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Toles Motivates Youth to Become 'Inspiring Minds'
WARREN, Ohio -- It was a moment, a seemingly insignificant moment for most, that helped change Deryck Toles’ life at a young age.
“I was angry at the world, I had a chip on my shoulder,” Toles says, recalling his early years as a newly arrived eighth grader in Warren. “I would walk down the halls, just waiting for someone to bump into me.”
Toles had just relocated from Columbus to Warren to live with his grandmother because of family problems at home. Toles’ grandmother was a faithful churchgoer; he was not.
“I didn’t want to go to church because I felt I didn’t fit in,” he says. “People made fun of me because I wore the same clothes all the time, and I couldn’t tie a tie.”
Then, one day while he and his grandmother were cleaning the house of a deceased relative, Toles found a tie.
“I went back home and stayed in my room all day,” Toles recollects. “I remember it was around 8 p.m. when I had figured out how to tie that tie.”
He attended church the next week.
It was one of the several “magic moments” that Toles says helped shape him as a person. It demonstrated that with perseverance and work, one could make things happen.
None of it came easy. Toles had to work hard to overcome the pressures of a broken home, poverty, gang violence, and crime and drugs in the neighborhoods. Despite these obstacles, he rose to prominence as a high school and college athlete, and then to the National Football League – only to have that promising career cut short because of injury.
Today, Toles is 32, and he’s taken all of these life lessons and devoted them to developing young people who are experiencing many of the same challenges and pitfalls he once confronted.
The result is Inspiring Minds, a nonprofit organization Toles founded in Warren nearly seven years ago. “I started to think, ‘What if you could help them with their homework, take them to different colleges, help them build resumes and get better grades?’ ” he reflects. “That, even though life seems so crappy right now, and it doesn’t seem that your pain will end, you’re going to have 60 or 70 years of your life to enjoy.”
Inspiring Minds has since raised more than $1 million to support after-school and summer programs for Warren City School students in grades 3 through 12. Inspiring Minds teaches everything from soft skills, such as proper etiquette, to language and math skills, all with the goal of building one’s confidence.
It also prepares them for the ultimate objective of landing a job, going to college, and securing a professional career, Toles says. “We’ve given more than $40,000 in college scholarships,” he notes.
Some 400 students have either passed through or are attending Inspiring Minds, and its college placement rate stands at around 98%. “Two went into the military,” he says, while just three failed to attend college over the last seven years.
Shawna’ King, a former student at Inspiring Minds, says the program helped transform her from a shy, inhibited high school student to an outgoing, confident young woman.
“I was really quiet,” she recalls. “Deryck inspired me to take more chances, meet more people and have more confidence in myself.”
King, now a junior in the electrical engineering program at Alabama A&M, says the experience allowed her to visit several colleges and universities, travel to cities such as Atlanta and New York City, and introduced her to professionals in the music and publishing industries.
“I saw how different people viewed things, and learned how to be mindful of that,” she says.
Helping to coax these attributes out of young people isn’t easy, and it wasn’t easy for Toles growing up.
He was raised in a single-parent home in a neighborhood with no positive male role models. His mother suffered from drug addiction, which added to the pressures of home life. When Toles was in the eighth grade, then living in Columbus, the situation became so unbearable that he left to live with his grandmother in Warren.
“I missed so much school that I was ineligible for the basketball team, and was coming home whenever I wanted to. So I left to go stay with my grandmother,” he says.
“I didn’t talk to my mother for 10 years. I was so angry, I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
But that year, another “magic moment” occurred when Toles watched a football game featuring standout Terrell Davis, then the star running back for the Denver Broncos. “When I laid down that night, I said that’s what I wanted to do, and everything in my life lined up for that particular goal.”
Toles says he began to examine how he treated himself, how he interacted with friends, and how to build his own confidence. “I started working out,” he says, and then tried out for the Warren G. Harding freshman football team.
There, he first met his freshman coach, Steve Arnold. “I hated him. I’ve never had a grown man talk to me like that before. But, I didn’t realize that he saw more in me than I saw in myself.”
Arnold, today the head football coach at Harding, says he knew Toles had potential, but also realized that the ninth grader needed discipline. “His grandmother came up to me one day and said ‘my grandson hates you,’” Arnold recalls. “I said that’s OK. I’m not here to make friends with him. He’ll appreciate it. I was tough on Deryck. I wanted to fill the void of a father figure.”
Arnold also spearheaded a mentoring program that afforded Harding students the opportunity to secure summer employment, and Toles took to it. “I became closer with him in the 10th and 11th grade, when he was in our mentorship program. This is where I saw him develop,” Arnold says.
At Harding, Toles played running back and outside linebacker. “I was never a big-time player,” he says. Still, he played hard, and after the season ended in his junior year, then head coach Gary Barber asked him to come into his office to meet someone.
“It was assistant coach Brady Hoke of Michigan,” Toles recalls. “He said he’d been watching me all year, and thought I could help win them a championship one day.”
The biggest surprise was yet to come. After the meeting, Barber returned and told Toles that he wanted to give him something, but before he did, he ran down a list of things that he wanted Toles to remember.
Barber told him to never let anyone outwork him, and to never think that he was better than anyone else, Toles recalls. Then, he advised the junior to stand up for what’s right, which isn’t going to win a lot of friends.
Barber also reminded Toles to never forget where he came from, and when the moment arose, to come back and help someone who faced the same challenges.
“He went into a closet, brought out a box and set it in front of me,” Toles says. “Inside that box were two or three letters from every college you could imagine. For the first time in my life, I thought I was really worth something.”
Toles decided to play at Penn State University, but was sidelined his first year because of an enzyme deficiency that caused him severe cramps. “I was dehydrating and it could have affected my internal organs,” he says. “It was my freshman year, and they said I’d never play football again. I went through a huge depression.”
Yet Toles stayed on, playing on average about 30 plays a game as an outside linebacker but also nabbing 100 tackles a year. While at Penn State, Toles earned his business degree and was signed by the Atlanta Falcons. He was released, and then joined the Cleveland Browns for the rest of the 2004-2005 season.
After the coaching staff was fired in Cleveland, Toles signed with the Indianapolis Colts. As he started working for the season, he was hurt. The injury and subsequent surgery ended his professional football career.
Toles says he left the NFL with two years of pay plus his signing bonuses, and “tried to save every penny,” giving him a great start to the next phase of his life.
Back in Warren for physical rehabilitation, Toles began to reflect on his life. “I started writing everything that impacted me negatively and positively,” he recollects. While negative influences such as his early home life factored prominently, the attributes that come with education, celebrity and athletic ability proved a very positive force.
It was at this time that Toles decided he would dedicate the rest of his career to giving back, and what would become Inspiring Minds was born.
“I believe every kid deserves the same opportunities, and I don’t see that,” Toles says.
When he’s not working with students, he’s working in the kitchen, working out in the gym, listening to music, or fishing. “I love to cook. I plan to cook a lot of different fish recipes in 2013,” he says.
He’s also partial to classic Mowtown artists such as Marvin Gaye, and is a fan of singers such as Usher. “I also love to travel, and I think my favorite city is New Orleans because I love the food.”
What he doesn’t have much time for, Toles confesses, is football. “I actually don’t watch a lot of it,” he adds ironically. “I don’t find it relaxing to sit and watch a game.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: Deryck Toles was selected by The Business Journal as one of our "Most Intriguing People of 2012." This profile first appeared in the January edition of The Business Journal. CLICK HERE to subscribe.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.