ROCKINGHAM — For six months, three fathers would drive their children and a handful of others to Greensboro to work with a speed coach.
The trio — Robert David, Chavis Everett and Shawn Everett — started to see a change. They noticed the members of the group were improving on the athletic fields, courts and diamonds.
Soon, they wanted to bring the same opportunities back to Richmond County.
“The coach taught us the skills,” David said. “We took the same core of kids and started doing it two times a week during the summer here. We worked on speed and cross-training drills.”
Unlike the majority of these “specialized” coaches which can charge hundreds of dollars to go through these drills, the trio provide this opportunity for free. All because they “wanted to give back to their community.”
“Athletics is a business now,” David said. “We are in a small area and we don’t have a lot of the resources athletes have in bigger places like Charlotte, Fayetteville or Greensboro. We are doing this because we love sports and we want to see more people get scholarships.”
Some could see this group as trying to compete with the coaching staffs at the high school or middle schools. David, on the other hand, believes this training can be used as a supplement.
“We want to be able to make someone better,” David said. “It doesn’t matter what sport, it could be football, basketball, baseball or whatever. We want them to improve when they go back out there. We’re not trying to compete.
“We would love for a coach to send us a couple of kids they think could use our help.”
David added the group’s main focus is to help a player improve their speed, agility and strength, but it also stresses the need to be good students in the classroom.
“We want to be able to build someone’s self-esteem and let them go on and be the best athlete they can,” David said. “We want them to also succeed and earn scholarships not only in athletics but academics as well.
“We all sit around and see a lot of great athletes on Friday nights. Then a few months later we see them on the corners not doing anything, not going to college. We want to try and change this.”
The trio, especially Chavis Everett and David, see this everyday. David is a juvenile probation officer in Hoke County and Chavis Everett works as an adult probation officer in Richmond.
“It is sad to see someone waste their life away,” David said.
The group currently meets every other Saturday at the South Hamlet Recreational Fields, until summer, when it holds the drills Tuesdays and Saturdays. For information, contact David and the Everetts at teachingandtraining@yahoo.com
— Sports editor Shawn Stinson can be reached at 910-997-3111, ext. 14, or by email at sstinson@civitasmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @scgolfer.
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