Baseball Player Gets Leadership Scholarship Phelps Training To Be A Nurse Anesthetist

Baseball is helping Bryan Phelps become a nurse anesthetist.

Phelps, who graduated from Lakeland High School last spring, is studying pre-nursing at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston thanks in part to $2,500 in scholarships from the American Legion and the Buick Division of General Motors Corp.

Phelps was selected as the 1999 Northwest Regional Buick Leadership Award winner from players on about 500 American Legion baseball teams in seven Northwest states.

Phelps said he played on baseball teams from kindergarten through high school.

Darren Taylor, his coach for two seasons of American Legion baseball, nominated him for the leadership award.

“He’s really a grounded kid,” Taylor said. “He always had his head on straight.”

Phelps is a good citizen, a good leader and a great player, he said.

“He had a couple of outstanding seasons for us,” Taylor said, noting that Phelps hit .371 for the summer and scored 63 runs, a record for the local program.

Baseball ability is not what earned Phelps the award, said Jim Quinlan, program coordinator of American Legion Baseball.

“It had nothing to do with his playing ability,” he said. “It has to do with character, leadership, scholastic ability.”

Three people had to write letters of recommendation for him: the coach, the local American Legion post commander and a community leader such as a principal or mayor, Quinlan explained. The committee that selects the scholarship recipient asks each applicant about their life goals and plans for education, he said.

Phelps decided not to pursue baseball in college.

Instead, he’s spending the time he would have spent on baseball studying and working as a certified nursing assistant for Life Care Center of Lewiston. If he were to play baseball, he wouldn’t have enough time to take the courses he wants to take, Phelps said.

“I still love baseball and I kind of miss it,” he said. “It was a trade-off, but I think it was the right decision.”

His mother, Patty Phelps, said the scholarship help has made a big difference for her son.

“Bryan could have easily played baseball in college, but he didn’t want to struggle,” she said.

The $2,500 from the American Legion and Buick “really helped me out a ton,” Phelps said.

Phelps said he became interested in the medical field because it sounded fun and sounded like a good opportunity to help people. He took a health occupations class in high school, which furthered his interest, he said.

“Baseball got me into college, but it’s not going to be my career,” Phelps said.