Panthers players express importance of voting through first experiences, family history
Reminders to vote have been everywhere for the past couple months.
Televisions couldn’t be turned on without seeing political ads. Signs adorned neighbors’ lawns and buildings. And the pieces of paper filling up mailboxes were enough to harvest a small North Carolina forest.
But one of the newer places that “VOTE” logos were seen was the football field.
The Carolina Panthers had a “VOTE” logo on the field at Bank of America Stadium last Thursday during what was likely the team’s only nationally televised game of the year.
The NFL mandated that league and team facilities were to be closed Election Day, although the trade deadline remained at 4 p.m. Tuesday and players and coaches will largely proceed as a normal Tuesday.
For the Panthers this fall, the effort to get fans to the polls has come from team owner David Tepper on down. It came from players like defensive Stephen Weatherly and tight end Chris Manhertz, who are part of the Panthers’ Player Impact Committee, getting a movement started.
For some players, they grew up with examples of voting, but for at least one Panther, this year was a first.
Wanting the Panthers to incite change
Weatherly has always been observant.
“He was able to pick up on things he noticed things,” his mother, Carla Weatherly said. “I think the first time I noticed how observant he was probably (age) two or three. I closed the bathroom drawer and something was sticking out of it. I had just helped him to brush his teeth and he stops in his tracks, opens the drawer and pushes whatever it is into the drawer. That was the first time I noticed he he’s paying attention, he’s watching and he does all the time. “
Those observations have extended to civic duty.
Carla has been voting since she was 18 years old. When she was in high school, students were automatically registered to vote in Atlanta, and she has been voting in every election since.
“That’s always been a top priority for me growing up, is you can’t be heard if you don’t cast a ballot. Period. Doesn’t matter who you vote for, you can’t sit around and complain one week, six months, three years down the line if you didn’t participate,” Carla said. “I can’t say that I stressed that enough to him more than he probably noticed it and realized it had to be done.”
Weatherly’s own website describes him as the “NFL’s Most Interesting Player,” with interests ranging from glass blowing to playing nine instruments to cooking, though he doesn’t understand why that makes him unique from other pro athletes. “Guys aren’t just like uniquely designed to just be football players,” he said.
After Weatherly signed with the Panthers and moved from Minneapolis to Charlotte, he soon joined the team’s Player Impact Committee and also started his own charity last month that focuses on a few areas, including a reading program, a scholarship to a youth football team and a football camp.
There’s always a personal reason behind the cases he wants to give back to. He struggled with reading in elementary school, but was interested in robots and learning about them.
“Watching from age three, just put together little toys, I always bought toys that required him to put something together, trying to nurture that in him,” Carla said.
When his grandmother subscribed him to WIRED magazine, his interest in reading grew and he became advanced in it.
“I was just fortunate that my grandmother saw me interested in robotics and subscribed to the magazine for me. If I had an incentive-based reading program at a young age, I would have been better off,” Weatherly said.
His mother and grandmother have had profound impacts on his life.
Carla’s mother, Dianna Johnson, worked for the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1976. She worked on community development efforts and improvements to the criminal justice system as part of a crime analysis group. Johnson wrote a thesis about safe summer programs for children that assisted the city of Atlanta’s response following a series of murders that saw at least 28 Black children and others killed from 1979-81.
Carla doesn’t know if she talked enough about the importance of voting with Stephen when he was growing up, but he learned about it along the way, partly through his grandmother’s involvement and his own observations from the examples that were set for him.
“Voting is incredibly important. It’s something that is necessary, it’s been downplayed for a very long time, for far too long,” Weatherly said. “If you want change, you have to put people in places of power that can affect change, that can see change happen, and make sure it happens, or else you will be protesting and fighting for the same things that your parents did and your grandparents did and your great grandparents did.”
Voting for the first time
Panthers linebacker Shaq Thompson spoke before the season about how this would be his first year voting.
“I think it’s very important (to vote). I know for me growing up, I wasn’t taught to vote,” Thompson said. “Just hearing it, understanding like, oh, your vote does matter. It changes the difference. Makes me want to register. I just got done registering actually. And it makes me want to reach out to guys back in my community and tell them to vote and get a whole pamphlet out and try to teach them and understand like your vote does matter and stuff like that. It’s interesting just to hear that my vote does matter and it does count.”
Thompson voted at Bank of America stadium’s early voting site, which was open through Oct. 31. The linebacker and many members of the Panthers’ organization, were among the 12,837 voters were processed at the location. The site even remained open during or prior to the team’s two homes that overlapped with the voting window.
The NFL and NFLPA report that 90% of active players were registered to vote.
The Panthers’ Player Impact Committee worked with Tepper to come up with a plan for the team to educate, register and mobilize voters, a initiative they called “Your Vote Counts.”
Tepper and the impact committee contributed financially, including current players and Panthers alumni. That could be seen in an ad placed in The Observer and The News and Observer to videos of players, including Manhertz, Christian McCaffrey and Julius Peppers, promoting the importance of voting. Manhertz and Peppers also went out together in 2018 to promote the importance of casting a ballot.
Weatherly was among the players that met with Tepper to discuss ideas on how to do that could best be put in place.
“When we did talk, (voting) was a major part of our discussion,” Weatherly said. “I came in with a bunch of plans and I’m like a utopic thinker, so I was just like, ‘hey, what about this, this and this.’ He slowly reeled me in. That was the main focus of our talk, just voting and how can we make a positive impact there.”
Tepper is the NFL’s wealthiest owner, worth $13 billion dollars, per Forbes. This year, he personally contributed only $200,000, per Federal Election Commission records, to a Pro-LGBT Republican Super PAC — his first contributions since 2016 when he donated to a variety of causes.
“Well I think from a club standpoint, we have a voting initiative that we’re trying to do. I’ve met with the players,” Tepper said in September. “Some of my priorities also having an understanding and continued communication with them about what we’re going to do (in regards to social justice issues) and I have to, it’s not just me, it’s them and how the Panthers organization does things. This is just continued dialogue.”
Throughout the days leading up to the election, various players posted on social media promoting voting. The hope is that by using the Panthers’ platform, first-time voters and many others have learned the importance of their vote.
“To learn how powerful your one vote is is everything,” Weatherly said. “Everyone thinks of it on a presidential level, but it’s way more than that, it’s about your local offices, the things that you will see and feel first, are all local elections.”
This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 11:31 AM.
