For legally blind 10-year-old, playing football fit his viewpoint
Isaiah Bingham saw himself as a football player.
It was a rather optimistic outlook, some may have reasoned.
But Isaiah, in his 10 years of life, has developed a perspective that’s not restricted by what his eyes can or cannot distinguish.
His foresight is broad, even if his eyesight is restricted.
Even his mother, Dionne, who has long encouraged Isaiah and admired his positive approach, was a tad wary.
“I was terrified,” said Dionne.
Football players can get hurt, especially if they’re not able to protect themselves from blocks, collisions and other mayhem.
Isaiah may not see potentially dangerous hits coming.
He is, after all, legally blind.
Isaiah can see straight ahead, but his peripheral vision is compromised and he can only decipher detail within a few feet.
Dionne and Bernard Bingham still signed up Isaiah for the Delaware's Middletown-Odessa-Townsend (MOT) Youth Football this fall, then watched him enjoy both the contact and the camaraderie.
“I wanted to play football because I knew it would be fun,” Isaiah said. “My mom, she didn’t want me to play at first but then she realized I was good at the sport.”
So did the coaches who attended a preseason combine where MOT coaches size up players before they are drafted to various teams.
“His passion just stuck out. ‘This kid is good,’ ” said Kenny Crawford, coach of the Panthers in the 10- to 12-year-old jayvee division.
Isaiah became short of breath during some of the combine drills and Crawford lent him his inhaler, which the young player appreciated. Afterward, Crawford was surprised to learn from Bernard Bingham that Isaiah has “vision problems.”
“His dad told me that he really can’t see well and I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Crawford said.
Finding where Isaiah can shine
Isaiah is a big and athletically built 10-year-old at 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, and had demonstrated impressive physical tools. Crawford chose Isaiah to play for the Panthers in a season that started late because of COVID-19 health precautions and included seven regular-season games and then a season-ending playoff loss last week.
MOT league rules state each participant must be on the field for eight plays per game.
“We thought he was gonna be an 8-play kid,” said Crawford. “But when he went out there, he kept doing things that we didn’t know he could do. He would shine. He’d make a play and we’d be like, ‘Oh wow.’
“He surprised all the coaches. I don’t think it was a surprise to him because he knew he could do it. Then he got better and better and better, so he was out there at nose tackle the whole season.”
Isaiah had several quarterback sacks. He forced and recovered some fumbles. On several occasions he hit a quarterback who was throwing a pass, causing a wayward trajectory that allowed a teammate to intercept the football.
Lining up at nose tackle on defense put Isaiah right across from the center, where he could see the snap of the football and the quarterback. His father, a former high school and semi-pro football player in Philadelphia, and coaches had initially thought he might make a good defensive end, but that was too far from the action.
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“He could find the ball,” Crawford said. “At nose guard, he was amazing. He was making tackles.”
It was the perfect spot for him. Sometimes though, Isaiah could be the victim of his own effective play.
On several occasions, a run aimed toward one side of the line, say the right, ended up going to the opposite side because Isaiah had broken through to that side. However, when the play would start moving in the opposite direction, Isaiah might lose sight of it and continue in the same direction he was going away from everyone else.
He’d be running south with everyone else running north.
A fake hand-off can dupe any defender, but Isaiah is particularly vulnerable, causing him to tackle the wrong guy. Yet he often astounded those around him.
After one practice, running toward the sound of his father’s voice, Isaiah cradled a nifty 20-yard spiral from a teammate. He couldn’t see the football until it floated near him.
It earned the Panthers an early exit from practice.
“He didn’t want to be treated any different than the other kids and the other kids didn’t treat him different either,” said Crawford, 48, a former Newark High player who has been coaching youth football for 25 years. “We’re the Panther family and we take care of each other, we really do.”
'All we knew is he can’t see'
Dionne Bingham looked into her baby’s eyes on the day Isaiah was born and knew something was wrong.
They had a cloudy appearance and were covered with liquid.
Even after cleaning they appeared abnormal.
“Two months later,” she said, “all we knew is he can’t see.”
That’s when doctors diagnosed Coloboma, a condition in which tissue in the eye doesn’t properly form during the embryonic stage. In Isaiah’s case, he has an opening straight through the retina in both eyes, which is why he sometimes wears protective glasses.
Soon after though, Isaiah’s parents were relieved to see him follow patterns of light in a dark room during tests for his visual acuity.
When he started crawling, it was evident he could tell where he was going, despite occasional run-ins with doors and walls.
As a young boy, Isaiah was encouraged to “use what he has to the best of his ability,” his mother said.
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Sometimes he’d get discouraged, especially when other kids teased him, saying he hated his eyes. But he proved to be brave and develop an optimistic attitude partially rooted in faith.
Dionne’s father is Bishop Eddie Hodrick III of Pressing Forward Missionary and has been a Philadelphia police chaplain. By the time he started grade school, Isaiah had a favorite scripture: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
Around that time, while overhearing his mother explaining to someone the cause of his vision problems, Isaiah asked his mother not to tell them that because he felt God had healed him.
“When he meets people that are maybe limited in one way,” Dionne said, “he tells them that you don’t have to take that as that’s your life.
“I’m just grateful God gave him that.”
His football season certainly was an example.
The Binghams live in the Glasgow area but Isaiah, who has five older sisters, is a student in fifth grade at Leasure Elementary School in Bear because of a previous family residence.
Because of COVID-19, he does his schoolwork virtually on a computer sitting at the dining room table. He has to get up close to see and uses a zoom lens and an Acrobat HD desktop magnifier to help him. He actually enjoys doing schoolwork that way. Math is his favorite.
“He was doing his schoolwork one day,” Bernard Bingham said, “and I said ‘Well you got practice tonight’ and he said ‘I’m not doing anything until this is done.’ ”
They call him 'Vision' because Isaiah can see the big picture
Isaiah has played youth basketball. The game’s small playing area is more conducive to his sight range though he did say it was hard sometimes to see the backboard or tell who had the ball.
He even played baseball in a modified league where a pitched ball whistled before arriving at home plate.
When he plays sports, like when he does his schoolwork, Isaiah's attention has to be riveted, he said.
“His focus has to be front and center,” Dionne agreed. “He can see straight on but it has to be within a certain amount of feet for him to really make it out.’’
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Football was especially appealing because of the chance to mix it up physically.
“I wasn’t scared,” Isaiah said, “because it just felt normal.”
In addition to nose tackle, he played some tight end on offense – for blocking, not pass-catching purposes.
“What made football fun was there’s lot of space on the field that you can run around in,” Isaiah said. “And you can stop the other team from scoring.”
Isaiah didn’t know any of his 16 Panthers teammates before joining the team. But they came up with a nickname for him, and it was given in complimentary fashion.
They called him “Vision,” because they could see that Isaiah had a view of the big picture and wasn’t going to let his compromised eyesight deter him.
Now Isaiah wants to start a T-shirt line under the “Vision” name.
“I proved a lot of people wrong by doing stuff that you wouldn’t think that I could since I have an eye problem,” he said.
Follow Kevin Tresolini on Twitter @kevintresolini.