Central Falls’ Robert Alves, right, and his teammates have put in lots of work in a bid to get a handle on opponents such as Tiverton’s Zack Kapstein and in the game of life.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

Sometimes you find great little stories when you’re not looking for them, the stories that are at the very heart of sports.

So it was Thanksgiving morning.

It was after the annual Central Falls-Tiverton game, which Tiverton won, 31-0, and the Central Falls coach was talking to his team, players who knelt around them in the grass, their red and blue uniforms stained with mud, their faces etched with defeat.

The coach is Mo Jackson and he was telling his Warriors that they had lost to a better team and that there is no shame in that, telling them that it was only a game, telling them that they had given 100 percent and that made them winners in his eyes.

Telling them that there are a lot more important things to dwell on than losing a high school football game. Telling them that he was proud of them, that he still loved them, no matter what the final score said.

And when he turned away from them his eyes were rimmed with tears.

It was the essence of coaching.

Except that it didn’t come in the white-hot glare of the NFL. Or for the kind of money that buys vacation homes full of rugs that are soft under your feet. Nor for the kind of celebrity that make people stop you in shopping malls to ask for autographs. Not in the any of the ways we’ve come to think what coaching is all about.

But in trying to make a group of kids feel better after they just lost the biggest game of their lives.

In trying to put it all in perspective for a group of kids who were kneeling before him, their young faces etched with defeat.

“We’re a family,” he said a few minutes later.

The fans had gone. Most of the players were leaving. Their season was over, had ended not in cheers and a big win, but by getting beaten badly in their last game. Football is a tough game.

And Central Falls is not the easiest place to coach.

Not in a city that’s all but synonymous with crime and poverty, a city where too many people seem to come and go in some never-ending ethnic stew, this old mill town with three-deckers on narrow streets, this place where too many people always seem to be swimming against the current.

Jackson has three kids on his team who are going to be fathers. He has another who can’t come to practice for the first hour or so because he has to go home and take care of his sister. He has some others who have to go to work right after practice. He has kids from a smorgasbord of backgrounds, many of whom make almost daily sacrifices to play high school football.

“Each year brings a different challenge,” he said. “Grades. Kids who have to work. Personal problems. It’s an ongoing thing.”

He paused a beat, looked, away.

“But I have kids who don’t want to leave the locker room,” he said.

Is it any wonder why he’s come to care for these kids, these kids who overcome a lot of odds every day just to be on a team in the first place, never mind trying to win games?

But Jackson also knows he grew up in an easier era than these kids do today.

“I was fortunate,” he said. “I had two parents.”

That was back in Warwick in the 1960s, when Jackson was one of just a handful of black kids at Warwick Vets, even though he became the vice president of his class. He also was fortunate that he had people who cared for him, coaches, teachers, people who believed in his potential.

One was Tom Shola, and when Jackson began to coach, it was as though he could hear Shola’s voice in his head, one that said to never forget where you came from.

And just as Shola had been an unofficial mentor to him, Jackson set out to do it for the kids he coaches.

That’s a lesson that got reinforced when Jackson became an assistant coach to Tony Rainone at Central Falls High somewhere in the mid 1980s. Rainone was another of those unsung heroes, one of those guys who coached for the love of it, not for what it ever got him.

These were Jackson’s role models, and to him it’s all about passing these lessons down. About how it’s not what you do on the field that counts. It’s what you do in life.

Old lessons to a new generation.

“I love coaching and football is the greatest game you can ever play,” he said Sunday afternoon. “It teaches kids so many lessons.”

It was Sunday afternoon, three days after his season had ended, and in a sense he was still coming down from the emotion of the season.

One of the kids who thought he was going to be a father had just found out over the weekend that it had been a false alarm.

“And you thought the game was the most important thing in the world,” he had said to the kid.

“No comparison,” the kid had said.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you after the game,” Jackson had said.

So his coaching goes on, even if the season stops. It’s shepherding them about their grades. It’s giving them rides. It’s a lot of things that have nothing to do with blocks and tackles.

“I’ve had opportunities to coach in other places,” Mo Jackson said, “but I love these kids. They always give their all. They’re underdogs, and they need a chance.”

The kind of chance he tries to give them.

In the kind of victory that doesn’t show up on the scoreboard.

breynold@projo.com