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Safety Anthony Mitchell was an undrafted rookie out of college who grinded his way onto the Ravens’ 2000 Super Bowl roster — winning a Lombardi Trophy with a team that will be honored this weekend before a game at M&T Bank Stadium against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

More than two decades later, running back Keaton Mitchell was an undrafted rookie out of college who earned his way onto the Ravens’ 2023 regular-season roster.

Like father, like son, right?

Not so fast.

“My dad’s got the NFL [experience], so everyone thinks I got it all from my dad,” Keaton said. “But I got something from my mom, too, now.”

After all, his mom is the one who went to the University of Texas on scholarship and competed on a national championship track and field team. Kandice might have been hesitant to take credit, but to Keaton it’s obvious where his signature speed came from.

More than that, Kandice helped develop Keaton as a football player.

Kandice, at the age of 46, made Team USA’s women’s tackle football team as a linebacker. Originally an alternate, she was called up and made the only sack in Team USA’s gold-medal-game victory in the 2017 IFAF World Championships in Vancouver.

“Just to see your mom out there, and then her bringing back the gold medal, is crazy,” Keaton said.

Keaton and his older siblings, Kobi and Kayla, have been Kandice’s biggest supporters as she has set out on what many would consider an unconventional path.

Kandice grew up in a football-loving household in Atlanta with a yard that hosted the neighborhood football games. Her older brother and younger brother had no qualms about letting a girl join.

“I was faster than a lot of the boys in the neighborhood, so my brothers knew that I was a secret weapon,” Kandice said.

Her days as a star running back were confined to the backyard because there were no options for girls to play football — tackle or flag — at that time.

She played basketball and ran track, but football remained a part of Kandice’s life, especially after she met Anthony.

The two hit it off in a mall in Tuskegee, Alabama, while he was in college. When Anthony decided to pursue an NFL career despite going undrafted, he worked with Kandice’s father, Augustus Pritchett, who coached and trained athletes.

After trying out with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Anthony was cut but signed to the Ravens’ practice squad. In 2000, he made the 53-man roster and played in every game on the Ravens’ Super Bowl run.

That year Kandice and Anthony also got married, and she traveled with him as his career grew. Both of their sons were born in Baltimore.

In 2003, Anthony went back to the Jaguars. It was there that Kandice learned she wasn’t relegated to the stands as an NFL wife. She could be a player in her own right.

Then-Jaguars quarterback David Garrard’s wife, Mary, told Kandice she was going to try out for the Jacksonville Dixie Blues. She invited Kandice to go with her.

However, the Women’s Football Alliance’s season is in the spring, and Anthony signed with the Cincinnati Bengals that year.

But the seed was planted. Kandice started researching teams in Atlanta, where they lived in the offseason. She found a team called the Atlanta Xplosion and, at the age of 33, decided to try out.

She made the team and found herself part of a group of women with mixed experience. Some had played some form of football, but the common denominator was that everyone was an elite athlete. The coaches showed them how to translate their skills to football.

Despite her husband’s career as a defensive back and her childhood experience as a running back, Kandice wanted to play linebacker.

“I was very motivated by and influenced by Ray Lewis back then,” Kandice said. “I loved what he did, and that’s what I wanted to be.”

As for Anthony, he was unsure about this new venture. He didn’t know how serious the league was. Then he attended a practice.

“He was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is the real deal,’” Kandice recalled. “He even used to help us out a few times with suggestions to be better. My teammates loved him; my coaches loved Anthony.”

Cheryl Glover, the quarterback, said Anthony used to give her tips and eventually became the team’s special teams coach.

“Once he saw the talent and he saw how serious we were, he started giving his time and coming out to practices, too, and offering his help, and his wisdom as well,” Glover said. “Which actually helped a lot of us.”

The Mitchell children also became a part of the team. Glover remembers them playing off to the side as toddlers and growing into athletes themselves. Keaton, she recalled, was always observing and absorbing. Sometimes, when a player would do something impressive, she remembers Keaton telling his older brother, “That’s me! No. 2 is me!”

Keaton said his early memories include sitting in on the team’s film sessions and his mom showing him her pads.

“I was like, ‘Dang, they’re really doing the whole thing,’” Keaton said. “They’re not just like coming to practice and leaving. They’re really out here watching film, studying. I was young, so they was teaching me some stuff."

As Keaton and Kobi got older, they got to teach their mom some stuff, too.

“Keaton would give me tips from his perspective as a running back because, of course, as a linebacker I’m trying to get to you,” Kandice said. “My other son would give me tips because we both played in the backfield on defense, so he’d help me on how to read certain situations, how to cover.”

Football began to expand into Kandice’s work life. At Henry County High School, where Kandice worked, she would often talk ball with the varsity football coach, Morris Star. Impressed with her knowledge of the game, Star invited her to join the staff as the varsity linebackers coach and the junior varsity defensive coordinator in 2013.

The high school boys embraced her, attending both her and her sons’ games.

Despite her success on the field and on the sidelines, Kandice had a higher goal. She had her sights set on the national team.

“I knew that I was one of the older women playing football and, you know, that I’d only have a couple shots to do that,” Kandice said. “And in 2017 I knew that that was probably my last shot to make the national team.”

She began training with her father and going through drills she had observed at the NFL combine. She made the team — and brought home gold.

Keaton, still in high school, was filled with pride for his mom. But in 2021 he and his father and siblings, who had always been supportive of Kandice’s career, experienced their first moment of hesitation.

Kandice, who had come out of a three-year retirement in 2020, was forced off the field in 2021 by a gruesome leg injury. Glover, who had retired from playing by then, has terrible memories of getting a call from one of Kandice’s then-teammates and hearing her screams in the background after she broke her tibia and fibula.

Yet she was determined to make it back for the 2022 season.

“I ain’t gonna lie, when she broke her leg, I was like you gotta chill now,” Keaton said. “But she wanted to keep going. But I mean, it’s a kid’s game, so if that’s what brings you joy, that’s what you want to do, then do it. Man, go have fun.”

Glover knew, if Kandice had decided this was what she wanted, she’d find a way.

“I’ve learned to never doubt anything that she says she’s going to do,” Glover said.

Little did Keaton know how much he’d rely on her comeback story someday.

As Keaton’s football career progressed, Kandice said, she tried to keep off her player hat, her coach hat and her athletic director hat and just be Mom. When he decided to try to make an NFL team as an undrafted rookie, it was his dad he called for advice. After all, he had been through the same experience.

His mom he called for a smile.

When Keaton made the team, his and his father’s story took off. Meanwhile, Kandice’s teammates, who are some of Keaton’s biggest fans, would privately point out that people should be talking about his dad and his mom. But no one, especially Kandice, wanted to do anything to detract from Keaton’s spotlight.

Then Keaton suffered his own gruesome injury — a torn ACL — in the Ravens’ game against the Jaguars in Week 15 of his rookie season. In the same city where Kandice learned about women’s tackle football, she now found herself rushing to get to her son.

When she reached him, her fears were quickly alleviated by the fight she could see in his eyes.

Like mother, like son.

“I thought, and so many others thought, that was going to be a career-ending injury because she’d also had knee surgeries,” Glover said. “But I looked up, and she’s going back out there. I said, are you crazy? Just like the injury that Keaton suffered, you know, he tore ... everything in his knee he could possibly tear up, and then be told it’s a career-ending injury. I sat there and I was like, that is not going to be a career-ending injury because he has the resilience of his mother.”

Through the long recovery process, Kandice was Keaton’s inspiration.

“My mom had an injury,” Keaton said. “She broke her leg, and when she healed, she was still trying to play. So it’s like, dang, if she can do that, then I can overcome my injury.”

Kandice has also shown Keaton that it’s about more than what you do on the field. For all her accolades as a player, Glover said, she thinks Kandice is most proud of the work she’s done behind the scenes.

In 2018, she introduced the Atlanta Falcons to the Georgia Athletics Directors Association to pitch flag football in Georgia high schools. Two years later, it became a state-sanctioned sport. She was also named to Team USA’s board of directors in 2017 to help grow the game, and in 2021 she began working for USA Football, helping on a variety of initiatives.

Now that Keaton has his own platform, he’s using it to support her work. Whenever the Ravens hold an event that promotes girls and women in football, he happily makes an appearance. And he makes sure to FaceTime his mom, along with his sister, Kayla, who is a flag football coach.

“I was over Kandice’s house two weekends ago, and lo and behold, Keaton FaceTimed,” Glover said. “He was at a girls flag football event ... and he just wanted us to know, he said, ‘Look at what y’all did. Look at what y’all started.’”

Having grown up in a household with a mom, a sister and a bunch of adopted aunties who play football and play it well, Keaton doesn’t see why there should be barriers for girls and women who want to play.

“I want everybody to know that it’s not just for men, but that females can go out there and play the same thing and have as much fun as we are,” Keaton said. “And the ones that’s doing it, keep doing it.”