APOLARITY

There are some games in which cheering for the other side feels better than winning – ESPN (!) article, a beautiful story about a well-funded high school football team who decided to welcome the other team – by providing fans to cheer for them! The other team: maximum-security prisoners.

This all started when Faith’s head coach, Kris Hogan, wanted to do something kind for the Gainesville team. Faith had never played Gainesville, but he already knew the score. After all, Faith was 7-2 going into the game, Gainesville 0-8 with 2 TDs all year. Faith has 70 kids, 11 coaches, the latest equipment and involved parents. Gainesville has a lot of kids with convictions for drugs, assault and robbery—many of whose families had disowned them—wearing seven-year-old shoulder pads and ancient helmets.

So Hogan had this idea. What if half of our fans—for one night only—cheered for the other team? He sent out an email asking the Faithful to do just that. “Here’s the message I want you to send:” Hogan wrote. “You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth.”

Some people were naturally confused. One Faith player walked into Hogan’s office and asked, “Coach, why are we doing this?”

And Hogan said, “Imagine if you didn’t have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you.”

(ht)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 5:47 pm and is filed under good news, links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.