A tale of two Anthonys “From helping me with my Tucker Hill law school application, to dealing with my shortcomings, and to being one of my biggest motivations, I say, thank you.”
Anthony Morton via text to Mr. Anthony Phillips
Anthony Morton (c/o 2020) didn’t sweat school too much, and he couldn’t see the point of attending TeenSHARP.
The Philadelphia high schooler was already a good enough student to get into college without focusing too much on academics. He was more than a scholar, anyway: he was popular, social, and a star athlete. By his junior year, Anthony would rack up more than a handful of all-public, regional titles, and division championships, as a football linebacker and a lacrosse midfielder.
He did all this while shuffling between two houses (his parents divorced when he was a baby), and caring for his siblings—one of whom is on the autism spectrum—sometimes late into the night. “With Baron and Zoe waking up at 5:30 in the morning,” Anthony wrote in his college essay, “comprehending James Baldwin and W.E.B. DuBois at TeenSHARP Saturday classes was an added challenge.”
For years, Anthony attended TeenSHARP with one foot out the door. He still wasn’t convinced he needed our help.
“When did the light bulb go off?” Anthony asked, during an interview earlier this week. “It was my junior year.” Thats when he met another Anthony: TeenSHARP pre-college success manager, Anthony Phillips, also known as Mr. Anthony.*
“I took it personal, to help him,” Mr. Anthony recalled, “because I saw he was an intelligent kid, and because people had helped me. I felt like I could relate to Anthony. I really did.”
They shared more than a name. They had both grown up as young black men in Philadelphia, products of a working-class background and guided by self-assured personality. Back then, Mr. Anthony was distracted from his goals, too—full of talent and smarts, but not focused on the future. Their paths had crossed for a reason, so Mr. Anthony rose to the occasion, as our incredible staff do each day.
He knew it would be a challenge, turning around a stubborn teenager. TeenSHARP doesn’t coddle students, after all. Instead, we show love and respect for our scholars and their families through candor, matched with continuous, unflagging support as they reach for their goals. But headstrong teenagers don’t always care much for criticism.
Still, Mr. Anthony was honest with Anthony. That’s his job. First, he showed a video that broke down the realities of the college admissions process—how even a well-rounded candidate could lose their edge based on factors that Anthony hadn’t considered, like a note about their attitude in a written recommendation, or a minor drop in a grade from one semester to the next. Then they looked at Anthony’s transcript: some low-Bs, some almost-As, and a straggling C.
Mr. Anthony used some old-school slang to make a strong point: “I said, ‘Anthony, you’re not as bad as you think you are—but you have the strong qualities and characteristics to be as bad as you think you are.” Then he issued a challenge to the high school junior: to get straight As for the rest of the school year.
“Youth development work is done over time,” Mr. Anthony said. “A student might not initially understand the purpose of what we’re trying to do at TeenSHARP, or how we’re trying to do it—to help them with their lives.”
Nowadays, Anthony Morton knows that without a doubt. Not only did he fulfill Mr. Anthony’s ambitious challenge, but Anthony ended up going to Mr. Anthony alma mater: Bates College in Maine (with an 12% acceptance rate), a place that hadn’t crossed his mind before attending TeenSHARP.
A year or so after the Straight A’s challenge, Mr. Anthony got a text message from Anthony Morton.
He sent a picture of his grades — all A’s — and went on to write :
These are the results from the trimester, as grades have closed this day. I want to thank you for everything. Yet, I’m well aware this isn’t the end, but only the beginning. A beginning that I want you to know you are responsible for.”
“I felt like I had everything under control,” Anthony said. “The moment when the light bulb really went off, is when I stepped on the University of Richmond campus for a month-long summer program Mr. Anthony had me apply to.”
There, Anthony said he saw students who looked like him, with aspirations of becoming doctors, lawyers, and much more. “It pushed me to do some introspection,” he said. “To think about my life, and what I really wanted from it. I had to ask myself, ‘Am I in a position right now where I can achieve my goal?”
Today Anthony is thriving at Bates College. He hasn’t chosen a major yet, but he plans to study politics with a concentration in economics. His sights are set on a career in the CIA or the FBI, but he hasn’t ruled out running for office one day.
“TeenSHARP is a place where it’s cool to be smart,” he said. “A place where it’s cool to have a dream that’s different from everyone else’s.”
Anthony still gets to play sports, too, on the Bates football team. “It’s just that TeenSHARP showed me I could apply the concept of hard work and dedication to school and find the same fulfillment I was searching for as an athlete.”
What advice would he give his younger self?
“TeenSHARP is literally here to help you get what you want from life,” he said. “So stop being lazy. That show you’re dying to watch isn’t going anywhere. The only time you have is right now, and you need to take full advantage of that.”
*(You might recognize his name; Mr. Anthony asked Barack Obama at a Biden event last month how he would encourage black men to stay engaged in a civic system that disenfranchises them so much of the time.)
