Emporia High School freshman Charlie Wilks is scheduled to be featured Tuesday evening on the E:60 program on ESPN. The show will air at 6 p.m., according to Ben Houser, senior producer for the news magazine.
Houser and an ESPN crew were in Emporia in December 2008 to film a piece on Charlie, who, despite his blindness, then played nose guard on the Emporia Middle School football team. He played this season on the freshman team at Emporia High School.
Charlie became blind after two surgeries to remove a brain tumor that was discovered when he was 5 years old.
He has not let the lack of sight hamper his participation in academics or athletics. As a sixth-grader, he was of 60 students nationally, and the only Kansas student, who qualified for the National Braille Challenge in Los Angeles . He finished fourth in his age group.
He’s attended a life-skills camp in Colorado, where blind staff members teach blind youngsters how to cook, clean, and manage themselves and their money. He received technology training for two weeks at the Kansas School for the Blind in Kansas City.
Last year, he and the rest of the EMS Vikings team spent a day as special guests at a Kansas City Chiefs practice, where he met many of the players and developed a telephone friendship with Glenn Dorsey of the Chiefs’ defensive squad.
Charlie’s grandfather, Al Reynolds, for eight years had played for the Chiefs, including logging some Super Bowl playing time. That relationship helped nudge Charlie into a love of the game and, when he was in seventh grade, he joined the EMS team.
According to an earlier Gazette article, Charlie’s teammates and the opposition help him get into the proper position before the snap.
“... (O)nce the ball’s snapped, he gets off the line and tries to tackle ... ‘whoever gets in my way,’” an August 2008 article quoted Charlie as saying.
During an interview last year while ESPN filming was underway, Houser seemed amused by Charlie’s sense of humor and his enthusiasm.
“He really has a funny candor about him,” Houser said then. “When I met him for the first 10 minutes last night, he started rattling off the things he does: ‘I play guitar, I ride my bike, I like to play football.’ ... He just kept listing these numerous things he enjoys doing. I said, ‘Well, what don’t you do?’ He says, ‘I don’t see.’
“So I mean right there, early on, he’s goofing around. He’s telling me jokes, blind jokes, things that, to him, it’s something that he just deals with,” Houser said.