On Tuesday, Feb. 5, eighty North Penn football players read to 5,500 students in 230 classrooms as part of the ninth annual Reading Super Bowl.
By Mary Jane Souder
The questions are invariably priceless.
“Do you have any friends?” a second grader asked Luke Berry.
“I have lot of friends from football,” Berry said.
“What’s your last name?”
The response when Berry told the students his last name evoked the inevitable question, “What kind of berry? Blueberry?”
And, of course, there were the football questions.
“Who did you want to win the Super Bowl?”
“Do you like Ray Lewis? My dad went to college with Ray Lewis.”
Then there was the question Nick Muth was asked by an eager kindergarten student.
“One of the kindergarteners asked me if I could tie her shoe,” the North Penn junior said. “I didn’t get that from the sixth graders.”
Muth did double duty at North Penn’s Reading Super Bowl on Tuesday, Feb. 5, reading to his sister’s sixth grade class at North Wales Elementary School in the morning and then heading off to his mother’s kindergarten class at Nash Elementary School.
“My mom asked me a couple of days before if I could read to her class,” Muth said. “It was a lot of fun going back to her class. Reading to a bunch of kindergartners was a different experience.”
This was the ninth year for the Reading Super Bowl, and each year it’s gotten bigger and better. Eighty North Penn football players read to 5500 students in 230 classrooms. Making this year’s Reading Super Bowl unique is the fact that the players can remember being read to when they were in elementary school.
“That’s the biggest thing,” said Cheryl Neubert, a North Penn reading specialist who has coordinated the Reading Super Bowl since its inception. “This year when I had the underclassmen come down, I was starting to introduce it to the first small group, and they were like, ‘Mrs. Neubert, we remember when they came out and read to us.’
“We’re paying it forward. We didn’t have to go through the whole thing – they all remember what it was like. They’re all coming down in October and saying, ‘when do we sign up’ because they know it’s coming, which is huge.”
At York Street Elementary School, senior George Shipp popped his head into a classroom to say hello to a teacher he knew, and there is a recurring feeling of familiarity. Brandon Mandes read to his younger brother.
“They’re all really excited,” Mandes said. “They were asking questions – silly questions like what I ate for dinner.
Both Mandes and Muth remember the wide-eyed admiration they had for the football players who read to them when they were in elementary school.
“It was really exciting when they came,” Mandes said. “We had a great time when they would read to us. We looked up to them.
“Going back is great and being able to read to them and being role models to them. They’re so excited.”
“The football players seemed to have a lot of fun when they came to read to us,” Muth added. “Also, it was cool looking up to those guys.
“They were huge compared to me back then. It was always cool to see the North Penn football players come and read to us.”
And what was the best part of their day?
“Just to see how happy they are that we’re there to read for them and that excitement,” Mandes said.
“For me, it was going back and seeing all the teachers,” Muth said. “It makes you feel good about yourself, showing them you still care about what they did for you.”
Neubert recounted the story of a parent calling the school office the day after the Reading Super Bowl.
“She wanted ‘whomever was in charge of setting up the day’ to know the impact that it had on her first grade student from Oak Park,” Neubert said. “He came home and told his mom he can’t wait to be a North Penn Knight so that he can go back and read to students.
“That, to me, is a wonderful testimony of the impact these student-athletes have on the kids they read to.”
In the end, it’s all about paying it forward.
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