The case for raising well-rounded, less specialized children

The most interesting story I read leading up to the Super Bowl was by Jordan Hill, our new prep sports reporter here at the Ledger-Enquirer. Way better than my column predicting the Falcons would lose to the Patriots. (And please don’t try to congratulate me for that.)

It was a profile of Philip Wheeler, an alumni of Shaw High School who now plays linebacker for the Falcons.

In it, Wheeler’s mother, Phyllis Dent, told a story about the time Philip nearly quit football.

He was a 13-year-old at Blackmon Road Middle School, she said, and he loved being a football player and a Boy Scout, but the weekly Scouts meeting conflicted with football practice. So Wheeler alternated between the two.

“One of the coaches had started calling him ‘Girl Scout’ because he couldn’t come every other Tuesday night,” Dent said.

Some of the other boys started teasing him, and Wheeler told his mother he wanted to quit Boy Scouts. “I told him, ‘No, you don’t quit,’” Dent said. “I had to deal with that coach. That was a trying time.”

Essentially, his coach was calling him a sissy, and trying to shame him into giving up something he enjoyed. He wasn’t committed to football 110 percent.

That’s the kind of thing you hear from those profanity-spewing nuts who coach youth football on the reality cable series “Friday Night Tykes.”

Parents today try to decide what their children will become and then force them to specialize. Dent’s strategy was to keep her son so busy that he’d stay on track until he figured out where he was headed.

“I was scared because the odds were stacked against me being a single mother raising two black boys,” she said.

As it turned out, Philip Wheeler was born to play football for a living, and it didn’t matter that he missed a handful of Tuesday practices when he was 13.

Can you imagine telling a future doctor that he shouldn’t play football or march in the band because it shows a lack of dedication to medicine?

The important thing was that Wheeler became what he was supposed to become: a professional football player as well as a man of character.

His mother made sure of that.

This story was originally published February 10, 2017 at 12:40 PM with the headline "The case for raising well-rounded, less specialized children."