Frankie in 1997 / Frankie in 2013. (Photos by Radio Diaries and David Gilkey/NPR)

In high school, Frankie Lewchuck was number 44 on the Tigers football team in Valley Head, Alabama. The team was terrible. They only won one game his senior year. But Frankie was one of the team’s star players. It was the best time of his life.

Sixteen years ago, I gave Frankie a tape recorder to chronicle his team’s losing season for Teenage Diaries. Frankie also did a radio diary about the time his dad spent behind bars. As a clean-cut, sports-obsessed teenager, it seemed unlikely that Frankie would ever end up there too.

But he did.

Listen to Frankie’s new diary—and all the stories in Teenage Diaries Revisited—on npr.org.