He’s the most powerful man in N.J. football. His star players aren’t even in high school. – NJ.com

He guides his team onto the field by glaring, then bellowing: “WELCOME TO HELL!” He boasts about his friendships with college coaches — and those same men quickly back up his claims. His team’s bombastic Instagram account follows a big win by taunting the losers with a string of cry-laughing emoji.

Nasir Gaines is brash, in-your-face and living, breathing bluster. But he also might be the most powerful man in New Jersey football.

Oh — and he’s a youth coach from Newark who works mostly with kids who haven’t even hit puberty.

In eight fast years, Gaines, the architect of the Brick City Lions Pop Warner program, has built an organization that captured two national championships last season alone and is pumping out more elite talent than perhaps any youth football outfit the state has ever seen. It has given Gaines an almost unfathomable amount of clout from a position normally reserved for minivan moms and dads.

“Every major university, when they fly into Newark, they come see me first before they see anybody,” Gaines says. “Everybody. Chris Ash. Ryan Day. James Franklin. There’s not a college coach around here that don’t know me. Period.”

If you think his standing as a major influencer sounds overstated, just consider:

• Six players or 12% of NJ.com’s ranking of the top 50 high school football recruits from across the state played for Gaines and Brick City, including No. 1 overall prospect Jalen Berger.
• Four former Brick City players are at Rutgers, another is verbally committed and several more dot rosters at schools like N.C. State, Northern Illinois, East Carolina, Albany and Massachusetts.
• Brick City players make up the foundation of nearly every powerhouse private high school in North Jersey, including some of the top prospects at Don Bosco Prep (Berger), St. Joseph Regional (Christian Abraham, Amin Vanover and Elijuwan Mack), St. Peter’s Prep (Tahj Bullock and K.J. Miles) and DePaul Catholic (Charles Finley and Andrew Butler).

Longtime Essex County high school coach Darnell Grant, now at West Orange, said Gaines’s surging influence is evident, and recruiters need to pay attention.

“They gotta give Caesar his due,” Grant says with a laugh. “None of those parochial coaches can just come into Newark and recruit a kid. They’ve got to have an ambassador. They need someone like Nas.”

Yet this meteoric rise has not come without controversy.

Gaines’s critics — and there are plenty — say he’s a bad winner who loves pounding his chest after a victory. They claim his program flouts Pop Warner’s residency rules and stocks its teams with kids from all over the place, rather than serving as a feeder systems for nearby public high schools. Some coaches even jokingly refer to the program as, “Brick City and the greater area at-large.”

“Nas does it his way,” says Ralph Steele, commissioner of the rival Newark Pop Warner League. “I just don’t particularly like his way.”

Gaines, his coaches and the team’s supporters brush off the criticism, saying they’ve always followed the rules and they’ve never been hit with any violations.

The animosity, they say, boils down to one thing: Haters.

And haters are gonna hate.

“It’s the same reason why people hate the Yankees,” says Curtis Germany Jr., one of Brick City’s coaches. “Because they win!”

He might very well have been born to be a coach. When Gaines was 7 and living across from Weequahic Park, he was mesmerized watching the South Ward Golden Bears youth team march to practice in shimmering blue-and-gold uniforms. When he started playing, his favorite part was teaching friends the drills he learned at practice.

“Coaching was always in me,” he said.

Gaines sprouted to 6-foot-1 and went on to Essex Catholic High, where he was a decent player, but says he lacked the guidance to play beyond graduation in 1998.

Gaines always regretted not putting himself in better position to play in college. So, when he started coaching in 2004 with the North Ward Scorpions, he vowed to become the type of mentor he never had. The next year, Gaines, then 24, was arrested for drug dealing. The charges were dismissed — he chalked the episode to being young and hanging around the wrong people — but the incident made him realize he needed to focus more squarely on football.

The Scorpions went on to win lots of games with Gaines, but he had grander visions than just battling for city-wide supremacy. He had an idea: What if the best Newark youth programs banded together and formed a super team?

In 2011, he brokered a meeting with rival Newark coaches and presented his vision. They would start the kids at 5 in flag football and develop them in the same program until they were 14, providing more structured practices and better coaching than city teams had ever seen. They would travel to play the best competition. Even their uniforms would be snazzier — bold blue-and-black colors that popped on the field.

Before the meeting ended, the Brick City Lions were born.

Most youth football programs run August to November, but Gaines turned Brick City into a year-round affair. He oversaw offseason training, shuttled players to camps, checked on their grades, took them to see colleges. He never, ever stopped going.

“The guy loves the game and you have to respect that,” says Newark West Side High coach Marion Bell, whose son plays for Brick City. “Most people, they sit back and they’re lazy and they don’t want to work. With [Gaines], he wants to work.”

It’s a head-spinning lifestyle for Gaines, a large, formidable man with a bushy beard and a distinct baritone voice. He has five children with his wife of 12 years, Chiquia. Two of their sons play for Brick City and a daughter is a cheerleader for the program; another son, Zyeir Miller, is a star wide receiver at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City.

Under Gaines, Brick City had fast success, advancing one team in its third season all the way to the Pop Warner national championships in Walt Disney World Florida.

Gaines made another mark through social media, promoting his teams and players like no one ever had done on the youth level. He touts his players nonstop, floods his timeline with highlights and wades into commenting wars with anybody who’s game.

“My one caveat with him is he needs to win more gracefully,” Grant says. “When he wins, you don’t have to throw it in everybody’s face. Those guys, they hold a grudge when they lose.”

As Brick City’s stature grows, those grudges are only getting stronger.

Decades ago, youth sports largely served as a low-stakes realm where kids played for teams in their neighborhood and the main goal was having fun. But today, youth sports have become ground zero in the ongoing professionalization of amateur sports.

Gaines’s sudden rise in the state’s football hierarchy is a prime example. His reputation for identifying and developing the state’s top young talent, he says, has given him sway with the state’s most acclaimed high school programs and even college coaches. (His players also filter to several public high schools, including Irvington and West Side.) Those coaches, for their parts, are quick to throw their support behind Gaines.

“I can’t say enough positive things about what he’s doing,” former Rutgers coach Chris Ash says a couple weeks before he was fired by the school. “Football changes lives, and he’s helping create opportunities for young people that they wouldn’t normally have.”

Penn State declined to allow coach James Franklin to discuss Gaines due to “NCAA rules.” But not without noting, “Coach [Franklin] would like to do this interview because he has a lot of respect for Nasir.”

Parents want their kids playing for Gaines because it can be a springboard to top private high school programs, which are breeding grounds for college teams. Take Joshua Fedd-Jackson, for instance. He started playing for Brick City at 13; Gaines helped stoke his raw talent, then nudged him from a troubled start at a Newark charter school to perennial powerhouse St. Joseph Regional. Fedd-Jackson now is a starting offensive lineman at North Carolina State and a projected NFL draft pick.

Brick City also is winning big, making the national tournament in Florida six times in eight years and capturing two titles. Games are televised nationally and reporters cover the scene as if it’s the NFL.

But some rival coaches have a different view of Brick City. They claim the program is skirting the rules and loading the teams with players who live outside of Newark. That model, they say, goes against the spirit of Pop Warner, where kids play for local teams that feed nearby public high schools.

“People say they have an all-star team,” says Fritz Dupiche, president of the rival East Orange Junior Jaguars. “I have over 200 kids and 90 percent of them walk to practice. My program is different. I’m trying to serve the community.”

Is Gaines just trying to live out some football fantasy through these kids?

The coach and many close to him insist his motivations are pure. He doesn’t earn a dime for the countless of hours he puts into coaching every week. His profile has grown, sure. But he says his efforts boil down to helping as many young people as possible excel.

“I just want to see everybody make it,” Gaines said. “When I was growing up, I had guys who coached me who were good men, and then guys who couldn’t lead right. I’m trying to make sure the kids are being led the right way and everybody’s making it.”

The fields at Newark’s Weequahic Park teemed with hundreds of players running and banging into each other during a recent practice. Gaines walked end to end, chatting up kids as young as 5 and as old as 14, all of them decked in Brick City blue, gray and black.

Bell, the West Side High coach, says this is Gaines’s genius. Brick City runs its practices like high school programs, splitting up offense and defense and coaching them separately. It’s a stark level of sophistication, compared to other youth teams.

“It’s almost not fair,” Bell says. “His teams are more organized than the other inner-city teams, and then they have more talent than the suburban guys. That’s why they win so much.”

Gaines hears his critics and what they shout about his program. He doesn’t care. His vision for a super power in Newark that can compete with the nation’s best is reality.

“I look at that as life,” Gaines said of his critics. “That’s just how the game goes. Anytime you’ve got success going on, there’s going to be people who try to dampen what you’re doing.”

Despite the critics, Gaines’s acolytes say his heart is in the right place. Even his biggest rivals grudgingly give him credit for his 24/7 work ethic and devotion to his program.

“I applaud his energy,” Steele says. “He puts a lot into it.”

It’s one reason his influence looms so large — his relationships with his players don’t end when they leave Brick City. If anything, they grow stronger.

“He’s like another dad,” says Yasin Willis, one of his current players.

As practice wound down recently, Gaines watched from his perch atop the youth football universe. His influence is growing, his teams are winning.

But some things he just can’t resist.

The next week, Gaines’s junior varsity team thumped a bitter rival, the Silk City Cardinals, by a 36-0 score. Later that day, Gaines took to Instagram.

Not to congratulate the opponents on a good game.

To gloat.

“I think we scored about 30 points on defense alone,” he wrote, tagging the opponents. “You’re welcome.”

Matthew Stanmyre may be reached at mstanmyre@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattStanmyre. Find NJ.com on Facebook.