Success grows for No Excuses University
By Mike Haynes
During a
seven-minute video, my eyes teared up three times. It doesn’t take a lot for my
ducts to moisten, but I’ll bet I wasn’t the only Amarillo College employee who
was touched by a football story.
It wasn’t
really about football, but about love and second chances.
Doug Curry,
former principal of Amarillo’s San Jacinto Elementary and Travis Middle School,
was giving AC faculty and staff a beginning-of-school pep talk about his
passion, No Excuses University. San Jacinto was the first school in Texas to
join the endeavor that, beginning in kindergarten, preaches to kids that they
will go to college – or at least will have the education to do so if they want.
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| Grapevine Faith Christian School prepared this banner for the opponent, the Gainesville State School Tornadoes. |
No Excuses
is a growing success story that I hope you’ll keep hearing about. We all can
learn from it and from the video with which Curry ended his presentation.
It showed a 2008 football game
between two Texas teams: Gainesville State School and Grapevine Faith Christian
School.
Grapevine
Faith won the game handily, but that wasn’t the point. What made it news – and
a story worthy of a theatrical movie expected to come out soon – was that half
of the Christian school’s home fans moved to the visitors’ side and yelled for
Gainesville.
The state
school is a maximum-security facility for young people who have committed
crimes. Those with good behavior get to try out for the Tornado football team.
They play all their games on the road and normally have no fans, no one
cheering for them except their coaches and teammates.
So in 2008,
Grapevine Faith Coach Kris Hogan convinced everyone at the Christian school to
show some agape love to the players from Gainesville. He and Faith
administrators had pondered, “What would give them the most hope?” The answer
was to make the incarcerated boys “feel like they were their own.”
Half the
Faith supporters sat on the visitors’ side, half the Lion cheerleaders rooted
for the Tornadoes and the Faith people formed a 40-yard spirit line for the
visiting young men to run through, complete with a banner for them to break.
“I figured
we were going to go around them,” said Alex, a Gainesville player. “I figured
it was for the other team.” But the state school coach, Mark Williams, replied,
“Huh-uh. They’re here for us. Run through that line, crash through that banner,
and have fun all night long.”
“You saw
hope in their eyes when they came out and saw that spirit line,” said Jordan, a
Lions player. “And then confidence every time our fans cheered for them.”
“It was
almost like they didn’t have to prove anything,” said Faith coach Hogan. “There
was such a celebration of them, they began to think, ‘Yeah, we are a team like
everybody else.’”
“You
couldn’t convince nobody on that team that we lost,” recalled Mack, a Tornado
player, on the video. “I felt like God was touching upon all of us and letting
us know there’s people out there that care about you – even if they don’t even
know us.”
Giving
someone that kind of love and hope shouldn’t be foreign to any Christian. Jesus blessed those who invite strangers in
and who visit people in prison (Matt. 25:35-36). He said the second greatest
command is to love our neighbor (Matt. 22:39) – and our neighbor is everybody.
Even our
Friday night opponents. And even those who have done bad things.
By the way,
the Tornadoes and Lions continue to play each other. The game now is called the
One Heart Bowl, and this year’s contest was last night (Sept. 13).
To learn
about the upcoming film, go to oneheartmovie.com.
