Post by TheShadow on Jan 26, 2007 19:22:18 GMT -5
www.freep.com
BY MICK MCCABE
FREE PRESS PREPS WRITER
Throughout his 10-year NFL career, Tyrone Wheatley said he wanted to return home to coach when his playing days were over.
People assumed Wheatley meant home as in Dearborn Heights Robichaud and coaching as in football.
Wrong on both counts.
"People forget, track was my first love," Wheatley said.
Whenever the state's all-time greatest individual performances are discussed, Wheatley's showing at the 1990 Class B track finals must be in the conversation.
As a junior, Wheatley won the 100, 200, 110 hurdles and the long jump in leading Robichaud to the Class B title.
The home he was referring to was the University of Michigan, where he won All-America honors in football and track before becoming a first-round NFL draft choice.
When he decided not to return to the Oakland Raiders following the 2004 season, Wheatley moved to Ann Arbor as a volunteer assistant track coach to Ron Warhurst and Fred LaPlante.
Wheatley watched and studied the U-M coaches and then realized it was time to move on.
"Those guys are great coaches and when you listen to them talk about all of the guys they've coached, I realized there's nothing for me to take on," Wheatley said. "There's only so much you can learn, and after that, you're just sitting there watching."
So now Wheatley is truly headed home. He is the track and football coach at Robichaud.
The Bulldogs have been mired in mediocrity for years, despite playing in the lowest division of the Mega Conference.
Robichaud hasn't made the state playoffs since 1994, four years after Wheatley carried the Bulldogs to the Class B state championship.
That begs the question: Why Robichaud?
"Where else?" Wheatley asked.
"For me, coming from Inkster and Robichaud, playing at Robichaud was a very humbling experience," he said. "I can take these kids and say, 'Look where I came from. Look where I care about.' "
Robichaud's facilities are a joke. Technically, there is a track circling the football field, but it is unusable.
Upgrading the facilities is Wheatley's first priority and then he will move on to football, where he must decide on an offensive philosophy.
He has already ruled out the spread formation and the wing-T.
"I'm not going to use a gimmick offense," he said. "We're going to play physical football. We're going to play old-school, old-fashioned football. We'll play to the whistle."
U-M's Gary Moeller and Oakland's Jon Gruden, now with Tampa Bay, were two of the head coaches Wheatley played for, and Wheatley learned from them.
"We'd be in a meeting and Moe might bring up a play and say we're not going to use it," Wheatley recalled. "Well, I would tell myself that I liked that play and I locked it away in a special book in my memory. When I'd ask Gruden if we could run a play a certain way, he might say, 'No, we're going to run it another way,' but I would lock that away, too.
"Now I get to see if they work."
Pro athletes like to talk about coming home and giving back, and some donate money. But Wheatley's choice is the best way to give back.