When Rick Byers took over the Turner football program in 2021, the three-time state champion head coach from St. Pius X in Missouri knew he had his work cut out for him. Byers was taking over a program that had not won a game in nearly three years.

But he received a glimmer of hope following his first team meeting that summer.

Byers was sitting in his office when he saw a 6-foot-3, 225-pound individual clutching a large set of keys as he filled up the doorframe.

“I thought he was just the custodian,” Byers said.

Byers was pleasantly surprised to find out that in addition to being a custodian at the high school, this person was also a football player on his team. Even better, he was just a junior.

“That gives me a little bright side from the new job,” Byers recalls thinking at the time.

Peyton Waldo, this week’s the CapFed® True Blue® Student of the Week, made a great first impression on Byers. Waldo introduced himself and quickly apologized for missing that first team meeting.

“Then he cleaned my office on top of it,” Byers said.

Waldo started working as a custodian during the summer before his freshman year of high school. Don Davidson, head custodian for the middle school, asked some teachers if there were any students that might be interested in taking on the role. Waldo’s name came up as a hard worker who might make a good fit.

“He came up to me one day and asked me if I’d be interested,” Waldo said. “I’m not going to turn down the opportunity to make a little money over this summer.”

But the summer job turned into more as the school year rolled around. Waldo stayed on to work part-time with evening shifts after his school day and practices were done.

Waldo admitted it was a hard schedule to maintain. He’d get up in the morning and rush off to school, followed by practice and with work not too far behind.

He eventually got one of his football teammates the same custodian role, so Waldo would drive that friend home after work before getting home around 11 p.m. No time to do much else than sleep, wake up, shower and get ready to do that same thing again.

His schedule did not leave much time for studying, but Waldo said he’s always been a strong student that he was able to find a way to manage.

“Part of it was just having great relationships with teachers,” he said. “The other part of it was just getting my work done in class and making sure I was utilizing my time in class wisely.”

Waldo said his biggest concern was how easy it would have been to get behind on homework, with the weekend being the only possible time he’d have to try and catch up. Instead, Waldo found a way to stay caught up and actually push ahead on other interests beyond the classroom.

Waldo takes multiple classes related to business classes such as accounting and Applied Business Development. In the latter course, he and five classmates managed other students, who were in Business Entrepreneurship & Economics, as they ran the school store during lunchtime.

“We run reports and do all the behind the scenes stuff that most people wouldn’t even think about,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot of business classes and I enjoy business related things.

Waldo said he’d often push himself to stay caught up on other coursework to make sure he had time to focus on responsibilities for the school store and make sure they weren’t falling behind on those.

Although Waldo has a strong work ethic, there is at least one situation where he tried to avoid taking on extra work.

Back when he first started as a custodian, one of the areas that Waldo was tasked with cleaning was the locker room during football season. Some of his teammates made that job tough.

“The guys are tracking in turf and smacking their shoes down, their cleats down, getting turf pellets all over the floor,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I knew I was going to have to clean all that up.”

At first, Waldo did not want to chastise his teammates at the end of practices, but the routine of seeing teammates create unnecessary messes for him to clean up a few hours later ended up eliciting a response.

“I started telling people, ‘Hey, you need to pick up after yourself, because I’m tired of doing it,’” Waldo recalls of those conversations.

When Byers took over the program, Waldo found a coach that shared his dislike of players leaving trash in the locker room. But that new punishment became double the work for Waldo.
 

“As a team, we would run for somebody leaving a bottle,” he said. “It was two gassers per piece of trash on the floor.”

For Waldo, cleaning up after his teammates' messes is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. His custodian job offers him the ability to make money for things like buying a car, having gas money for the car, saving up for college and spending on little things, such as taking his little sister and cousins out for some food every now and again.

It’s an empowering experience for somebody who has enjoyed football all his life, only to have the cost associated with it prevent him from playing on an organized team until he reached middle school.

“I always told my dad I wanted to play football, we just never had the money to put me in a program,” Waldo said.

Once he started though, he fell in love with the sport even more.

“I lived for football,” he said. “Every season it was, ‘I can’t wait to play, can’t wait to practice.’ I just enjoyed it, it was really exciting.”

Waldo also played basketball, but stopped playing after his freshman season. That’s the year that his offensive line coach, who was also the track and field team’s throwing coach, convinced Waldo to compete in throwing events during the spring.

Although offensive linemen generally make up the core group of throwers on the track team, Waldo said it was not an easy transition for him to start throwing the discus and shot put.

“Honestly, it was hard to switch from going fast and hard to slow and developing a rhythm, especially with discus,” he said. 

Waldo ended up finishing ninth in discus at the United Kansas Conference meet last spring. Heading into his final semester of high school, Waldo actually decided to take on more hours at work and become full-time, which ultimately meant he’d forgo his senior track and field season.

In addition to making that tough choice, Byers also thinks Waldo’s hard work as a custodian has had unintended consequences in recruitment. In fact, Waldo's work ethic has turned into a bit of an obstacle as he spends his summers working full-time to make money rather than spending money to attend various football camps where more college teams will take a look at him.

“So the colleges that were looking at him were the junior colleges, some of the smaller NAIA schools,” Byers said. “Those were the schools looking at him because he couldn’t afford to go to and couldn’t take time off to go to a bunch of these bigger combines and stuff.”

Byers said he thinks that the conference accolades that Waldo received on a winless team are a great indicator of the type of talent Waldo would offer any college program. Waldo finished his senior season with double-digit sacks as the team’s top pass rusher. Waldo earned All-United Kansas Conference honorable mention as junior and second team as a senior, both on defense.

“We learned throughout the season and at all-conference night that he’s the one kid that every team had prepared for him when they played us,” he said. “Whether it’s offense, defense, whatever, they had to account for him.

“I think that says a lot coming from other coaches about one of your players on a 0-9 team.”

Byers said how Waldo handled his business, particularly with his consistent effort in the face of mounting losses, has been a huge benefit for a coach attempting to turn around a program that only won 30 games over a decade preceding Waldo's freshman year.

“He’s going to have an opportunity to go on and do great things, and he doesn’t have to be here,” he said. “They see that and that he’s got good grades.”

Waldo credited Byers with keeping the team encouraged and focused on improving, even though as the progress was not showing up in the W-L column.

“We were there to get the job done and he always tried to encourage us to make sure we knew that we had a chance, regardless of our record and theirs,” Waldo said.

Waldo said that it was still difficult to stay positive.

“You kind of just lose hope sometimes and it’s hard to keep up and keep fighting to the last whistle because sometimes you just get down on yourself,” Waldo said. “But Coach Byers and the rest of the coaching staff, and some of our players, would make sure that we all kept our heads held high all year.”

Waldo said it was a surreal moment when he experienced his first high school win in Week 3 of the 2021 season. Turner even entered the game as the favorite, with parents and students packing the opponent’s stadium at JC Harmon. Turner earned a 52-0 victory to end a 23-game losing streak, which dated back to two seasons before Waldo entered high school.

“It felt like the whole school had finally came around and rallied around us,” Waldo said. “That’s just not a feeling we ever had before.”

Even with the victory, the only one during his four years on the team, Waldo’s favorite football memory might actually be from a loss during his senior season.

In Week 6, Turner went up against Topeka West at home. Both teams entered the contest with 0-5 records.

“That game was a dog fight,” Waldo said. “It really did come down to the last play. … We fought tooth-and-nail to the end.”

Topeka West ultimately pulled out the 26-21 victory, but Waldo was proud of the way his team competed against the Chargers.

“It was a great feeling to have a game go back-and-forth," he said. "We didn’t exactly know how it was going to end, but that was honestly probably the most fun I’ve had on a football field.” Byers said that Waldo has the one thing you hear at every level of football as a key trait that leads to success.

“They always hit that one chord: He’s a high character guy,” he said. “Peyton is an extremely high character guy.”

Byers said that in addition to having a good home life and being a great athlete with all the measurables, including running a 4.7 40-yard dash, Waldo is never going to stop working. Byers said Waldo refused to quit through four losing seasons and likely played a huge role in other players sticking with the team through hard times.

“You don’t have to worry about him quitting,” he said. “He ain’t ever going to quit on you. If a kid goes through high school and in four years, he’s one in 20-something (W-L record), it says a lot about him.”

Byers is working with Waldo to figure out the best options for playing at the next level, keeping in mind what Waldo is interested in pursuing education-wise. 

Waldo said he wants to work toward a fire science degree, as well as look into paramedic/EMT training programs. Waldo said becoming a firefighter has been a dream of his since he was a young kid.

“I told my grandma one time that I was going to be a firefighter and now I’m still interested in it,” he said. “I’ve always just liked helping people and I like to stay busy.”

Waldo said he’s never been one to run away from something that was hard. He also likes the idea of entering a profession that would require him to stay sharp, both mentally and physically.
Of course, Waldo will also have those business and entrepreneurship skills in his back pocket. If he heads in that direction, Waldo will likely have a career involving fire.

Byers said he and Waldo would always argue over which one of them was the better cook. Byers go-to food to cook is steak while Waldo is more likely to whip up the full gamut of BBQ sides to go along with his top choice for meat: ribs.

“Ribs, baked mac and cheese, probably glazed carrots and cornbread,” Waldo said. “If I had to present something to Gordon Ramsey, that’s what it would be.”

Byers has not fired up the grill for Waldo, but the senior lineman did bring his coach a plate of ribs to try. Byers was impressed, although he did not want to tell Waldo that.

“I gave him a bunch of crap about how bad it was, then I had to come back and say it was pretty good,” Byers said.

Waldo said he did not need Byers to clear things up because he already could see the truth.

“I saw the rib bones,” Waldo said. “There wasn’t any meat on them.”

Waldo just told him to bring the steaks to prove things once and for all, although Byers has avoided that moment.

“I always put it off because I think he may be better than me,” Byers said.

Waldo has skills on the gridiron and the grill, but he said he’s hesitant about combining his business and cooking skills to start a restaurant. He’s already learned how most restaurants fail within their first two years of opening.

That said, he has thought about the idea of opening a barbecue joint somewhere down the line.

“That’s because barbecue is my passion,” Waldo said. “Football and barbecue. If I have that in my life, I’m happy.”

Waldo probably could have added hard work as the third item on that list … but he’s sort of shown that hard work comes standard, without him needing to comment on it.