Kyle Goon: Elijah Sarratt’s unlikely road to the Ravens started at Baltimore’s Saint Frances Academy

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On a recent day at Saint Frances Academy in East Baltimore, it was easy to witness how the young boys who want to be football stars grow tough.

The nationally acclaimed football program has no field, so defensive backs and receivers ran drills in the school building, dripping sweat while dashing on the hallway tile. The small gym was packed with roughly four dozen boys, some of them doing dumbbell presses right off the ground.

Back when Elijah Sarratt played for the Panthers, he hated when the players would sprint up the stairways, or when the whole team would end a lift with timed planks that felt like they dragged on forever.

“Looking back at it, it sucked,” he said, “but it helped out a lot for sure.”

Saint Frances helped build the body Sarratt needed to eventually be an NFL receiver for the Baltimore Ravens. But to build his mental strength, the 23-year-old rookie lost a lot more than sweat.

There is a version of Sarratt’s formative football years at Saint Frances that feels hard all over. He watched his childhood home burn down. One of his closest high school friends died in a tragic collision. He got zero Division I offers for football as he graduated, and had to transfer schools twice before NFL teams took any interest.

But you will find no callouses in Sarratt’s soul. Now attending NFL minicamp in Owings Mills — just a 40-minute drive from the apartment where he lived as a teenager with dreams but little else — Sarratt considers himself one of the luckiest men alive.

“It’s crazy how just how things come, man,” Sarratt told me recently, never once letting the smile fade from his face even as he talked about the biggest challenges of his life. “It’s a blessing to be here, to be comfortable in the city, knowing that the city loves me, that’s going to take care of my people. And then just knowing that I’m representing a great school and the best schools in the nation over there is very surreal.”

Which is the more truthful version of Sarratt’s life? The hardscrabble one? Or the one filled with blessings?

The two narratives must coexist. The Virginia native could never have gotten through the tough times without having a family and support system to lift him up. And without the tough times, the story of Sarratt’s path to the NFL wouldn’t be as triumphant as it actually is.

“I always expected Elijah to be that guy,” said Andre Roye Jr., his roommate at Saint Frances who is now an offensive lineman for the University of Colorado. “He was always the same guy, always on the right track. Any success he got, I knew he deserved it.”

Finding deeper waters

The first thing Donnie Sarratt told me over the phone is that his youngest son is not the pound-for-pound hardest working football player in his own family. That would be Donnie’s middle son Joshua, who had the hard luck of growing up to be 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds.

“If anybody deserves any credit,” Donnie said, “it would be Josh.”

Three years older than Elijah, Josh woke his brother up early to work out and run. Josh directed Elijah through rope ladder drills and route trees that built up the footwork that would become the foundation of his career. It was Josh that Elijah followed, until Elijah shot past his older brother to grow to 6-foot-2.

The family expected Elijah and Josh to be a package deal at Saint Frances, but it wound up being just Elijah who shipped up to Baltimore in search of a more competitive football experience. He had become an all-region player at Colonial Forge in his hometown of Stafford, Virginia, but he was not drawing the recruiting attention that he or his family hoped for.

Elijah quickly learned that getting recognition with the Panthers would be tougher. Looking back, his old coaches said he was probably seen as the fourth-best receiver on his own team.

“I’m not gonna lie — I’m not sure who on the staff would have called him a pro back then,” said safeties coach Cam Wiggins, who lived in a Brentwood Avenue apartment with Elijah back in 2021. “Every year we do a little thing like, ‘How many pros do we have on this team?’ And he wasn’t one that I counted, to be honest, but over time, you could see the growth.”

Elijah was not the fastest receiver at Saint Frances, but he was good at so many other things. In practice, opposing defensive backs hated covering him because of his precise, technical footwork and routes. Quarterbacks trusted him to come down with contested balls.

It wasn’t until college that Donnie coined his now famous nickname — “Waffle House,” because Elijah is always open — but even back at Saint Frances, the other players saw him as that kind of player.

“From the moment he got there, we were like, ‘The kid is kinda different,’” Roye said. “You never expected him to drop the pass.”

Elijah planned to play for the Panthers in the fall of 2020, but the season was upended by COVID-19. He chose to reclassify so he could play in 2021, but between the pandemic and his new status, he lost the few Division I offers he had and basically was starting from scratch in the eyes of college recruiters.

That did not deter him. Roye remembers Elijah for his dedication to getting better. He would link up with the team’s quarterbacks for throwing sessions after practice. While other players might find mischief to get into after school hours, he stuck to his nightly routine of stretching while watching videos or listening to music.

“I mean, he would keep me out of trouble,” said Roye, who eventually started doing the stretching routine with his roommate. “He was really focused on what he wanted.”

Saint Frances has become a scholarship mill, with many blue-chip players passing through its doors. This past year, the school had two five-star recruits who signed with Alabama and Maryland. Head coach Messay Hailemariam is proud of the top-line players who have come through the school’s doors.

But you can’t field a great team without the supporting cast, ideally made up of role players who aren’t discouraged by not getting the spotlight or the scholarships of their more heralded peers. For a Panthers team that finished with a No. 4 national ranking in 2021, Elijah was that kind of player.

“You kind of need the guys who are like, ‘I don’t care what anyone rates me. I’m gonna succeed,’” Hailemariam said. “I think he established that.”

Challenges beyond football

When Donnie sent Elijah to Saint Frances, he had been hoping that it would force his son to develop some grit. Colonial Forge had been good to his kids, but it felt too small a pond for Elijah, who had a chance to do something meaningful in his football career.

It takes just a little under two hours to drive from Stafford to Baltimore, and Donnie wanted to see what would happen if Elijah went from the cushy Virginia suburbs into the city streets: “I’ll put it to you this way — he had to get off his mama’s food.”

But as the Sarratt family pushed Elijah to get out of the family house, they could have never imagined that home would be taken from them.

The fire started in the garage, during a family gathering in the kitchen. Inspectors would later tell the family that faulty refrigerator wiring had sparked and started the blaze. It was a hot August day, and the fire spread more quickly than anyone could have anticipated — within minutes, the family was standing outside at the blackened wreckage of their house.

“It was a lot of chaos,” Donnie said. “A very bad day.”

As they stood there crying and dazed, mourning their house and the things that had burned up within it, it was Elijah who broke the spell. He asked the family to join him in prayer. It was serene moment, one that gave them calm and helped them see how blessed they were to have escaped the blaze with their lives.

Donnie had been trying to toughen up Elijah for years. But for the first time, he felt his youngest son was there for him.

“I don’t know what made him want to pray right then, but from that moment on, I looked at him different,” he said. “After that, whatever he went through, I thought, ‘Elijah’s good.’”

When Elijah returned to Baltimore, he seemed the same, level-headed guy that had left that spring. Most of his teammates only learned about the fire a week or more after the fact. No one would have believed it from his steady demeanor.

There were two Saint Frances receivers in 2021 who were renowned by teammates for their work ethic: Elijah and Lamar Patterson.

Patterson was only 5-foot-9, but after a whirlwind summer of workouts and retooling his nutrition in 2021, he blew up on the recruiting scene. He went from a relative afterthought to one of Saint Frances’ main recruiting attractions. He reportedly racked up two dozen offers, and was planning on playing in 2022 as well.

“I wish everyone around here could meet him, man,” Elijah said recently after a Ravens workout. “He was had a smile on his face every single day, one of the hardest workers that I’ve been around.”

Elijah and Patterson worked out together on Feb. 1, 2022, talking about their dreams of playing high-level college ball. It would turn out to be the last conversation the two ever had.

The next day, Patterson was killed on his commute to school when his car was struck by a light rail train (the light rail operator was eventually found guilty of reckless endangerment).

It was a shattering event for the entire Saint Frances program, which was rocked by its second death within a year (another player, Aaron Wilson, had died in 2021 from brain cancer). But it especially shook the receivers who played with Patterson and loved him for his jovial presence.

“He was goofy, always playing around, but he flipped that switch once he got to the football field,” Elijah said. “He turned up, and you could tell that he really loved the game and that he was trying to take care of himself and his family. And he proved that every single day that he was out here working.”

Elijah was known to the Panthers as one of the hardest workers even before Patterson’s death, but his Saint Frances coaches note how quickly his career seemed to take off afterward. There was another gear of motivation that he reached.

The team came up with a saying: “Long Live Lamar Patterson,” one that they still text each other to this day. When he doesn’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, Elijah said, he thinks about Patterson and the opportunity he never got. Then he pulls himself up.

“I’m doing it for the people who can’t do it anymore — who aren’t here anymore,” he said. “Lamar would be playing on Sundays, too, if he was still here. There ain’t really a day goes by I don’t think about him.”

A startling climb

The process doesn’t always match the results. Most of the people who knew Elijah at Saint Frances thought he had a great process — “It shocked us that nobody out of high school, when college coaches came by, saw it,” Hailemariam said — but was not getting the recruiting attention he wanted.

That started to change when he went to Saint Francis University in 2022, going the FCS route when other programs failed to show interest. With 13 touchdowns and 700 yards on 42 catches, it took just one year to get serious programs to start taking him seriously.

But instead of going to a bigger program, he joined James Madison where his brother Josh was a safety, recruited by a coach named Curt Cignetti. It was a defining decision in his career.

“There were 30 schools that wanted him — he wasn’t a surprise anymore,” Hailemariam said. “It was more a surprise that he went to James Madison.”

That commitment kicked off a torrid, unlikely ascent to the highest peak of college football. In 2023, the Dukes went 11-1 with Elijah making the all-Sun Belt squad. When Cignetti went to Indiana, Elijah followed him: “You could see how loyal he was to Cignetti,” Hailemariam said.

It would have been a reasonable assumption to think Elijah joined the Hoosiers as a token transfer, someone who would be more of a locker room presence than an on-field force.

Wrong! He was one of the best receivers in the country, making a seemingly effortless transition to the Big Ten. As a senior, he led the nation with 15 touchdown catches.

“I mean, I was his roommate, so I’m biased,” said Roye, who tried to get Elijah to transfer to be his teammate at Maryland in 2023. “He had this pattern of always achieving the highest level everywhere he went, from Saint Francis, to JMU, to Indiana. He deserved it all.”

So much changed for Elijah across four years, and yet so much has not. When he went back to Virginia last weekend before the start of Ravens mandatory minicamp, he ran workouts with his brother Josh — just like always.

He’s still motivated to achieve more in his career. The fire continues to affect the family to this day. The Sarratts have lived in four different apartments since 2021, and one of Elijah’s NFL goals is to help his parents (and their three dogs) move out of the apartment they live in now.

“Every weekend, I go home,” he said. “I wake up in the apartment, and I’m like, ‘Man, I got to get my folks out here.’”

Elijah and Hailemariam have connected on FaceTime since Baltimore drafted him, and Saint Frances hopes to schedule him to speak to their team someday soon. While the Panthers had four former players taken in this year’s NFL Draft, only Elijah is directly in their backyard — a living, breathing example of what discipline and self-belief can accomplish.

“We always use his story about how he always played with a chip on his shoulder, and over time, the dream came true. It didn’t happen overnight, it definitely took time, but he’s a walking testimony.”

While Elijah acknowledges that he has endured pain and struggle in his journey to the NFL, it’s hard to see how it weighs on him, if it does at all. He looks back and sees joyful memories. He looks forward and sees the magic of possibility. The valleys in his life story smooth out, even his lowest points.

The fire? It made his family closer. Lamar Patterson? His spirit lives on through the teammates who keep his memory alive. The grind of working up from an FCS school to a national champion? It was just a beautiful journey.

Seeing the world from Elijah Sarratt’s eyes gives light to the possibility that something incredible could be just around the corner.

“When your back’s against the wall, you don’t know what the next day is going to hold,” he said. “But look where we are now. We’re continuing to get better, and I can’t thank the man above enough for the position that he’s putting me in.”