Walnut Park is in the northwest corner of St. Louis. It is the neighborhood where Jeremiyah Love grew up. His father, Jason, an Army veteran who became Jeremiyah’s first football coach, described it plainly: very dangerous.
Jeremiyah has said it in his own words: “It’s a bunch of bad stuff. My parents did a great job sheltering me away from all that.”
That sheltering was not accidental. It was the deliberate, sustained project of two parents who understood exactly what the environment outside their front door meant and chose to stand between it and their son.
Who Are Jeremiyah Love’s Parents?
L’Tonya Love served in the St. Louis Police Department, reaching the rank of sergeant before retiring. Jason Love served in the Army before becoming Jeremiyah’s youth football coach. Both parents worked demanding schedules through Jeremiyah’s childhood. L’Tonya’s shifts left her unavailable for games, practices, and family events with a consistency that was not by choice but by necessity.
What they built around Jeremiyah in their absence was structure. Tutors, activities, and sports. A schedule so full that the environment outside the home offered limited opportunities to find him. What they modeled in their presence was something harder to define: the specific quality of two people who chose to serve under conditions of sustained personal cost and kept showing up anyway.
That is the origin story of the top running back in the 2026 NFL Draft.
Jeremiyah wrote the note during his freshman year of high school. He put into words what he had not been able to say out loud: he wanted his mother to be there more. He knew what the long hours meant. He understood, at some level, that the sacrifice was the point. He wrote the note anyway.
L’Tonya described reading it as heartbreaking. “My long hours at work, the holidays, birthdays, all those missed times, practices, football games, I missed a lot,” she has said. The note did not create resentment or blame. It opened a door. From the day she read it, L’Tonya made nearly every game. She has not missed many since.
The pre-game ritual between Jeremiyah and Jason goes back to when Jeremiyah was six years old. Before every game, Jason finds his son before kickoff. He grabs him by the helmet. He says what needs to be said.
“When we share that moment with each other, it’s just me and him,” Jeremiyah has said.
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It has continued without interruption. The stadiums have gotten bigger. The stakes have grown. The ritual has not changed, because the relationship underneath it has not changed either. Jason Love coached his son at the very beginning of his football life and has never stopped being the first person Jeremiyah looks for when the game is about to begin.
Players who perform at this level under this kind of pressure (Doak Walker Award winner in 2025, 1,372 rushing yards and 18 touchdowns, Heisman finalist, unanimous All-American) do not manufacture mental toughness in a weight room. They develop it from somewhere.
The Walnut Park neighborhood, the note, the ritual, the two people who spent decades choosing service over ease: these are where Love’s competitive infrastructure came from.
The Doak Walker Award goes to the best college running back in the country. Jeremiyah Love won it in 2025, becoming the first player in Notre Dame history to do so. He is projected to go in the first round of the NFL Draft on Thursday night, with the Tennessee Titans at fourth overall and the Washington Commanders at seventh among the most frequently linked destinations in mock drafts and betting markets.
The running back who is about to be selected with a top-10 pick in the NFL Draft was built by two people who understood that the work of building a person looked nothing like the work on the field, was harder, and mattered more.
They built it in Walnut Park. It turned out exactly the way they intended.
