Brooklyn's in the House
Classes are canceled, the roads are empty and students are celebrating this rare spectacle.
But when snowfall hit Athens in mid-January, it meant something much more to Isaiah Wilson. It brought back a lot of memories to the 6-foot-7 offensive tackle. The little white pellets were more than just frozen water falling from the sky. They served as a mental-bridge to the place Wilson spent nearly his entire life—Brooklyn, New York.
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Except in true Northerner fashion, the snow Athens had just received hardly even counted.
“He sent me a picture of it and I was like, ‘That is not snow, Isaiah,’” said Wilson’s mom, Sharese Wilson. “I said, ‘Let me guess, everything has shut down, right?’ For us, it would have been like oh thank goodness it’s only a little bit of snow. It would have been business as usual.”
Wilson even confessed to her that it wasn’t true snow, but that wasn’t the point. He wasn’t excited about class being canceled (Well, maybe he was), or about the fact that he could make, or at least try to make, a giant snow angel. He was happy to feel close to home again because it’s hard to get that feeling when you’re nearly 1,000 miles away.
Wilson wasn’t unhappy with Georgia, it was just a tough transition, on and off the field. The northern east-coast vibe of Brooklyn is worlds different from the deep south culture of Georgia. The weather, the level of football and just the sheer distance from Athens to Brooklyn were all things that weighed on Wilson his first year in school, but now they are things that empower him. They don’t bring him down, they lift him up, all the way up to a starter on one of college football’s deepest offensive lines.
At first though, it seemed a little doubtful, at least from a fan’s perspective. Wilson came in as one of the highest rated prospects in the country and as Georgia’s top player of the 2017 recruiting class. Expectations were high for him to play immediately, maybe even unreasonably high. So when it seemed Wilson was destined for a redshirt year, it scared folks a little. Even his parents.
“We didn’t know that he was going to have that much of an adjustment,” Sharese Wilson said. “It just felt different not seeing him play.”
Wilson himself though was completely ok with it, even saying that it was harder for his friends and family to take the news. He knew it would give him a chance to learn everything he needed and prepare to take on the high-level pressure of SEC football later down the road. And thinking about it before the Rose Bowl, Wilson was very pleased with what he had gotten out of that year.
“Looking back on it, this is probably one of the best things that’s ever happened to me,” Wilson said.
And it was that kind of mindset that helped get his parents feeling really comfortable with it quickly. He told them that it was simply his role on the team and that he had fully embraced it and that the feelings about redshirting were “perfectly fine,” after that, according to Wilson.
It did take some adjusting for the family. They were used to seeing Wilson as a star because he was such an unstoppable force in Brooklyn. So when he took a back seat at Georgia, it was much, much different.
“[Mrs. Wilson] told me that it took adjusting as a parent,” said Mitchell Pinsky, a family friend and one of Wilson’s elementary school principals. “She knew it was crazy. She just didn’t know how much.”
Even before all of that took place, Wilson’s high school coach at Poly Prep Country Day, Kevin Fountaine, talked to him about the idea of redshirting. He told Wilson something he had learned from his friend Pat Kirwan, a former executive with the New York Jets and a person who has scouted many offensive linemen before.
“He really liked getting players from big programs where they would redshirt their first year,” Fountaine said. “He likes when they learn the system their freshman year then play three years, especially in the SEC.”
Even after knowing he wouldn’t see the field, either of Wilson’s parents, if not both, were still in attendance at every single game. Wilson told them at first that it wasn’t necessary, but as it got later in the season, it was a nice feeling to kind of have home brought to him in a bigger form than just snowflakes.
“I think he wanted to think he wasn’t going to miss home much, but I think he really did,” Sharese Wilson said. “So I think it really was a big boost for him when we came down for the games. Or like when we came down for Thanksgiving, holidays. It was a big thing for him.”
It also helps take a little bit of pressure off of Wilson. Not much though, mostly because there wasn’t a whole lot on him to begin with. It may seem like there would be as one of the nation’s best prospects, but not with Wilson. His mom constantly checked in on him, seeing if the life of a high-level student-athlete was taking a toll on him. And they weren’t. A strong love for football has kept him from getting burned out at all. Not just the aspect of playing football. He loves talking about it, learning about it. Anything that has to do with football will catch Wilson’s attention and probably his heart, too.
That’s something that has been around for a while. Like since he was seven years old while. His parents noticed early on at home, but some others did too.
“We’d have conversations in the hall about football and some history of it and I’d have to say ‘Alright calm down go to class,’” Pinsky said. “He knew 10-times about football than I did. To him, it was almost like playing chess. He really had a passion for the game and was knowledgeable.”
That love was noticeable last year, you just had to look very closely. The way Wilson interacted with his teammates, how he acted on the sidelines, you could tell he loved every second of it despite not being on the field.
Now, as Georgia’s starting right tackle, Wilson gets to bring that love out onto the football field. There will still be some adjusting to be done as he starts getting serious playing for the first time in more than a year, but for the most part, the transitional phase is over. Wilson has gotten his year to learn all about the environment of an SEC program and the minute details of protections and schemes.
And now he’ll get to show that that redshirt year was truly one of the best things that could have ever happened to him.
