Belleville's Jeremiah Beasley honed on both sides of the ball by star athletes in family

Brothers and sisters growing up competing with and against each other is a common occurrence, but the members of the Carr-Beasley-McMichael family have taken things to a completely different level.

“Everything was a competition in our house,” said Peggy McMichael, the mother of Maliq Carr and Joshua and Jeremiah Beasley. “Video games for sure, all the time. Who could do the most push-ups, who could do the most sit-ups.”

The competition at home helped make the three athletes who they are today and that is pretty special. Carr is a junior tight end at Michigan State and last week had a career-high nine catches and 100 yards and two touchdowns, including the dazzling game-winning 36-yard score and was named the Big Ten’s offensive player of the week.

Joshua is a redshirt freshman on Ferris State’s football team.

And then there is little brother Jeremiah — a senior at Belleville and one of the best players in the state. He'll enroll early at Michigan in January.

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But before then, he will attempt to help Belleville win its third consecutive Division 1 state championship Sunday at 7 p.m. when the Tigers face Southfield A&T at Ford Field in Detroit.

“This will be crazy because a lot of people, in their high school career, can’t say they won one,” he said. “For me to win three, back-to-back-to-back, would be a blessing.”

Beasley, at 6 feet 1 and 215 pounds, is a standout linebacker and running back. He loves being a running back, but he has committed to be a linebacker in Ann Arbor.

Running back is a glory position, but Beasley’s reasoning for choosing linebacker may surprise you.

“I felt like me being able to play linebacker and seeing how long linebackers last in the league and how long running backs last in the league,” he said, referring to the NFL. “And then it was me hitting somebody instead of taking a hit.”

Avoiding taking a hit is sound thinking, but the somewhat short NFL careers of running backs is something high school kids don’t usually take into consideration.

And Beasley wasn’t even in high school when he figured that out.

Clearly, this is a man with a plan.

“I was 13 or 14 when I started to see a running back in the league and two or three years later he’s nowhere to be found,” he said. “With linebackers, there’s more of them staying in the league longer.”

Beasley got his initial taste of playing football in the basement of the family home while playing with his brothers.

It was no-holds-barred football.

“Growing up with everything, we used to play football in the basement until he was like six,” Carr said. “I was bigger than all of them, so I had to play on my knees. It was cheating.”

He may have been on his knees, but Carr didn’t hold much back when it came to going after his two younger brothers.

“That’s the thing, I started slippin’ Jeremiah and Josh,” Carr said. “They both learned battles from it, I guess, because Jeremiah doesn’t really get tackled anymore.”

Beasley is averaging over 10 yards per carry this season, gaining 787 yards on 71 carries and scoring 12 touchdowns in limited playing time because of Belleville’s lopsided victories. Eleven of the Tigers' 13 games have ended with a running clock.

Defensively, Beasley has recorded 56 solo tackles with 58 assists and five sacks.

Playing football in the basement was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to family competition.

“I competed with all my brothers, but when it came down to it, it was usually me and Maliq,” Beasley said. “We’d be going head-to-head; whether it was outside in the backyard going one-on-one  or the best out of five or in video games, we’d just compete.”

The two even resorted to inventing ways to compete.

“We’d probably hang on the monkey bars at a park to see who could hold up the longest,” Beasley said. “It was things like normal kids didn’t really do, but it fell to us. We look at it is competition.”

Carr said the two were always looking to get an advantage on the other one.

“It’s pretty much everything from Madden to who can get upstairs the fastest to who can put the most groceries in the car,” Carr said. “It was all that. It was everything. Anything and everything could have been a competition.”

Maybe they competed to see who could take the fastest shower.

“Not the shower, no,” Carr said. “We take our showers seriously.”

Like Carr, who was an outstanding basketball player, Beasley is much more than just a football player. He wrestled as a nine-year-old and won the state championship, but gave up the sport a year later when it began to conflict with indoor track.

He found a home with football making it a bit ironic that he will be facing Southfield A&T, led by quarterback Isaiah Marshall, in the state championship game.

Marshall and Beasley were youth-league teammates for several years and the team was coached by Isaiah’s father, Brian, a former Birmingham Brother Rice all-stater who played at Northwestern.

Beasley credits Marshall’s father with much of the success he has enjoyed carrying the ball.

“He really got me into playing running back and being as good as I am now,” Beasley said. “We used to sit down and I was at a young age. I think he was developing me faster than a lot of kids. We’d sit down and watch film when I was 7 or 8. It would be me, him and Isaiah. It was 10 times easier when I got on the field.”

The exact position Beasley should play in college is a matter of debate even though he committed as a linebacker.

“He’s not going to like my answer,” Carr said. “I think it’s running back. But he’s probably going to outgrow that position.”

Belleville head coach Calvin Norman doubles as the running backs coach so you can imagine on which side of the debate he falls.

“I’m a running back coach so he does things at running back I’ve never seen running backs do at his age,” Norman said. “He has a low center of gravity. He’s so tall, but he runs so low. And his vision of the field is better than anybody I’ve seen. He knows how to plant and go.

“There are things that he naturally does at running back. I watch him at practice and I think ... I don’t know.”

Norman understands why Beasley wants to play defense and his demeanor makes him ideal for that position.

“He’s an aggressive guy,” Norman said. “He’s fast; he can get to the ball. He understand what the defense needs; he’s almost a quarterback on defense. He knows his IQ on the defensive side of the ball is really high so when he goes after a play, he goes after it full force and makes great tackles.

“On the blitz packages he’s coming quick because he’s so fast.”

Beasley is a naturally gifted athlete, but he is not the best athlete in the family. Neither is Carr, who would have been a candidate for the Hal Schram Mr. Basketball award had he not skipped basketball as a  senior to enroll early in college.

Carr said he knew from birth Beasley was going to be an excellent athlete.

“He came from my mom, so pretty much when he came out I knew,” Carr said. “In reality, yeah, that’s how it is. My mom is still the best athlete in our family as it stands now.

“Yeah, but we’re going to pass her real soon.”

Don’t count on it.

Peggy was Peggy Evans when she won the Miss Basketball award way back in 1989 at Birmingham Detroit Country Day.

She still holds the state championship-game record with 47 points and her 769 points (28.5 per game) in her senior year are eighth-best in Michigan history.

She went on to play at Tennessee and Ohio State, winning the 1991 national championship with Tennessee.

Beasley was a bit late to the party when it came to recognizing his mom as a tremendous athlete.

“I was about 5 or 6 when I went to games when she coached at Inkster, I heard the praise people gave her,” he said. “People were saying that she was that type of player.”

Beasley didn’t go for it at first because, well, she was just his mother.

“People like to overexaggerate so I had to see it for myself,” he said. “I was around 7 or 8 when I really got to notice how good people were at sports. So I could watch her highlights and it was crazy.”

As he has grown older, people have put two and two together, and they tell him more and more about his mother’s athletic accomplishments.

“At the beginning of my life it was just mom, but now we’ve got to this point and a lot of people bring her up to me,” Beasley said. “She’s still mom, but I still think about her being Miss Basketball and all she accomplished.”

Despite being a premier athlete, Peggy and her husband, Will McMichael, an assistant coach at Belleville, knew little about the recruiting process when their sons were growing up.

It seemed like all of a sudden they were faced with swarms of college coaches hitting up their sons.

“At first, you don’t realize how good they are,” Peggy said. “Will does, because he’s a football guy. People talk about Jeremiah and say how good he is. When he started getting recruited, that’s when you can tell how good he is.”

When he was in the seventh grade Beasley accompanied Carr to some camps and wound up with an offer from Austin Peay.

“I was on the trip just to have fun, watch my brother show out at camps and get a bunch of offers,” Beasley said. “When I picked that offer up, it was, like, surreal, it didn’t feel real at the team.

“I was going into the eighth grade. I don’t think I processed it at first. I knew what a scholarship was, but I didn’t hear of people my age getting offered.”

Going into his freshman year, Beasley received offers from Kentucky and Maryland. He was pleased with the Power Five offers and off it went from there.

Carr, who began his college career at Purdue, has been a good sounding board for his little brother. He prepared Beasley for the circus that comes with the recruitment of a high-profile athlete.

He told Beasley how to block out the nonsense.

“Maliq always told me to work hard and not worry about the rankings,” Beasley said. “The offers and everything were going to come. That’s one of the big things I took with me and they did.”

Naturally, the sibling rivalries got out of hand from time to time, but Carr always knew his job was to make his younger brothers as good as possible.

“I think Maliq always wanted his little brothers to be better,” Peggy said. “He would say: ‘If my little brothers aren’t better than me, then I didn’t do my job.’ ”

It was a job well done by Carr, but he will tell you when it comes to Beasley, it was nothing more than a matter of biology.

“It’s just the genes; he’s got the genes to do it,” he said. “It was naturally there. And I wasn’t going to let him slack off. He was going to have the work ethic.

“People kept telling me Jeremiah was going to be better than me and Josh was, too. I knew that. They were supposed to be.”

Mick McCabe is a former longtime columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at mick.mccabe11@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mickmccabe1. Order his book, “Mick McCabe’s Golden Yearbook: 50 Great Years of Michigan’s Best High School Players, Teams & Memories,” now at McCabe.PictorialBook.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Belleville two-way star Jeremiah Beasley already eyeing his NFL plan