Anthony

"It's made me have integrity — to do good things when no one's watching."

By Students of NYC

December 4^th, 2023

"When I was young, my mom asked me what I want to do, and when I said football, she got me into it straight away. She’s always wanted me to do something positive; she didn’t want me on the streets. I was born in Oakland, actually. Then we moved to Tennessee, and my mom got sick, so I had to come live with my grandmother in Brooklyn. I was just a kid, so of course, I missed my mom. But eventually she got better, and she came out to be with me. Since then, we are doing great. We have our own place and everything.

I’ve been playing football since I was eight. First, it was the Warriors, the Spartans, and then the Brooklyn Steelers. Coach Landberg came to my Steelers practices to see me and told me he wanted me to play for Erasmus. That’s how I found this school, and ever since, I’ve been at 'home' just making family. Well, I call them my family. I only have a baby sister; I never had a brother. So when I think about brothers, I think about my teammates. We go through hell together. The conditioning, the weightlifting, the bad stuff, but also all the good times.

This year, we got to go to London together to play the NFL Academy. When I got there, it was like being on a different planet. The steering wheels were on the other side of the car. The buses looked different. Even the air felt different to breathe. But it was all different in a good way. I kept thinking how glad I was that playing football exposed me to so many things I probably would never have gotten to do.

In the UK, they have bad neighborhoods just like us, and most kids have never been exposed to American football. We went to one of the schools. It was tiny, like an elementary school, but with kids our age. We brought them outside and ran through drills with them. Conditioning, how to throw the ball correctly, catch. It was funny, they were even speaking to us with New York slang. At the end, we all stood in a big circle together — all the kids and the coaches, probably 80 or 90 of us, and we locked arms. We chanted our motto we use at Erasmus: Hold the line. There was this one kid, Isaiah. Before I left I gave him a New York Jets hat. I told him, ‘ Just stay focused. If you really love something, just keep on going.’

Recently, I've learned to stop worrying about the future. I guess I've been busting my brain for the past couple of weeks about college and scholarships, and I realized I have to relax. I have faith in me, my future, my plan. I just need to take steps to get prepared. It's okay not knowing the whole plan; you just have to keep taking those little steps. All that overthinking: what am I doing, what can I do to get this? What can I do to get that? When I am on the field, it’s just silence. It calms all my nerves and I’m just having fun. Having those four quarters all to my football 'family' — it’s really special. And if I make a big play, or if my brother makes a big play — it means the world to me.

My mom — I’m her star. She has always had high expectations of me, and I always exceed them. Football has made me better. All the discipline it's taught me, the brotherhood, the family. It’s made me have integrity — to do good things when no one’s watching. It's made me into a better person, and a better young man."