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Miami Palmetto High School senior Prince Smith is going into his senior year with ambitious plans to excel at linebacker on the football team and potentially earn a college scholarship to an excellent Division I school.
“I do have dreams of playing in college,” he says.
In fact, he has talked with the inside linebacker coach at a major academic university who told him they are waiting to see the films of him playing his new position because they are interested in recruiting him.
“He was impressed by the films at defensive end, but he wanted to see some films of me at linebacker,” Smith says.
That’s one of the reasons Smith switched to his new position. Until this year, Smith was a defensive end. This year he switched to linebacker on a team that has high hopes to end the season in the playoffs.
Smith says the team is looking good. Last year Palmetto made it to the first round of the playoffs but this year they hope to go much further.
Smith played in a preseason game on August 14 – the first day of school – and the first game was August 22.
It will be months before Smith can sign with a college. If he doesn’t go out of state, he’s interested in attending one of several Florida universities that are football powerhouse, including the University of Florida, the University of Miami, Florida State University and the University of South Florida.
Whatever school he ends up at, he wants to take Molecular Biology or Forensic Science as his major.
“I have dreams of working in a lab some day, being a scientist,” he says. “I am also interested in Forensic Science and working with the police department, looking at fingerprints and blood types, too. I always thought that was pretty cool.”
His interest in Forensic Science comes from his time in the Forensics Academy at Palmetto.
The Capstone students are required to do a research paper on a topic of their choice. His paper was on the mental health effects of cyber bullying. He studied the effectiveness of prevention methods, which include parental care, psychological training, and selective use of social media.
“I ended up finding the selective use of social media was the most effective,” he says.
Ways to do that include adjusting privacy settings (making accounts private), reporting the bullies and blocking the bullies.
Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok and X (formerly Twitter) were the specific social media sites most mentioned by the 150 students across all four grade levels. The respondents included 40 college students as well.
This summer, Smith participated in the Summer Youth Internship Program at Palmetto.
“I got hands on experience building shelves, moving desks, moving chairs,” he says. “I helped cleaning. I helped paint the walls. I did that for the entire month of July.”
Since elementary school, Smith has been involved in Breakthrough Miami, attending the enrichment program at Palmer Trinity School in the summer and on weekends. He’s been attending since elementary school.
Now that he’s in high school, the program changed from enrichment academics to helping the students with SAT prep, advancing writing skills and mock job interviews.
“It’s been extremely helpful,” he says. “It’s always given me a step ahead going into the school year. With the program, I have been able to go on two college tours. In tenth grade we went to Florida colleges.”
In the eleventh-grade college tour, they went to Georgia and visited Morehouse, Georgia Tech and the Savanah College of Art and Design.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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