Cleveland Browns long snapper Rex Sunahara walked back through the halls of his old high school this week, not to relive game days, but to hand over a pair of blank cleats to kids who could actually draw. Sunahara, a Bay Village native, returned to Bay High School for a My Cause My Cleats event, recruiting art students to design the custom shoes he plans to wear on an NFL field this season.
Sunahara was shaped by Bay High School, according to News 5 Cleveland, which reported that he returned to his alma mater on Tuesday for the special event and visited teachers and coaches he knew during his time there. The outlet reported that Sunahara held the gathering specifically for art students at the school, asking them to sketch concepts that would eventually become the design on his game-worn cleats.
Why He Picked This Cause
Sunahara chose to support the Browns' Stay in the Game! Attendance Network for his My Cause My Cleats project, per the station's report. He serves as an ambassador for the network, which helps support good attendance for students across Northeast Ohio. My Cause My Cleats is the NFL's player-led initiative in which players, coaches and staff wear custom-designed cleats during a designated week to spotlight causes and nonprofits they care about.
Sunahara told students he was glad to be handing off the creative work entirely, since drawing isn't exactly his specialty. “I'm really happy you guys are going to help me design my cleats that I'm going to wear this year because I can't draw at all,” he said, per the same account. The resulting sketches leaned heavily on local pride — Browns colors, Bay High's own colors, rockets, and Cleveland skyline elements all showed up among the submissions, the report noted, calling it a mix of “endless creativity.”
From Classroom Sketches To Game-Day Cleats
The student designs won't stay on paper. According to the article, they will all be sent to a professional artist, who will paint Sunahara's cleats based on the concepts the Bay High students created. Sunahara is expected to wear the finished product in the My Cause My Cleats game in Week 12 against the Raiders, and he told the students they would get to see their work in action — Sunahara and the Browns sent each student designer home with a gift bag containing two tickets to that game, the outlet reported.
This isn't Sunahara's first turn representing a cause through the program. In the Browns' 2025 My Cause My Cleats initiative during Week 13 against the 49ers, he represented University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, according to clevelandbrowns.com. Sunahara is a 2015 graduate of Bay High School, as reported by cleveland.com, which traced his path from Bay Village to the NFL.
The Attendance Problem Behind The Cause
The network Sunahara champions has grown since launching in 2019 through a partnership between the Cleveland Browns Foundation, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, and Harvard's Proving Ground, according to stayinthegame.org, which also states it is managed by Battelle. The organization's own site says it has grown to more than 237 member school districts throughout Ohio, representing over 600,000 students annually, while a separate News 5 Cleveland report on the network's literacy efforts cited a different figure, describing growth from an initial cohort of 17 districts to 189 districts statewide also affecting roughly 600,000 students.
Whatever the exact count, the goal according to stayinthegame.org is ambitious: getting more than 90% of Ohio students to attend school more than 90% of the time, in a state where the network says 30% of students miss almost 20 days of school a year. Ohio also launched a statewide attendance dashboard in April, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, intended to give schools and communities fast, transparent attendance data. It's the kind of systemic backdrop that gives extra weight to a Bay Village athlete lending his platform, and his cleats, to a hometown cause.
