By Joseph Santoliquito
Special to MaxPreps.com
Johnathan Coleman sat in the green room, hands shaking, eyes darting from side to side. He wore an uneasy grin trying to hide his tension, trying to cover his hands up so his mother and grandparents wouldn’t see. But they did, smiling in delight at each other. The room bristled with emotion and the sheer joy that something good was about to occur.
Coleman was minutes away from making his first TV appearance, about to announce his college decision. The 6-foot-4, 210-pound Radnor High (Pa.) wide receiver was going to sign a ceremonial national letter of intent for Boston College on the air on national signing day, for the Philadelphia area to see on Comcast SportsNet. What they didn’t see, what no one could imagine is how Coleman’s journey from where he was to where he is ever happened.
There were the darkened hotel rooms, waiting for his mother to arrive home from one of her three jobs. There were the times his stomach rattled from hunger, subsisting on chilled lettuce in a sink. There was the time when Johnathan was 11 years old, fending for himself in a drug house in Connecticut and somehow managed to find his way back home to the Bronx, New York.
And there were the times a pesky coach kept at him to try out for football, just to give it a shot and see what happens. That shot evolved into one year of high school varsity football—and a six-figure scholarship to a nationally ranked program.
“I suppose a lot of people wouldn’t believe everything that’s happened to me,” said Coleman, who verbally committed to Boston College on Sunday, Dec. 22, 2008, before making it official on national signing day, Feb. 4. “But I don’t really consider what I’ve gone through as an amazing journey, or a miracle. Some people hear the things I went through, and some of the things that happened to me and say it is a miracle that I’m even alive.
“But I don’t see it that way. I see it that this is my life and it's the way things happened. Some people might shake their heads, after hearing everything."
Coleman is the beneficiary of the ABC Program (“A Better Chance”) out of New York, which places underprivileged, inner-city children in suburban, affluent high schools. Coleman himself went from the hardcore area of the Bronx to comfortable Radnor. He’s never met his father and was raised by his maternal grandparents, Vaughn Coleman and Linda Williams. His mother, Vanci, struggled holding two and sometimes three jobs concurrently.
The family moved 10 times the first 10 years of Johnathan’s life. Always some place different, with new faces to get acquainted with, and just like that, another move. Vanci was always there, working, providing, until one time she wasn’t.
Vanci skirted the law and was arrested in 2001 for transporting drugs over international lines. She did six months as a first-time offender at a state facility at Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility, in Brocton, N.Y. She still carries the guilt. It wasn't unusual for Vanci to work 15-, 16-hour days, but when she became unemployed in the summer of 2001, desperation took over.
“It was a desperate and difficult time in my life and I lost my job and was out of work for five months," said Vanci, 38, who currently works two jobs in New York City and speaks publicly to women's groups who were formerly incarcerated. “I was willing to do anything for my children, I was that desperate. I was willing to do anything. Consequently, I took the wrong path. I'd change it if I could, because I play it back a million times over in my head, what would I do differently? I'll always regret it. The bottom line is put my children at risk, and they didn’t deserve that.”
What Vanci is most grateful for is Johnathan getting out of the house in Connecticut after she was caught. Johnathan was just 11.
“My mother took me to this house, and just like that, she was gone,” Johnathan recalls. “I never cried, and never got scared. But I did then. We had the electricity cut off of our house when we lived in South Carolina, and that was nowhere near as scary as that house. I just remember asking the people there, ‘Did you see my mother?’ Do you know what happened to my mother?’”
Vanci managed to make a few calls to get her son back to their grandfather.
"I'm just grateful Johnathan got out of that house,” Vanci says. “That was a drug house, with all kinds of things going on in there. I got caught and was never able to get back. I called my family to get my son, and eventually a cousin came and picked him up. The whole scenario saddens me. But people can change. I'm very far from the person that was arrested in 2001. But I'm proudest of Johnathan. He took a better path. I think Johnathan gets his survival instincts from me. He's seen me go through enough to never make the same mistakes I made.”
Vaughn Coleman shudders at the memory, “It was traumatic for me, and traumatic for Johnathan. This was my daughter, Johnathan’s mother. It was a desperate time for Vanci. I didn’t know about the drug thing, all I knew is that I had to do something and take custody of my grandson. I had to get him before he wound up in the system and got lost.”
Johnathan didn’t.
He moved in permanently with his grandparents. He had to attend a library class in the Bronx while in seventh and eighth grade just to become eligible for the ABC program. That meant doing extra work every Saturday for two years, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It was trying.
“I came close to quitting, but my grandfather convinced me to stay with the program; I was ready to give up,” Johnathan said. “I’m happy I didn’t quit, because none of this would have happened. Everything would have been different if I quit, because I would have quit on myself.”
The next obstacle was visiting Vanci at Lakeview. It was difficult for both Vaughn and Johnathan to see her. She had lost a lot of weight. Her hair was gone. She came out wearing a garish orange jump suit, and they spoke in a room filled with other prisoners.
“My mother looked like a completely different person to me,” Johnathan recalled. “All of the other people around her, part of a group that was foreign to me was there. I remember I just shut down. I didn’t talk to people. My mother wrote me every week, apologizing to me for what happened, and we stayed in contact. She kept saying how her children were helping her get through this. Time passed and she got out. I was always afraid she’d make the same mistake and got back, but she didn’t.”
A few years later, Johnathan fulfilled the ABC requirements and found Radnor in Southeastern Pennsylvania. He’s been living the last four years in the ABC House in Wayne during the school year with eight other student residents and an adult moderator.
During summers, he returns to the Bronx to live with Vaughn. Radnor was once a respectable program in the Central League, which has state powers Ridley, Strath Haven and Garnet Valley, that fell on hard times, and was just coming under new head coach Tom Ryan.
Ryan wasn’t about to let an athletic 6-4, 210-pound kid walk through the Radnor halls without asking him why he wasn’t playing football. Coleman, already a budding star on the Radnor basketball team by his junior year, never played organized football.
“When I was first hired at Radnor, I’d see Johnathan running around with the basketball team, and for a 6-4 kid moving the way he did, I said more than once to him he should think about coming out for football,” Ryan said. “I told him there are a lot of 6-4 basketball players, but not many 6-4 wide receivers with a [35-inch] vertical jump like his. I knew the kid could have a college career in football and he’s one of the fastest learners I’ve ever coached.”
Ryan could start to see the light bulb light up over Coleman’s head. Coleman went from a player who had to be shown how to put the pads on properly to someone who was coaching up other kids on the team who had been playing a few years.
This past season, Coleman led Radnor in receptions with 34 catches for 489 yards and seven touchdowns. More importantly, he has a 3.2 GPA and scored 1,000 on the SAT. He overcame the culture shock of being an African-American kid from the Bronx to mixing smoothly into a predominantly white school. He’s been taken in by the Radnor family, by Ryan, his teammates on the Radnor basketball and football teams, by ABC supervisor Florence Hubert.
“Johnathan really is someone you root for, and the big thing is, he’s such a good kid,” Ryan said. “With his amazing backstory, you have to root for him.”
After Johnathan committed to Boston College, Penn State and Vanderbilt followed with offers, and Purdue, Pittsburgh, Alabama, Temple, Villanova and Delaware showed interest. But Coleman felt loyal to BC, since it was the first school to offer. After BC named Frank Spaziani as head coach on Jan. 13 to replace Jeff Jagodzinski, who was fired for interviewing with the New York Jets, the first recruit the Eagles' new coach visited was Coleman.
When Johnathan finalized the deal and signed his national letter of intent on Philadelphia’s Comcast SportsNet, he held up the signed letter for the cameras to see. His hands were steady, as was his breathing. He wore a smile of relief, and just off camera were Vaughn and Linda. A tear trickled down Vaughn’s face, as the young kid he first got involved with sports was completing a dream no one thought was possible.
“This really is a victory for everyone around Johnathan,” Vaughn said, holding back emotion. “I look back on everything he’s been through. All these good things couldn’t happen to a better person. He’s special. It’s something I’ve always known.”
Now Johnathan will have the chance to let the world know.
Joseph Santoliquito covers high school sports for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a frequent contributor to MaxPreps.com.
