember I was driving home from one of my theology classes and I was thinking ‘you got to take the small wins in life, too.’ We get so caught up in the headlines and the clippings that we forget to slow down and smell the roses sometimes.”