TAKING IT TO THE MAT
O| n that chilly Saturday morning, before the meet was about to begin, Coach Patrick Coleman pulled his young wrestling team in close. He spoke of hard work, of dedication, of never giving up. The winner’s mindset he always preached.
But injuries and suspensions had decimated the ranks of his once-promising squad of sixth-, seventhand eighth-graders from East Baltimore's Banneker Blake Academy. And the junior league team they were about to face in Montgomery County had been pumping out champions for years.
Coleman, just a dozen years older than his young charges, knew they were facing a beat down. First, little Elijah Johnson took the mat for Banneker Blake. At 75 pounds, Elijah was a serious and respectful boy. His opponent from Damascus made short work of him.
Next was Michael Rawls at 95 pounds. A thoughtful student, Michael dreamed of becoming a lawyer. In nearly 30 tries on the wrestling mat, he had yet to win. This time was no different. He was pinned
in under a minute.
Then came Myles Wilson at 115 pounds, who aspired to one day win the shiny wrestling trophies he saw in the glass case in a rival school’s hallway. He, too, was pinned.
The coach and his team of mostly beginner wrestlers from one of Baltimore’s two all-boys public charter schools were 40 miles from home. In that gym in Damascus, though, they might as well have been standing in a different nation. One where trash didn’t pile up on the streets. One where there was working heat in the classrooms.
That season a year ago, so many institutions in the boys’ lives seemed in jeopardy.
Their wrestling team, the best in their city league the year before, was struggling. The middle school the boys attended would soon be threatened with closure. Even the future of the city in which they lived seemed in doubt, ravaged by record high killings and drug overdoses.
A nonprofit, called Beat The Streets Baltimore, aimed to save these kids by resurrecting the sport of wrestling. The young league partners with Banneker Blake and about a dozen other city schools to give kids a place to play a sport, get academic help and develop their character.
Wrestling thrives outside of Baltimore, in other middle and high schools around the state. But in the city, basketball rules. Wrestling is almost an orphan sport.
Beat The Streets was founded six years ago by Lydell Henry, a native of West Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood. It runs the wrestling league November through March, as well as summer camps and other programs. The nonprofit has operated on a shoestring budget, without much fanfare. Yet Henry and his team of coaches like Coleman have been making inroads.
They believe in wrestling because of the values the ancient sport instills: personal responsibility, resiliency, hard work. It demands a kind of discipline, grit, and self-reliance rarely found in the modern world. It is often practiced in basements and contested in front of empty bleachers. It offers few promises of fame and riches.
The men know the wrestling team can serve as a support system for the boys — a kind of second family.
“We always tend to attract some of the toughest kids,” Henry says. “We have some really great students, but we also have some who need some extra work.”
In the gym that day, Coach Coleman looked at the scoreboard. By traditional evaluations of sports performances, the Damascus meet was a disaster.
Riding back to Baltimore, jammed together in the white van that serves as the official transport and sometimes office for the league, the boys were quiet. Coleman thought about how the kids wrestled hard and no one quit. He told the boys it was his birthday, and that their effort, against steep odds, had been a kind of present to him.
Coleman knew success would be judged not on whether these young wrestlers ended up as champions, but by whether he helped put them on the right path in life. They were boys, just middle schoolers, goofing around, struggling with their homework, wanting to hug their moms, afraid to walk home from school alone.
In the dim light of the evening bus stop, fake wrestling with each other, they could have passed for young men in a serious fight. But they were still kids, kids on the cusp of manhood in one of the toughest cities in the country.
An early victory
Just weeks before, things had looked much different for Coleman’s young team.
With two strong eighth-graders named Dashawn Heidelberg-Jones and Dakuwuan Corprew leading the way, Coleman had started practice in September — two months before other schools. He thought if he could get their technique and skills in good shape, he’d have even more time to accomplish his other mission: transfer that discipline to the classroom, and get the older ones ready for better high schools.
During an early meet against rival Baltimore Collegiate, the team had really come together. They lined up in the gym at Banneker Blake, clasping their hands together in the air to form a tunnel through which each wrestler ran as he took the mat. They had cheered each other on. If a student’s mind started to wander, the coaches urged him to think of his teammates, not himself.
They captured the win that day, and they had looked so happy. Coleman thought they had a good shot to repeat as city champions. Dashawn, the team’s leader, the one who motivated them to come to practice, to work hard, hoisted the trophy. Still in his bright yellow singlet, he held it for a photo, the rest of his teammates gathered around, holding up their index fingers: They were, at least for a time, number one.
Two weeks later, the season had started to unravel. Wrestling against Baltimore County’s Perry Hall team, Dashawn had moved so smoothly, so effortlessly. When his coaches shouted instructions from the sidelines, he executed them. This was the way Coleman remembers himself wrestling as a high school senior. He felt sure Dashawn was good enough to capture first place in the state later in the season.
This day, after winning four matches each without a loss, Dashawn and Dakuwuan had gone outside to wait for their ride. Playing around above a steep drop by the back entrance, Dashawn had decided to try out some stunts used in parkour, the sport of running and jumping over city obstacles, when he slipped and fell. The drop was 20 feet.
Dashawn started screaming. “Coach Coleman!” The coach, who had been inside the school, came running. He found Dashawn on the ground, holding his leg, crying. Part of Dashawn’s ankle bone could be seen pressing against his skin.
Coleman had a close bond with Dashawn, who reminded him of himself when he was a kid. Growing up in West Baltimore, Coleman had started off as a rebellious boy. He says he was suspended “at least” 15 times for fighting in the first grade alone. But sports helped him channel his anger. When football wasn’t everything he had hoped, he found his way into wrestling.
There, relishing the intensity, the way he would face an opponent alone on the mat, he hit his stride. He did better in school. It made him independent.
Now he was trying to stop these students from making some of his mistakes. Dashawn, as a seventh-grader, had gotten in trouble almost every day for fighting. But over the last year, his mother and others said, Coleman had taken him from a problem student to a more disciplined young man — and an exceptional wrestler.
For all the things that were hard in their lives, their school, their city, Dashawn had been his hope, the other kids’ hope. And in that moment in Perry Hall, everything changed, just as when, as a middle schooler himself, Coleman had tried a flip on a backyard mattress in the snow and got hurt, for no good reason.
“I felt like wrestling season was over. I knew it was over for him,” Coleman said. He found himself thinking about quitting as coach. He didn’t know how the other wrestlers would react. “I wasn’t sure if they were going to fall apart.”
Things got worse.
The team’s other top wrestler, Dakuwuan, might have been expected to step up. While he had struggled with fights in school, since joining wrestling his behavior had improved dramatically.
“He’s really changed his life since he’s been here,” the school’s founder, former City Councilman Carl Stokes, once said of Dakuwuan. But after Dashawn’s injury, Dakuwuan had given in to a lunch-hall tussle with a basketball player and found himself sidelined.
A team, and a city, in crisis
As the team struggled last winter, their city was in even worse shape. Baltimore’s murder rate had soared in 2017 to a record high, mostly claiming the lives of young black men. And as a frigid winter set in, the city school system’s infrastructure failed in real time before the nation’s eyes. More than a third of schools lost heat, including Banneker Blake. A pipe break caused damage to the gym at Digital Harbor High, where Henry had planned to host the pinnacle event for his league, the city tournament.
The boys’ middle school was in some ways a refuge. The students at Banneker Blake were representative of the public school population of Baltimore. All were black, and most lived below the poverty line. The wrestlers were the sons of a janitor, a restaurant owner, a truck driver, a nurse. Some grew up in blocks full of vacant homes.
At school, the students dressed in sports coats and maroon and gold ties, called each other “scholars” and their principal a “headmistress.” A school system evaluation said they out-performed their peers at other schools academically.
The school, which specialized in science, math, engineering, arts and technology, offered afterschool activities that boys have been shown to gravitate toward: robotics, chess, debate, basketball. And wrestling.
To be on the wrestling team, the boys had to sign a contract agreeing to keep their grades up and maintain good attendance and behavior. Coach Coleman had a study hall a few days a week and tutored them when they were struggling.
For the coaches, working with the boys was a mission squeezed into lives with their own everyday struggles.
Coleman, father of a toddler son, was at the moment without a car. So he took Maryland Transit Administration buses more than an hour each way from his home in Catonsville to get to Banneker Blake. He worked as a teacher’s assistant during the day, and after school earned a small stipend as a wrestling coach. He put in hundreds of volunteer