This past November, I had the pleasure of speaking at a career day at the Barack Obama Leadership Academy, which is a magnet secondary school located in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, Texas. It is an all-boys school with 98% minority enrollment. During my presentation, I began polling the room of boys to ask what they wanted to be when they grew up. An 8th grader stated that he wanted to be an NFL football player. I replied, “fine,” and then challenged him to become the next Myron Rolle–or rather Myron Rolle, MD, the former NFL football player, former Rhodes Scholar, and current neurosurgery resident at Harvard.

Myron’s story is one that defies all odds. The chances of becoming an NFL player are very slim. The chances of becoming a neurosurgeon are certainly far higher than becoming a professional football player but are still very small. To become a professional football player, one has to gifted with a baseline level of athleticism and hand-eye coordination. Once you have these minimum prerequisites, if you work incredibly hard and your talent is nurtured, you could become a professional football player. Similarly, to become a neurosurgeon, one must have a baseline level of innate gifts. If you are fortunate to be born with these gifts and you work incredibly hard while having those gifts nurtured adequately, you could become a neurosurgeon.

Despite the chances of becoming a neurosurgeon being far higher than becoming a professional football player, we as a society do much more to invest in children becoming football players. Author Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the term “talent capitalization rate,” which refers to the rate at which a given community is capitalizing on the human potential of those within its midst. When describing the talent capitalization rate, Gladwell has used the following example:

What hockey is to Canada, football is to Dallas. Dallas cares very deeply about football and, as such, Dallas’s football talent capitalization rate is high. An excellent article by Robert Mundinger titled “DFW, Poverty and Football” details just how high this rate is. In the article, Mundinger notes that three of the top six overall players selected in the 2017 NFL draft are from the DFW Metroplex: Myles Garrett (Arlington Martin High School), Solomon Thomas (Coppell High School), and Jamal Adams (Hebron High School). Mundinger further notes that in 2017, despite only 22% of Texas’s student population residing in DFW, 45% of the top 100 Texas high school players were from the Dallas area.

For a kid growing up in Dallas, if you show a semblance of football talent at a young age, we will find you and nurture that talent. In other words, if a young Myron Rolle, the football phenom, was born in Dallas, it is very likely that his football talent would not have been squandered. But what about the young Myron Rolle who displayed the intellectual ability to become a neurosurgeon? Would Dallas have nurtured that talent with the same ferociousness as it would the football talent?

In 2017, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) conducted a study regarding projected physician staffing numbers. The study projected that by 2030, due to population growth and an increase in the number of aging Americans, the United States may have a shortage of over 100,000 physicians. A separate AAMC report titled “Altering the Course: Black Males in Medicine” notes that in 1978, there were 542 black male matriculants to medical school. In 2014, there were only 515. At a time when more doctors are needed, fewer black men are becoming physicians.

And while the AAMC’s report focused on the nation’s current shortcoming in graduating black males from medical schools, the state of Texas is struggling to graduate black males from college. A recent Dallas Morning News article noted that in 2016, only one college in Texas graduated more than 100 black males within 6 years of the student enrolling into college.

Whatever Dallas’s physician talent capitalization rate is, it is obviously not as high as it can be. When we identify football talent we send kids to football camps, invest in private coaching, and the entire community starts pulling for the kid’s success. What if we applied the same level of nurturing to a child that shows promise to become a physician? The impending physician shortage is an issue that we must address—not only from a nationwide perspective but locally in Dallas as well.

I have been working with Dale Okorodudu, MD, and Thomas Bennett, MBA to host a Black Men in White Coats Youth Summit on the campus of UT Southwestern Medical Center on February 16th. We are expecting over 1000 students (boys and girls third grade and above) to be in attendance. The Summit will provide inspiration and mentorship to DFW’s youth who are interested in healthcare as a profession. Throughout the day, students will engage in hands-on activities and network with healthcare professionals from diverse backgrounds. The goal is to inspire and show them that there are people who look like them in the medical field, and if others like them have done it, then so can they. The Summit will also provide tangible information to educators, parents and community leaders to inform them of what they can do to help nurture our physician potential.

We cannot afford to only select from a small demographic. We must ensure that regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or geographic location, we find all of the existing talent, harness and develop it. This is not something that can be accomplished by solely relying on physicians of color. There are simply not enough Dr. Dales to go around. This is a job for all of us.

“We have a scarcity of achievement in this country, not because we have a scarcity of talent but because we are squandering talent. This is good news…because that means we can do something about it.”

So let’s do something about it. It takes a village. So let’s be the village.

More information about the Black Men in White Coats can be found at www.blackmeninwhitecoats.org