At six-foot-two, you don’t have to look very hard to find Arlington Heights Yellow Jacket safety/wide receiver Antonio “T.J.” Johnson. But it’s more than his height that gets him noticed on the high school gridiron and in the classroom. Currently ranked 94th in the nation, Johnson has already landed a full-ride football scholarship to Brigham Young University. And even though he seems to have the world by the tail at the moment, Johnson’s journey has been anything but easy.
I met up with his mom, Wendy Brown, during football practice to meet the young man so many Fort Worth football fans have been raving about. She stood on the sidelines — arms crossed, eyes locked on the field — as her son moved through drills with the confidence of someone who has something to prove. Brown smiled as she watched him work, a mix of pride and awe in her expression.
For Brown, getting T.J. into sports wasn’t just a pastime — it was a lifeline. “We got him started in sports when he was three,” she said. “That’s the age you can start at the Y(MCA). He started football at four. We played two years of flag, then moved to tackle at six. He’s basically been doing this his whole life.”
Football, it seems, wasn’t something T.J. discovered — it’s something he was born into. “When he came out,” Wendy laughed, “his arms were up like this — like he was already ready to catch a pass. One of his first words was football. He never played with toys. It was always about balls and sports.”
By the time T.J. hit high school, football wasn’t just a game — it was his north star. But the journey from the Peewee fields to a Division I scholarship didn’t come without dark stretches.
“I remember so many nights of him crying as a sophomore and junior,” Brown said. “‘I don’t have any offers. Nothing’s happening for me,’ he’d say. And I’d just tell him, ‘Keep the faith. It’s going to happen.’”
It did.
In June, Brigham Young University flew T.J. and his family out to Provo, Utah. “They laid out the red carpet,” Brown recalled. “Photo shoot, hotel rooms — it was surreal. I knew it was going to happen, but to actually experience it was amazing.”
For T.J., the trip represented something far bigger than football.
“There’s a lot of hard work behind this,” he told me during a break from practice, sweat still glistening under the Texas sun. “I’ve been doing this since I was four. I train every weekend with my coach, even after games. I just keep working.”
Though he’s heading to BYU as a safety, he hasn’t lost his respect for the receiver position. “I’m a receiver at heart,” he said, grinning. “But I like defense because I don’t have to wait for somebody to give me the ball. I can just go take it.”
He’s found role models in LSU’s cornerback DJ Pickett — “a big dude, big corner, which I am too,” he said — and in the NFL’s own Sauce Gardner. “That’s one of my guys,” T.J. added. “That’s who I look up to.”
Still, it hasn’t all been easy. “Right before I came to Heights, I didn’t think I could do this,” he admitted. “I had to overcome that. When I came here, everything changed.”
That change, says Arlington Heights head coach Curtis James, was immediate and powerful.
“The greatest thing about T.J. is when he came in, he said he came here because he really wanted to just be in a spot where he had a chance to be himself and grow,” James said. “And I said that’s the perfect attitude to have. He played receiver last year, and to transfer to defense from receiver is not as easy as people think, but he’s bought into it. He’s flying around, he’s doing things I’ve never seen a free safety at my campus do, which has been fantastic.”
James says that while the team encourages younger players to learn both sides of the ball, few manage to keep up with the conditioning and intensity that it takes.
“It takes a high-level kid to do all the hard work and the conditioning to be able to play both,” he said. “I told him, you’re going to make sure your body’s in shape — one side of the ball will suffer if it’s not. But he bought into it, and he’s proven that.”
What James looks for, though, goes beyond talent. “I make sure they have fun with the game of football,” he said. “If they’re not having fun, none of this is worth it. If it ever feels like work, they’re just doing it because somebody said to do it. But when they’re having fun, it’s child’s play. You just have to show them how to be great at it.”
He grinned and nodded toward the field. “T.J. is having a tremendous time. He loves being a leader — even when he doesn’t feel like being one. He shines through anything we ask. There’s nothing too big or too small. He’ll see me picking up trash, folding laundry, hanging clothes — he jumps right in. The little things you don’t see your stars do — he does those.”
Back home, Brown reflects on the challenges T.J. has faced. “He’s color blind, hard of hearing in his left ear, and has dyslexia,” she said, smiling through a mix of pride and disbelief. “But look at him now.”
She recalls the advice she got when doctors told her that her son shouldn’t play contact sports. “They said with his hearing, it was too risky,” Brown shared. “But he told me, ‘I’d rather go deaf than stop playing football.’ So I said, okay — then we’ll keep playing and believe we’ll be okay.”
Elementary school was just as hard.
“Those early years were tough. I’d get calls almost every day — temper tantrums, frustration,” she added. “But once he got into a dyslexia program, everything turned around. He became a straight-A student after that.”
Today, T.J. speaks about those challenges with calm confidence. “It gets hard,” he said. “It’s always going to get hard, but I have to persevere through the hard stuff to be where I want to be.”
Off the field, T.J. works part-time at Roller Land West — a skating rink where he likes to unwind. “I skate all the time,” he said, laughing. “That’s my thing. It helps me relax.”
He plans to major in business marketing at BYU. “I want to learn how to make money — build wealth — so I can help my family,” he said. “My mom, my brother, my sister. They’ve done so much for me.”
Wendy’s daughter, Jaden, is a senior nursing student at TCU — a Chancellor’s Scholar. Her youngest, Dorian, is a junior at Benbrook. “It’s been just me and the kids forever,” Wendy said. “It’ll be hard with T.J. gone, but I want him to have a big, amazing life.”
When asked what keeps him grounded through all the noise — the accolades, the expectations, the dream of the NFL — T.J. doesn’t hesitate. “My mother,” he said. “Having a good mom. No backing off, no letting me quit. That’s the secret.”
He grinned when I asked where he’d like to end up one day. “Baltimore Ravens,” he said without missing a beat. “Free safety.”
For now, he’s still just a kid from Fort Worth — skating, studying, chasing down passes under the Friday night lights. But if there’s one thing clear about Antonio “T.J.” Johnson, it’s that no obstacle — not hearing loss, not dyslexia, not doubt — can stop him from listening to the one sound that’s driven him since childhood: the pop of shoulder pads on a Texas football field.