Jayden McGregory’s football journey from public parks to Division I | Senior Superlative

• Jayden McGregory, a top Iowa high school football senior, began his athletic career at a young age, influenced by his mother.
• He transferred from Des Moines North to Valley to face higher competition, leading to success in both football and basketball.
• McGregory’s decision to focus on being a defensive back at camps led to numerous Division I offers, and he has committed to Louisville.

This story is part nine of a series on the Des Moines Register’s top 10 Iowa high school football seniors. Each week until the end of the season, we will feature a different senior, showing readers a side of them that goes beyond the Friday night lights.

Sometimes, the best sports stories begin in public parks.

There is a quiet green space on the east side of the Drake neighborhood, Good Park, made up of a large grass field on one end, a pair of basketball hoops and a chain link fence-enclosed row of tennis courts on the other, with three swings, a playground, a gazebo and a splash pad sandwiched in between.

One seemingly unending breeze funnels through the trees, and there’s a city soundtrack produced by an ambulance speeding down University Avenue and cars rolling past on Interstate 235.

Jayden McGregory spent a lot of time at Good Park, one of the places where he played football as a child.

It’s one of the places that turned the Valley senior into the athlete he is: one of the top football players not only in Iowa but in the entire country.

McGregory’s athletic endeavors began early, and never stopped

McGregory was born to be an athlete.

Growing up, he spent plenty of time in the halls of a high school and competed in organized sports by the time he was 2 years old. And his first word, “ball,” was a sign of things to come.

Marissa Townsley doesn’t recall a time when her son wasn’t around sports. She was a sophomore at Des Moines North High School when she had him, and with an athlete for a mom, he tagged along to her basketball games. McGregory can still recall those memories, like when he shot a basketball at halftime of those Polar Bears contests.

That’s the sport he fell in love with first, and Townsley realized early on that athletics were going to be a large part of both of their lives.

“On Saturday mornings, he wasn’t watching cartoons,” Townsley laughed. “He was watching ESPN, and he was like 4 years old.”

She put him in a basketball league for 3- and 4-year-olds when he was 2. He skipped flag football and began playing tackle ball at 5 years old, because he just wanted to be in pads – like the professional athletes he’d started to idolize.

Townsley thought that her son would take one or two hits and be done with football, but that obviously did not happen. During his youth football days – growing up on teams sponsored by the Des Moines Parks and Recreation department – he made all-star teams for sixth and seventh graders when he was still in fourth grade.

McGregory’s life revolved around sports, which meant Townsley’s life revolved around sports.

She started to volunteer with his youth programs. While McGregory practiced or played, Townsley would help with bookkeeping or registration. The pair would wake up early to shoot hoops – on any net they could find – before school and work. Townsley turned into McGregory’s most consistent practice partner.

It wasn’t always easy for the single mother of three – McGregory and his younger siblings, Amari and Mariah – to keep up with her oldest child’s aspirations.

“At times, it really broke my heart because I’m a single mom, and so having to sometimes make those sacrifices or tell him no was hard,” Townsley said. “It was a lot of, ‘If we have the money.’ Financially, that was the hard part. Showing up was the easy part.”

But the work they put in together paid off.

McGregory gravitated toward the quarterback position, and that’s where he played during most of his youth football years and even into his first season at Des Moines North. He didn’t have an easy transition to the high school game, though.

He didn’t register any statistics in the Polar Bears’ first game of his freshman season. In game two – a win over Des Moines East – he was credited with half a tackle. And then came game three.

The freshman receiver caught two passes totaling 32 yards from senior quarterback Nick Crispin. But then, Crispin got hurt in the middle of that game, and then-head coach Eric Addy put McGregory in at quarterback. He completed three of three passes and threw one touchdown pass, but the Polar Bears lost.

That’s when the real work began.

“That Saturday, I had to learn the whole playbook from the quarterback’s standpoint,” McGregory said. “It was a roller coaster, for sure, in my freshman year. But it was a good learning lesson.”

Before the start of his sophomore year, McGregory transferred from North to Valley.

The decision to leave the community that had essentially raised him didn’t come easy. But McGregory and Townsley both knew that getting recruited out of the Des Moines Public School programs was an uphill battle, and they understood that consistently playing against a higher level of competition would only aid his development.

He emerged as one of the top two-way players on the Tigers’ roster in his first year in West Des Moines, recording 247 receiving yards and three touchdowns on offense and 16.5 tackles, one fumble recovery taken 70 yards for a touchdown and two interceptions on defense.

That success continued into his junior season, where he helped Valley to a state runner-up finish, recording 173 receiving yards and one touchdown plus 13.5 tackles and three interceptions – including a pick six – along the way.

And his accomplishments weren’t just limited to the football field.

McGregory earned a spot in the starting lineup of Valley’s basketball team, and he played a large role in the Tigers’ back-to-back state championships in 2024 and 2025.

He missed out on the three–peat, with Valley also winning the title in 2023, since McGregory still played for Des Moines North. In that 2023 season, he led the Polar Bears in points, rebounds, assists and steals per game as a freshman.

McGregory’s athleticism – on the gridiron, on the hardwood – made him a standout in Iowa.

It also made college coaches around the country take notice of his talents.

McGregory’s motivation leads to Division I offers

Quarterback, wide receiver, cornerback, safety, punt returner, kick returner and punter.

“That’s really it,” said McGregory, after rattling off all the positions he played during his four-year, two-program high school career.

So, the ‘athlete’ distinction – given to two-way players who were recruited as both an offensive and defensive player – fit McGregory perfectly. He’ll be a defensive back in college, and that’s by design, since it’s not a position that he just fell into naturally.

The motivation that pushed McGregory to excel in sports at such a young age is also the reason why he stood out at college prospect camps.

Always the quarterback on his youth football teams, he quickly noticed that it was the largest position group at almost every prospect camp he attended. McGregory noticed something else, too: the defensive backs were typically the smallest group.

“He quickly noticed how slim the lines were at the defensive back position,” Townsley recalled. “Everybody wants to be the quarterback, and everybody wants to be a receiver. Jayden just wanted to be seen.”

He’d never really played that position before, but he’d always been athletic, and he took to it easily. And that one decision to camp at a position unfamiliar to him changed McGregory’s life.

In the summer after his freshman year, McGregory landed his first Division I offer. It came from Iowa State, and it came after one of those prospect camps. He earned a second offer – from Minnesota – that summer, but it wasn’t until after his first season at Valley that the floodgates opened.

Over the next year and a half, he picked up offers from Arkansas, Florida State, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kansas State, Louisville, Michigan, Michigan State, Missouri, Nebraska, Southern Miss, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

He climbed to a four-star ranking – the second highest in the recruiting world – by 247Sports Composite, making him one of the top 375 players in the country in his senior class.

On July 7 – a date partially picked to coincide with his No. 7 jersey – McGregory committed to Louisville. It marked the end of a recruitment process that had brought him and his mother even closer together.

When his recruitment picked up, Townsley made one thing very clear: education came first, and football came second.

“If his grades were not there, then this does not happen,” Townsley laughed. “I made sure he understood like, Cs are average and please don’t bring me a C because you’re not an average kid.”

She not only pushed him to separate himself academically, but she also did everything she could to foster his football dreams. Townsley spent a lot of time on the road with her oldest son, making sure he set foot on almost every campus where he held an offer.

She spent those hours in the car – long weekends trying to stop at three or four colleges in one trip – trying to prepare McGregory for life after high school.

McGregory wouldn’t change anything about that relationship – from growing up in the halls of Des Moines North to long days on the road chasing his dream. It’s always been him and Townsley, and a dozen-or-so Division I offers didn’t change that.

“Man, my mom’s the reason why I’m here today,” McGregory said with a smile. “She put me in so many great positions, like I can’t thank her enough. It was fun growing up, just me and my mom for a little bit. My mom, she’s a very good one.”

McGregory sets high expectations for senior season

McGregory pulls a cell phone – protected by a bright orange case – from his shorts pocket and presses the power button, illuminating his home screen.

The screensaver is a thrown-together collage of football images, including a screenshot of a list, typed out in the notes application and partially obscured by the white letters and numbers spelling out the date and time.

His eyes hover over each line as he reads down the checklist.

Football state champion, 1,000 receiving yards, zero catches against him in coverage. Ten interceptions, four pick-sixes, at least 70 tackles, seven tackles for loss. Be a great teammate, lead by example, earn first team, all-state honors for defensive back and wide receiver. Player of the year.

During his official visits to college programs during the summer, he thought a lot about what he wanted to accomplish this season and the type of football player he wanted to be in his senior year.

The goals are lofty, almost unattainable, especially for a player who spends little time catching his breath.

This season, he threw one pass for 24 yards and a touchdown, has racked up 434 receiving yards and seven touchdowns through the air, and recorded 4.5 tackles and a fumble recovery on defense.

So, he has some catching up to do on some of those preseason goals.

But it was never about checking each of those things off the list; it was about making his mark. And, even before the season started, McGregory’s done that.

The Valley senior partnered with Back 2 School Bash – an event that provides free school supplies, haircuts, food and resources for local families – in an NIL deal this summer. It was an event that McGregory and Townsley attended when he was growing up.

He wanted to remind people where he came from and how he got to where he is now.

“He’s just such a role model in his community where he’s from, which is really the inner city,” Townsley said. “Yes, we’re at Valley now, but everybody knows where he started. And there’s just so many kids in that community that really look up to and idolize Jayden because they know him.”

McGregory accomplished a lot in his 18 years of life, and there is a lot more to come.

It’s too early to know if his final season of high school football will end with a state championship or how he’ll play in college.

But McGregory made a name for himself in Des Moines – and showed other children what’s possible in the process – and that’s enough, at least for now.

Alyssa Hertel is the college sports recruiting reporter for the Des Moines Register. Contact Alyssa at ahertel@dmreg.com or on Twitter @AlyssaHertel.