Jalon Daniels settled before a polished wooden table for his admissions interview at a premier private school in Southern California, maintaining the practiced posture his mother drilled into him. Sunlight streamed through tall windows as a panel of adults studied him.
One of them smiled, cueing the question many elite schools trot out.
Tell us about a struggle you’ve had to overcome.
Daniels sifted through his life the way a quarterback works through progressions: not nervously, but with a thoughtful hunt for honesty. A few feet behind him, Jalon’s mom, Star Daniels, mentally cycled through potential culprits: a challenging math class? Maybe that one rough football game. Something to check the box.
To everyone’s surprise, Daniels hitched his chin up and answered with disarming simplicity.
“Yeah,” he responded, “I haven’t had any.”
Interviewers’ eyes bounced between Jalon and Star, verifying an answer they thought they had misheard. “Nothing?” Nothing.
“I’m like, ‘Well, thank you guys for your time. I know we’re not gonna get this,’” Star said. “But part of me was very proud.”
Years had to tick away before Daniels made sense of the moment at Junipero Serra High, before he discerned that the struggle he couldn’t name was one Star shouldered in the shadows.
The truth that the Kansas quarterback, now 23, couldn’t name at 13 underpins the backbone of the foundation he later created to empower single mothers and their kids. Only as Daniels grew older did he recognize the full weight Star carried to make his childhood stress-free: two jobs, endless carpools, policing his grades, covering every fee and smoothing every lingering crack.
When NIL money arrived — Daniels is in his sixth season at Kansas — he had the means to repay the gratitude he’d been carrying for years. The MOM2JD6 nonprofit sprang from that clarity: If Star could erase his struggle, he too could smudge out someone else’s.
The committee may have crossed his name off, but Star processed the purity of her son’s truth.
“I’m going to make sure you have 100 percent of what you need, 90 percent of what you want,” Star told her only son, “but you have to do your job, because I don’t get to quit my job.”
Star’s promise governed a home grounded in discipline, where she said a C counted no differently than an F if Daniels hadn’t fully applied himself. If he had a party to go to, Star drove him and watched Netflix in the car until he strode out exactly a minute before his curfew. If she juggled a full-time job at an insurance company and a seasonal shift at Toys “R” Us, then he sure needed to handle business — school, football, money and discipline.
That structure followed him to Lawndale High School, where Daniels transferred from Narbonne High for a real shot at the starting job. As a junior, before injuries cut into his senior season, Daniels piled up 2,351 passing yards, 940 rushing yards and a state title. A three-star dual-threat prospect and barely inside California’s top 300 in the class of 2020, Kansas was his singular Power 5 offer.
“I wasn’t always the kid who was getting all As. My first time getting a 4.0 was freshman year,” Daniels said. “I was the happiest I ever could be.”
It taught him that success wasn’t magic. It was chiseled out of a relentless grind — and to a Division I QB, no amount of work can patch the damage of cruising off course. “They don’t want a dumb quarterback,” he said.
This all played out nine years before Daniels launched MOM2JD6 — which borrowed its name from Star’s email address. However, the roots had been sprouting for years, well before anyone considered formalizing it.
Growing up, Daniels helped fund Christmas meals for local families, donated during Thanksgiving and assembled school supply kits for kids nearby. He even stashed away pocket money to finance scholarships for a dozen children at their local church in Lawndale, Calif.
“(The nonprofit) was his big way of doing it,” Star said, “saying, ‘I want to create my own foundation so that I get to determine how I give back and how I present myself.’”
In 2021, a year into Daniels’ stint with the Jayhawks, NIL floodgates erupted. Athletes’ checks dropped; real money, real fast.
It helped that money was never mysterious in the Daniels household. Tyrone Daniels, Jalon’s stepdad, who married into his family when he was 11, trained Jalon on spreadsheets and bank apps long before NIL came knocking.
So when cash rolled in, Daniels — who said he’s “scared of doing broke” — constructed a mental pie chart: savings, mortgages, life insurance, spending money, nonprofit.
“My freshman year, all I got was a stipend to be able to live on campus,” said Daniels, who started at Kansas in 2020 when the NCAA still banned athletes from profiting off their NIL. “Now you’re talking about some freshmen coming in, making more than their families as soon as they get to college.” The pressure, he said, is real when families back home start asking for money.
For Jalon Daniels and his parents, being involved in the community is nothing new. (Courtesy of MOM2JD6)
Kansas’ 2025 season — with the 5-6 Jayhawks chasing bowl eligibility in Friday’s finale against Utah — is Daniels’ final lap in Lawrence. He opted to return for a final year of eligibility despite speculation and is expected to pursue the NFL Draft.
Daniels’ accelerated financial maturity paid off when he — the unofficial football financial counselor for Kansas freshmen — signed papers for his own home in Kansas at 22, a moment Star still calls her proudest.
“There aren’t a lot of 22-year-olds out there just purchasing a home,” Tyrone said. “It’s not about money. It’s having the proper foundation and credit. … He did the work, and now he gets to bear the fruit of that.”
For Daniels, financial independence widened the map Star drew for him. As his savings climbed, MOM2JD6 scaled in tandem.
Sharon Elefant, founder and CEO of The Nonprofit Plug, directed the Daniels family to legitimize the organization from its legal formation through federal approval. She said she recognized early that it wasn’t a typical celebrity-branded charity.
“What sets Jalon apart is he’s still so connected to the roots of his community,” Elefant said. “Before he even got contracts … before he even knew where he’s going to college, he was already doing it all.”
Daniels funneled a large slice of his NIL earnings into events in Lawrence, Kan., hosting a Holiday Meet & Greet last year with The Single Mom KC, a support organization for single mothers, and donating $5,000 to power holiday initiatives. Once MOM2JD6 officially opened, those gestures blossomed into community events that functioned like the Daniels household — meticulous, welcoming and personal.
Star billed them “five-star” events, and she and Daniels treated them like it — triple-checking food, decorations, volunteers and atmosphere. At this year’s Back-to-School event, an Egg Roll Babe truck pulled up sizzling, with garlic noodles steaming and egg rolls crackling beside Kool-Aid jugs. A Mother’s Day smorgasbord laid out bacon, sausage, eggs, waffles and even shrimp and grits. There were mocktail bartenders, balloons, shirts, banners and a DJ, the setup humming long before the first child walked in.
“For some, that may be the best meal that they had for the whole week,” said Nicole Legaux, a 47-year-old single mom with a 12-year-old son. The two attended the Mother’s Day event.
At each event, Daniels wasn’t the guy posting up for autographs and then disappearing. He mobilized his teammates — his linemen on Mother’s Day and wide receivers on the Fourth of July — to offer kids the experience of being alongside big brothers.
The Mother’s Day event spanned four hours, with about 50 kids clustering around Jalon and his linemen, peeling off by position group. Legaux recalled her son — a sixth-grader with a varsity lineman’s frame — tearing around with Kansas linemen and tuning in as Daniels preached staying grounded, avoiding drugs and maintaining good grades. Delivered by someone he admired, the message caught hold of Ryder Legaux in a way no parental refrain could.
“When the kids can reach out and touch someone that they see on TV or is in talks of a Heisman — and they’re from our community — it creates that ‘I can do it too’ mentality,” Nicole Legaux said.
“My son does respect (Daniels) because he’s done a lot of the things that my son is doing now at a young age. It helps those messages resonate a little bit more.”
It wasn’t lost on Star, watching kids melt toward Daniels, that she was once the child reaching for an adult’s steady ground. Before she raised a boy who breathed football, she was a product of Aunt Ricky — her father’s sister who personified structure and sacrifice in silence.
Ricky held down minimum-wage jobs, covered a mortgage herself and opened her doors to any kid who needed a safe place to fall. Star described weekends when her house became a permanent sleepover, cousins and neighbors nested across couches and floor space, each fed whether she knew their name or not.
“My aunt was the type of person that would take the shirt off of her back and give it to somebody,” Star said, “so I became that type of person that would do that.”
So when MOM2JD6 planned a major event for Daniels’ bye week on Oct. 18 back home in Southern California, Jalon knew what belonged at its center. Breast cancer was the illness that took his aunt, the woman who anchored his mother’s world.
“(Ricky is) the definition of strength to me,” Daniels said, “the definition of being so courageous about what you’re doing that no matter what’s going on in your life, you want to be able to stay on track.”
Jalon Daniels’ foundation held a breast cancer awareness event. (Courtesy of MOM2JD6)
Star called longtime co-worker Nancy Rivera, a single mother who survived breast cancer, to speak at the event. Rivera had never voiced her story publicly, not even to her own family. Still, she agreed.
Rivera avoided saying the word “cancer” aloud, aware of how it drained the light off people’s faces. However, when Star called, knowing what Ricky’s story meant, Rivera didn’t hesitate; she’d do “anything Star asked me.”
After days of rehearsing her 10-minute speech in her backyard, Rivera, 56, faced a room of about 100 people, unspooling pieces of her journey she’d never strung into words. Her parents and strangers wept in unison. They laughed when her story offered relief.
“When I was done,” Rivera said, “I felt like a big weight had been lifted.”
“Jalon and Star allowed me the opportunity to overcome something I didn’t know I was ready to do.”
And that’s the real arc of MOM2JD6. Daniels isn’t outrunning his upbringing. He’s honoring the people who built it, then widening the path they cleared.
It’s why Star didn’t shed a tear when she dropped Daniels 1,599 miles away from home.
“I know what type of child I raised,” she said. “Now it is your time to get out in the world and show that I did my job.”
Safe to say she did hers. And now, he sure as well is doing his. Like she always requested.
