Juanita Ratliff was talking about being a single parent and first raising her own two daughters and then raising her grandkids and providing for other family members who have lived with her over the years.
“Yeah, times have been very hard,” she said. “But we work together as a family and we have the Lord on our side and with both of those, we make the best of what we got.”
And in the case of her 18-year-old grandson, Dylan Miller, “the best” is pretty darn good.
He’s the 6-foot-4, 240-pound center of the resurgent Belmont High School football team and, in the words of Earl White, the Bison head coach and athletics director, “He’s the kind of person you want as the face of your program.”
Talk about hanging on harder:
When Dylan was born, his mom, Victoria, was 15, and his dad, Mike, was 18. They were kids themselves. But rather than this becoming one of those all-too-typical stories of overwhelming odds and predestined failure, Dylan was raised mostly by his grandmother — he calls her MaMaw — and he has blossomed.
He has a 3.1 grade-point average, is a football and basketball player, is in the school’s Navy JROTC program, was the Homecoming king and is active in the Central Church of the Nazarene on Brown Street.
Talk about hanging on harder:
Two years ago, Dylan was part of the Belmont football team that finished 0-10. After heydays in the 1960s and ’70s, the program had struggled for decades. And the 2013 season was the worst.
The Bison were routed by Sidney, 69-0, Riverview East Academy, 61-0, Thurgood Marshall, 56-0, Dunbar, 59-6, Northridge, 53-0, and Meadowdale, 48-0.
“My freshman and sophomore years we used to walk around school and they used to boo us and make fun of us for being on the football team,” Dylan said. “It was pretty devastating. A lot of people said, ‘Why bother? You might as well just quit.’
“And by the end of the season we had just enough guys to go out on the field and have maybe three or four more on the sideline.”
But Dylan didn’t quit. And then White, who had built a perennial power at Thurgood Marshall, took over as the Belmont coach and athletics director.
Today, the Bison are the surprise team of the Miami Valley.
Going into tonight’s regular-season finale against Dunbar, Belmont is 7-1, and with a victory has a chance at making the Division III state playoffs.
As for the offensive line Dylan anchors, it has paved the way for running back Davion Lankford, who has rushed for 1,597 yards and 23 touchdowns in Belmont’s eight games.
Talk about hanging on harder:
Although money is tight in their Hassler Street home, Dylan is trying to do his part. Even during the football season, he’s working three days a week at McDonald’s.
“My grandma and my aunt, she lives there too, are both working at UDF, but I want to help out as much as I can,” Dylan said.
Such things make White smile when he talks about Dylan:
“He’s just a guy who’s cut the right way.”
Makes good choices
Although Juanita said Dylan’s parents have always been around and taken an interest in him, he’s lived with her since he was born.
“With the way things were, it was just easier for me to get him and his sister to school and things like that,” she said.
Dylan realizes what she has done for him and the rest of the family: “Everyone has lived with her at least once in their life. She’s the band that’s wrapped around all of us. She holds the family together. And she’s the person who motivates me. If I have a problem, I can talk to her. She always guides me.”
One place she’s taken him since he was a toddler is church.
“Sunday, no matter what, he’s in church ” Juanita said. “When he was little, I’d have him in a suit. He doesn’t wear that now, but he’s very active. He goes to youth camps in the summer and he’s been on mission trips down in Cherokee, North Carolina.
“They work with Indians. They do outdoor work and work in food and clothing pantries, there’s Bible school, all kinds of things. He also goes down to Cincinnati every year to bag up stuff to send overseas. He’s just a really good kid with a big heart.”
Those underpinnings have helped guide his choices around school, as well.
“I’ve tried to hang out with guys that aren’t always getting in trouble and getting suspended,” Dylan said quietly. “Sometimes that’s hard because I don’t want people to judge me for being a certain type of way.
“Really, I don’t hang out with a lot of people. Just a few friends, my girlfriend (Mercedes Cokley) and my family. I figure while I’m at Belmont, I might as well try to get as much of an education as I can. And then I’ll go off to college.”
White said his football has improved enough that he could play in college at an NAIA or Division III school.
Such talk makes Juanita beam: “Man, everybody knows I’m the proudest grandmother there is. Dylan would be the first one in our whole family to go to college.”
‘Something special’
Earl White spent 13 years at Thurgood Marshall, which prior to 2007 was known as Colonel White. In his last 10 years, the Cougars went 72-36, made the state playoffs four times and in 2012 became the first City League team to reach the state semifinals, where they lost 34-33 to Belleview.
He took the Belmont job two years ago because it also offered the AD job, was a place where he could make a real impact in football and it also appealed to him because, as he put it, “Belmont is a community within a community.”
Belmont, he said, is a distinct neighborhood and he thought the football team had a chance to “really make those people proud again.”
And in Dylan Miller, he said he has a real representative of the neighborhood. “He’s a true East End kid. He just lives three blocks from the school.”
White needed to convince other neighborhood kids to join the football team, which wasn’t easy, he said:
“You have to almost be a door-to-door salesman to get kids to come out. The football program had been pretty down in the dumps for years. We knew we’d have to build it from scratch and the first thing we had to do was sell them on a vision and what it was going to look like.
“We established a level of expectations and dedication. It wasn’t just on the field, but in the weight room and throughout the school, too.”
Turnout still needs to get better — the roster has fluctuated between 30 to 40 players, but most are freshmen and sophomores.
White guided the team to a 6-4 record last season and this year — in the new Southwest Ohio Public League’s National Division — the Bison have won seven straight and, in capturing the divisional crown, won their first league title since 1978.
“People are realizing we’re not the same old Belmont now,” Dylan said. “People are cheering us because we’ve done something. And we want to keep doing it. We want to beat Dunbar and make the playoffs.
“And because we’ve got such a young team, it feels like Belmont will be good for years to come. For us older guys Coach White keeps telling us that our class will always be able to come back to school here and say ‘We made history here. We did something special.’ ”
When times got hard, they just hung on that much harder.
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