Ray Rice moved back to the Baltimore area a few years ago feeling he had “unfinished business” with the community that had adopted him during his six seasons as a star running back with the Ravens.

Rice knows that for some people, he will always be defined by how his career ended. The Ravens released him in 2014 after TMZ posted video of him striking his future wife in an Atlantic City casino elevator. The NFL suspended him, and though he was subsequently reinstated, Rice never played another snap.

He does not shy away from that part of his story. In fact, as Rice prepares for a new role as junior varsity football coach at Milford Mill Academy, he believes his mistakes make him the perfect person to help 15- and 16-year-old boys work on themselves.

He has been doing this for years in one form or another, working with domestic violence awareness organizations and speaking to younger players, including each Ravens rookie class, about his experiences.But as his first career faded into the rearview and as he turned his attention to his own children, 13-year-old daughter Rayven and 8-year-old son Jaylen, Rice craved a more formal job in which he could teach football and life to aspiring players who might walk the same path he did.

“I’m at the point in my life where I feel like I want to serve the next generation,” he said Wednesday, speaking at Milford Mill before the school celebrated the 2025 college commitments of its senior football players. “I just feel like there were things in my own world where if someone had gotten to me before high school, that’s where you really want to make the difference.”

He noted that he was a “public school kid” growing up in New Rochelle, New York, and that he doesn’t like the negativity he hears when some people talk about public school academics and athletics.

“I want to help shape that narrative to something different,” the 38-year-old former Pro Bowl ball carrier said.

Rice has known Milford Mill’s football coach, former NFL defensive lineman Reggie White, for years. Several youth league players Rice coached in Pikesville went on to the Millers. When he talked to White about joining Milford’s staff, he said JV would be the perfect level.

“That’s the group,” he said. “Ninth grade is no time for screwing up. You can’t start your high school journey behind, because you’ll always be playing catch-up.”

White has no doubt Rice will command players’ attention.

“Instant credibility. He knows Ray Lewis. He knows Ed Reed,” the Milford Mill coach said. “He has a story to tell. A lot of people don’t understand with football that we’re seeing these guys from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. during the season. That’s a lot of time every day for five months, and you’re not talking about football that whole time. You’re talking about life, home, school, girlfriend, boyfriend. There’s so much that we pour into these kids.”

With help from expert counselors, Rice has thought a lot about his childhood — why he became the person he did. He was highly responsible in some ways, helping to pay household bills as early as age 11. On the field, he was a ball of lightning swift fury, perpetually reinforced for his achievements, which led him to stardom at Rutgers and for the Ravens. But that success helped him ignore other parts of himself that needed attention and work. He said he never learned to ask for help.

“A man at 11, a boy at 21,” he said, summing himself up. He aims to make sure his players at Milford Mill don’t overlook the self-care and work they need off the field.

He hopes they’ll see in him “a willingness to make it right but to make it right for the long term.”

“Life is best understood in reverse,” Rice said. “So what I’m able to do in my world now is just pour back in things that I went back and fixed in my own world. And another thing I’m a big believer in is showing them better than you can tell them.”

That might mean listening to a player’s life struggles during a quiet moment. It might also mean running sprints side by side with his athletes in the heat of summer.

For all his talk of nurturing, Rice does not sound like he’ll be easy going about the business of football. Asked what nuggets he might pull from past mentors, he repeated a phrase from his coach at New Rochelle High School: “Too many pats on the back set you back.”

In other words, reward young athletes for performing well but known when it’s time to “peel back” and get real about the work still to be done.

That didn’t make sense to Rice when he was 17 years old, scoring touchdowns by the bundle. It hit home a decade later, when he realized there were flaws he had never addressed because he lived in an acclaim bubble.

Rice made a point Wednesday of saying he wanted to do this work in the Baltimore area, where he and his wife, Janay, have settled their family for the long haul. He noted how thankful he was when people in the community welcomed him back in the wake of his highly public downfall. The Ravens, too, began inviting him back to speak with players, enjoy alumni events and ultimately serve as a “Legend of the Game” late in the 2023 season.

“I’ve always felt genuine love,” he said. “To the point where, when I came back, there were fans who said, ‘I didn’t like what you did, but I appreciate the willingness to be able to change your narrative.’ And that’s just real. This is a real place.”

He hopes to introduce a new mantra at Milford Mill: “Asking for help is a superpower.”

Words that speak directly to the teenager Rice was two decades ago. “I was struggling in high school, but I wasn’t struggling on the field,” he recalled. “I was struggling trying to figure out who I was.”

If he had known whom to ask and how to ask, he said, maybe he could have avoided a lot of the pain he felt and caused.

“I didn’t have that internal structure in high school where I should have asked for a little bit of help,” Rice said. “That’s where I wish that I could have done things differently. But that’s what I really want them to do: ask for help.”

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