Coaches & Athletes Who Give

written by Deborah Cadorette, Eugene T. Moore School of Education, Clemson University, SC

Let's welcome a season of giving and joy with spotlighting athletes who are making contributions to those in need. Google brought several items of interest, with two in particular from ESPN. Top 10 Givers of Service; and some high school athletes who helped a schoolmate in Arizona with a bullying situation. The 3rd topic came from our national organization, NFHS through an article written by Kent Smith of Orrville High School in Orrville, Ohio about caring Coaches.

If you have athletic programs who perform service for others, we would like to know about it. Contact us at djcat@clemson.edu so we can share this information with others. It may spark more giving of our services and more rewards to those in need.

ESPN's Top Ten

• Arizona State guard Danielle Orsillo has spent more than 150 hours over the last two years shooting hoops, cooking meals and playing video games with mentally disabled adults at an ARC recreation center in Tempe.
• Growing up with alopecia areata, a congenital autoimmune skin disease that causes hair loss on the scalp and sometimes the entire body, made life difficult for Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva. Now he offers financial and emotional support to kids such as Alex Fabozzi, 16, who suffers from the disease.
• Kyle Petty and his wife Pattie founded the Victory Junction Gang camp. It is a retreat for children with serious illnesses or chronic conditions. They started it three years ago in honor of their son Adam.
• Boston Red Sox knuckleballer, Tim Wakefield has been instrumental in supporting the Space Coast Early Intervention Center, a preschool for children with special needs in his hometown of Melbourne, FL.
• Taylor Bell, a star soccer player at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, formed TOPS (Total Outreadh Program for Soccer) four years ago to enable children with mental and physical disabilities to enjoy the sport.
• College of Wooster players volunteer at Every Woman's House, a shelter for abused women and their children in Ohio.
• Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards meets with children from Cleveland's Clark Elementary school. Last spring Edwards pledged one million in scholarship money for 100 worthy 8th grade students in the city. He and his mother, Malesa Plater, select recipients from among 1500 applicants.
• Liezel Huber, the WTA's top-ranked doubles player has helped more than twenty families get back on their feet in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
• Montreal Canadiens captain and cancer survivor Saku Koivu started a foundation that raised over two million toward the purchase of a PET Scanner for Montreal General Hospital.
• Since 2005, Lorena Ochoa has been supporting La Barranca Elementary School, a nontraditional school in an impoverished community near Guadalajara, Mexico.

Kent Smith, CAA, Athletic Director at Orrville High School, Orrville Ohio writes about their service oriented tasks in interscholastic athletics:

We continually ask ourselves, "What is the mission of our high school athletic programs?" For some members of our community or for some parents, the answer would center on how well the team does in terms of wins and losses. This viewpoint would evaluate the season based upon winning the league title or how far a team advances in the tournament.

Most of us are keenly aware of the phrase "Educational Athletics." We associate educational athletics as being the intentional efforts of our coaches to teach skills, behaviors, actions and attitudes that extend far beyond the X's and O's of our sports. Some of these positive character traits are: hard work, discipline, teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, respect, and learning how to win and lose with dignity.

How many of us have thought about community service as another character trait that can be used in our pursuit of educational athletics? We define community service as giving back to the school and surrounding community through volunteerism. Service is doing something for somebody else without any expectation of getting anything in return. It is a selfless way for teams to give back to their communities. Unfortunately, in today's society, the concept of service is foreign to many young people.

At Orrville High School, we do not require teams to perform community service projects but ask them to strongly consider performing at least one each year. We try to emphasize that community service does not have to be simply raising money and donating it to a worthy cause or organization. Community service can be the giving of time, talent, or labor to a worthy or needy recipient.

In the case of our football program, head coach Doug Davault has taken this to new heights by requiring each grade level within his football program to perform separate community service projects during the summer months and throughout the school year. It then becomes almost a contest to see what they come up with to out-do the other classes. In the course of a calendar year, our football team will easily perform 6-10 community service projects. Many of them are as simple as going to read to elementary classes, raking senior citizens leaves, or helping officiate youth league games at our local Boys' and Girls' Club.

Coach Davault feels, "Community service not only benefits the recipients of the good deeds but also benefits my team by infusing leadership skills in my athletes. For example, when the junior football players chose to have a work day at our local park, they had to organize their teammates, coordinate their efforts with city employees, and gather paint, brushes and other tools before spending a day of work at the park. This creates team building, organization skills, and memories outside of the games. I would also contend that the athletes end up benefiting as much as the recipients."

With Orrville High School being a small school, many of the efforts related to community service tend to overlap between our sports teams and our student groups. (Student Council, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Earth Science Club, National Honor Society, etc.) With many of the athletes being the "doers" and "leaders" in the school, they pick out a service project and get going on it. The overlap of our teams and clubs turns out to be a positive as our projects pull in an even broader base of ownership.

Examples of recent team service projects are:

• For Life - Each athletic team gets pledges and walks in one-hour shifts with their team. When students are on multiple teams or clubs, this involves multiple hours of walking and pledges.
• Fight Like A Girl - Our girls tennis team and volleyball teams sold pink breast cancer awareness shirts as well as providing pink ribbons and public-service announcements that were read to educate and inform. All money raised was sent to the Susan Koman Fund.
• Operation Gridiron Airlift - In conjunction with a neighboring rival school, we collected footballs to send to the troops along with cash donations for personal hygiene items. We sent more than 100 footballs along with close to $2,000 in cash that was used to purchase personal hygiene products.
• Adopt-A-Child - Athletes from our Fellowship of Christian Athletes adopt between three and five children every Christmas season and provide them with gifts of both clothing and toys. These children are selected with the assistance of our local Salvation Army. The money used for this is raised when our athletes donate their time parking cars at home football games.
• Smith/Orr Homestead - This non-profit historical home in Orrville will call our school whenever it needs help with manual labor, painting or other odd jobs.
• Orrville Public Library - The library staff knows that our football team is there whenever it needs boxes of books moved or shelving re-arranged. Our athletes are also part of a program called "Red Riders Read," which is when our athletes read and have lunch with our elementary students.
• Orrville Area Boys' and Girls' Club - This facility is directly across the street from our school. Our teams offer themselves for tutoring to younger students as well as volunteer to coach youth teams and even officiate various youth sport leagues. Our athletes also spent two weekends helping lay decorative landscaping block in front of the facility this past fall.
• Orrville Fire Department Canned Food Drive - Each holiday season our athletes volunteer their time assisting our local fire department in the collection of canned goods and then help distribute them to families within our community.
• Raking Leaves - Local churches give names of shut-ins who need their leaves raked. In the winter, many of these same shut-ins have their driveways shoveled as well.
• Assist In The Moving Of Schools - Recently, Orrville Schools opened up a new elementary building and a new middle school. All text books, teachers' supplies and miscellaneous furniture were moved for the school system. This job involved more than 40 athletes working during several evenings and weekends.

This listing is far from complete, but gives an idea of the kinds of things that can be done. There are two types of community service projects - those where money is raised to donate to a needy cause and those that simply involve time and effort. Coach Davault feels "Community service is something all teams should strongly consider. Our goal is to develop the complete student-athlete. In my mind, there is no doubt that our athletes will be far more likely to give back to others around them through volunteerism as they transition into adulthood due to these experiences."

Click on the link below to read this heartwarming story about high school athletes who make a decision to "hang out" with one of the students in their school. They wanted to discourage unkind comments that were being made by other students because she was different. This was shared with coaches throughout Greenville County Schools by Bill Utsey, district Director of Athletics.

Special team

How about a little good news?

In the scrub-brush desert town of Queen Creek, Ariz., high school bullies were throwing trash at sophomore Chy Johnson. Calling her "stupid." Pushing her in the halls.

Chy's brain works at only a third-grade level because of a genetic birth defect, but she knew enough to feel hate.

"She'd come home every night at the start of the school year crying and upset," says her mom, Liz Johnson. "That permanent smile she had, that gleam in her eye, that was all gone."

Her mom says she tried to talk to teachers and administrators and got nowhere. So she tried a whole new path -- the starting quarterback of the undefeated football team. After all, senior Carson Jones had once escorted Chy to the Special Olympics. (read the rest...)

(back to pelinks4u homepage)