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By DEREK REDD
Tanner Russell doesn't want to just live in Wheeling. He wants to be of Wheeling.
Service to the community is paramount to him. It's not only as vice president of commercial banking at Main Street Bank, where he develops new customers from Wheeling to Wellsburg to Toronto and helps them navigate their financial needs. It's also in roles as president of the board of directors for the Children's Home of Wheeling and treasurer and past president of the Greater Wheeling Chamber of Commerce.
Russell has been impressed by the growth he has seen in the Ohio Valley in the nearly two decades he has lived here. He doesn't want to just be a spectator to that growth. In both business and community, he wants to play an active role, to roll up his sleeves and be part of the good things he observes.
Russell had plenty of places to choose from when he and wife Stacy decided to make a place their home. A Princeton native, he could have returned to his hometown. He and Stacy could have settled in Morgantown where they met and where Russell was an offensive lineman and captain of the West Virginia University football team.
Yet Wheeling was calling. Stacy is a Wheeling native and has a large family in the area, which helped the Russells pick a home. Yet Russell said there was more to it than that.
"As much as I love Princeton and I try to communicate to everyone the streets are paved with gold, in my mind it didn't offer the same things that I thought would be really important and what you can offer to your kids," he said. "(Wheeling) was the easy solid choice.
"It's all the little things when you think about what's offered," he added. "All those things are so hard to find. To me, there was nowhere close to what Wheeling and the Ohio Valley had to offer."
Russell wants to give back to the community he loves and chose to call home. He does that through his role at Main Street, calling upon his 18 years of banking experience in the Ohio Valley to tout his bank as the right place for people bring their business.
"My role specifically is to be a part of servicing the customers we already have and also spending time in and around the communities developing new customers," he said, "whether it's through any kind of community interaction, through a current customer, being part of a community event or community organization. You meet people.
"We try to promote Main Street Bank as a place that will service each and every customer in the most efficient way possible," he continued, "and try to first sell myself and then sell somebody on the bank and try to bring on that new relationship and expand it and help anyway I can."
He's also giving back through his roles in the community. He said he and Stacy love being involved. The two of them were heavily involved in the revival of the Woodsdale Elementary School playground. Russell plays another important role for the children of the Ohio Valley in his position with the Children's Home of Wheeling. The organization is launching the Orchard Park Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital, a 30-bed facility will be located within the former Robert C. Byrd Behavioral Health Center.
Russell credits everyone involved with the Children's Home of Wheeling in making that project a reality.
"Really what it comes down to is who you're surrounded with," he said. "The people that sit on those collective boards with me are innovative people. They're of the same mindset. They live in Wheeling, they're pushing Wheeling forward. They're engaging. That is really what has helped me."
Russell said his successes have come in part because he doesn't fear failure. It's not that he likes failure, but rather than viewing it as a hurdle, he looks at it as a learning experience. Learning from that failure, he said, leads to greater accomplishments in the future.
"I try to impress this upon both my kids right now," Russell said. "I look at them and say you miss every shot you don't take. I may not know what percentage this is, but I know what 100% of nothing is. You can't be afraid to fail. You're going to fail at something. It's going to happen, but how do you deal with it? How do you handle it? I'm going to try to grab every failure and learn from it."