I think I'm gonna cry.
Star recruit pushes on
Powe disputes 'learning disabled' label
By Richard Lake
rlake@clarionledger.com
Joe Ellis/The Clarion-Ledger
Former Wayne County football standout and University of Mississippi recruit Jerrell Powe explains that he learns best when things are laid out clearly for him.
TIMELINE
December 2004: Jerrell Powe caps stellar three-year career at Wayne County High School with nine sacks and 89 tackles in senior season; named first-team All-State by The Clarion-Ledger.
February 2005: Powe signs scholarship papers with Ole Miss.
August 2005: After failing to meet NCAA academic eligibility requirements for freshmen, Powe enrolls at Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Va., where he plays football.
February 2006: Powe signs scholarship papers with Ole Miss.
May 2006: Powe graduates from Hargrave Military.
Aug. 26: Ole Miss announces the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse did not certify Powe's eligibility, ruling him ineligible to play at Ole Miss this fall.
Aug. 31: Lafayette County Chancery Court Judge issues temporary restraining order, ordering The University of Mississippi to enroll Powe and place him on athletic scholarship.
Sept. 1:The NCAA, Ole Miss and Powe's attorneys reach an agreement allowing Powe to enroll as a part-time student, not on scholarship, pending an appeal of his eligibility status.
Sept. 14: NCAA appeals committee rules against Powe; Ole Miss urges him to drop his lawsuit.
Sept. 16: Powe announces he's withdrawing from school and dropping his lawsuit.
WAYNESBORO  He is a big dumb kid who was pushed through school by football crazies with dollar signs in their eyes despite his failing grades, an inability to read and a learning disability.
Right now, that's what most people think about Jerrell Powe. But Powe says those people are wrong.
There is no doubt about it, Powe is enormous - 6 feet 3 1/2 inches tall and 347 pounds - about the size of a refrigerator, only taller.
But he swears he isn't just some dumb football player.
Despite, he says, what people have read, what the authorities have said and what anyone's instincts say about football players from the sticks, he can read just fine.
"There was a lot of lies in the press saying I couldn't read and write," said Powe, who was shadowed by a Clarion-Ledger reporter and photographer for a day last week. "I never had any problems reading."
To prove it, Powe logged onto the Internet and read aloud with no problem an Associated Press breaking news story, about the Carolina Panthers for the reporter. He wrote a few words - "I love mom" - on a pad of paper, too, just to show he could.
Powe, who turned 19 last month, is the much-heralded high school football player from this blue-collar town who signed to play for the University of Mississippi, only to have his eligibility denied by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Powe has a 2005 certificate of attendance, not a traditional diploma, from his high school.
Everyone in Waynesboro knows Powe. Waynesboro is a town of about 5,000 people - the hub of a county with 21,000 people whose major industry is timber.
The town is a few miles from the Alabama border at the junction of U.S. 84 and U.S. 45.
This is where Powe was born in 1987, the third of four children.
His mom, Shirley, raised them by herself in a small brick house down a country road a few miles outside of town.
At that house, where Powe still lives when he's not staying with his girlfriend, there is a grass lot, the shape and size of a miniature football field.
That grass is where Powe learned.
JUST A REGULAR KID
He never played organized football as a child, "But I always played yard ball with the older guys," he said.
He was just a regular kid, he said, who saw school as neither a curse nor a blessing. It simply existed.
School officials have said Powe began special education classes in the second grade. When he was still in elementary school, Powe said he had some behavioral problems that he didn't want to describe in full.
That led to a label, he said: learning disabled.
Powe said it is not true. He has a problem comprehending what he has read sometimes, but that doesn't mean he's disabled, he said.
True or not, the label stuck. "I never thought he had a learning disability," said his mom, a dietary supervisor at Wayne General Hospital.
Powe said he kept getting grades just good enough to move him forward, but it would not be enough.
A standout football player in junior high, Powe focused more and more on football in high school.
Wayne County High is a place where the football team is so important that the local police cars are painted in its colors: blue and orange.
Coach Marcus Boyles took over the program in 2001, when Powe was a freshman.
The team won the state championship the next year and the year after that. Powe was a big part of winning.
"You knew on Friday night, he's going to come ready to play," Boyles said. "In the big games, he's going to have a good practice beforehand."
He said like any kid, Powe could slack off in practice when he knew the opponent wasn't expected to be all that tough. But still, Boyles said, Powe was the team's leader.
"He was a guy who offenses had to scheme around," Boyles said. "His presence made them change the way they had to play the game."
But slowly, Powe was falling further behind in school.
By the end of Powe's sophomore year - after that first state championship - Powe knew he had to do something or he'd never graduate.
He had dreams of making it big in the National Football League, he said, visions of million-dollar contracts dancing in his head. He was rated as the top high school defensive player in the nation by most recruiters.
It was during this time that he met Shane Barnett, the team's punter, and Shane's dad, Joe.
Joe Barnett is a local businessman, a real estate appraiser with a nice house in town and a pool in the back yard.
He took a liking to Powe from the start, he said.
Powe started hanging out more and more at the Barnett home. He learned to swim in their pool a couple of summers ago.
Barnett loves telling that story.
"Boys," Powe announced to the other young men goofing around in the pool, as Barnett remembers it, "I can swim and I'll show y'all I can swim."
He jumped in, and in a flash he was sitting at the bottom of the pool. "I thought it was over with," said Powe, who'd never been in a pool before.
WORKING HARDER
His buddies had to bulldoze the 350-pound player across the bottom of the pool to the shallow end to get him out; he was just too heavy to lift.
In time, Powe learned to swim.
He and Joe Barnett became close. So close that now, Barnett is like a surrogate father for Powe, both said. Barnett has helped guide Powe through the last two years.
As Powe's future looked bleak, the two, along with Powe's mom, began to focus more on his schoolwork as he entered his junior year of high school.
By his senior year, he was working harder, excelling in correspondence courses with the help of a tutor, but in the end it was not enough.
His tutor, Ginny Crager, said Powe has trouble comprehending what he's read. Powe agreed.
The NCAA on Sept. 14 affirmed an earlier ruling that Powe was ineligible even though he had taken correspondence courses from Brigham Young University and attended the Chatman, Va.-Hargrave Military Academy for a year to try to catch up.
"That's what happens to a lot of young men who are good athletes but are in special education," said Madison County parent Mandy Rogers, who has a Web-based parent advocacy information network called Parents United Together. "They get to that last year. They don't have any credits and can't graduate. ... Someone should have known something. In ninth grade, they should have known what track he was on. If he was in the certificate track, they should have known he's not going to Ole Miss.
"This kid should have gotten academically what he got athletically," Rogers said.
The NCAA won't accept his work from the correspondence courses as legitimate. The organization won't comment on specifics of the case.
CREATING A PLAN
"I was mad," Powe said, though he never lashed out in public and won't start now. "My way of getting back is just not giving up, and just proving them wrong."
So, after much fanfare, including a lawsuit that he still thinks he could have won, if he pursued it, Powe dropped out of Ole Miss after a few days.
He has asked the school to get with the NCAA to help him lay out a plan. What does he need to do, he wants to know, to make himself eligible? He swears he still wants to play for the Rebels. If he can't, there's always junior college or the Canadian Football League.
So now, here Powe sits, trying to stay in playing shape, depending on others to tell him what to do.
Whose fault is that?
"If he was having problems," said his mom, "he should have come to me."
So, it's partly her son's fault, she said.
But it's also partly the school's fault, she said, for not pushing him harder, for not letting her know how serious his problems were.
And, she said, it's also partly her fault for not demanding answers sooner.
Everybody's a little bit at fault, she said.
That's what Boyles, the coach, said, too. "For whatever reason, he fell through the cracks," he said.
"All of us - and I mean me, the school, his mom and Jerrell - are to blame in this situation."
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Staff writer Cathy Hayden contributed to this report.
