BELLE GLADE, Fla. — It’s a blazing Saturday on a sun-baked football field in a city that grapples daily with poverty and problems. Across the street, sugar canes sway in fields that never seem to end.
Just a mile away, there’s the corner where Norman “Pooh” Griffith, a high school standout from a rival town, was shot and killed last fall.
This is Belle Glade, a place University of Miami safety Randy Phillips is proud to call home. And he’s even prouder that he’s trying to show the next generation a way out.
“No guns. No gangs. No fighting. That’s what we’ve got to get into these kids,” Phillips said. “We’ve got to keep these kids positive and show them, right now, what happens when you make the right decisions. I made the right decisions. Too many guys, they made the wrong ones.”
For the next three weeks, this is the mission for Miami’s football team.
The Hurricanes embarked Saturday on a community outreach program, targeting kids ages 8 to 15. By the end of the month, they will do 28 events like this, first playing a little football, then talking about things that matter most.
“We’ve got to keep these kids out of trouble,” said Leigh Gooden, the president of Glades Pioneer Park, which hosted Saturday’s event. “If we don’t do it, who’s going to?”
Miami athletic director Kirby Hocutt said the outreach program came from an idea hatched by Hurricanes coach Randy Shannon, a South Florida native who knows the perils of a rough-and-tumble lifestyle — his father was murdered and three siblings died of AIDS.
There’s an obvious upside for the athletic department’s bottom line: It’s a key time of year for season-ticket sales, and more exposure throughout South Florida won’t hurt those numbers. But Hocutt insists there is far more here than steering fans toward turnstiles.
“Our student-athletes, our young people, are tremendous role models,” Hocutt said Saturday. “I think there are many young people in South Florida, in the state of Florida, across the country that look up to the young men on our football team.”
About 20 Miami players were assigned to Belle Glade. Once there, they broke into small groups by position.
