‘A rare football player’ from West Charlotte is the Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year
West Charlotte High’s Anansi Coleman, The Charlotte Observer’s male student-athlete of the year, is used to making sacrifices.
He always wanted to wear the number 27, and when he got it last football season, it didn’t last long. Early in the year, coaches asked him to move from linebacker to offensive line. That meant wearing No. 50 and playing against players sometimes 100 pounds or so heavier than Coleman, who is 6-foot-1, 185 pounds.
“I played guard, center, everything on the line,” said Coleman, who started on offense and defense for the Lions. “And yeah, it hurts sometimes. Being that I’m only 185 (pounds), I have to rely more on strength and speed, those are my advantages, than (my opponents) do.”
And just to play football and keep a grade-point average well north of 4.0, Coleman has to make sacrifices, too. There’s extra football study time needed to prepare for two positions and he was taking a heavy course load, full of advanced level classes.
“Linebacker is my favorite position,” he said, “and offensive line wasn’t a position I ever played but it turned out to be really fun. It was a learning process, but also a fun process. There are not a lot of people who had done the same thing, but it was just the work that went into it, being a linebacker and an offensive lineman and doing homework. A lot of times I went to bed at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning and I’m up at 5:30.”
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Coleman admits lunch time frequently became nap time last fall, but he maintained a 4.54 weighted grade-point average and earned a full academic scholarship to North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, where he hopes to walk onto the football team and continue playing.
West Charlotte football coach Sam Greiner said it would take a rare teenager to keep Coleman’s schedule and do well with it, but he believes Coleman is that rare high school football player.
“Anansi Coleman is one of the greatest human beings you’ll ever meet in life,” Greiner said. “He basically is the most peaceful, humble, hard-working kid. If I needed someone to watch my kids, it would be Anansi. He’s the hardest-working kid in the weight room. I’ve never heard him say a curse word his entire life.
“You’re talking about someone who hits all the categories in life: He lifts hard, works hard, keeps education first and foremost. He’s a great teammate, he’s non-selfish, just the whole deal. He’s everything you could want in a person.”
Coleman said his parents embedded the discipline and love for academics in him as a young student.
“It started that way,” he said, “my parents pushing me because as a kid that obviously wasn’t my first goal, but as I grew older in middle school and high school, it turned out to be a passion. They didn’t have to push me. I guess it was how good I was at it. Before it was just grades to me, just numbers, but going into middle school and being able to take advanced courses and realizing that I was good at subjects like math and science, it made me want to get better at them.”
At N.C. A&T, Coleman plans to study to become an engineer. His coach has no doubt that he will succeed.
“He has something that lives inside of him,” Greiner said, “something instilled in him at a young age that you rarely see. Once in 20 years do you see a guy like that who has it all put together, to where he loves football, he attacks education, social life, the whole package Anansi has. He’ll be an engineer and that’s not an easy thing to do, but he’ll go to N.C. A&T and he’ll be an engineer and he’ll be the best there is.”
This story was originally published June 22, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
