A CIVICS LESSON

Friday night lights, the cheers and roar of the crowds attending high school football games is perhaps no more cherished and well attended than in the South. There is a lot of attention given to high school football with many local TV stations devoting a portion of their programming to bringing us the latest standings and scores.

In my day they were called jocks; the high school gridiron heroes, admired by all, fawned over by cheerleaders. This probably made up much of the lives of the Hollywood Hills football team out of Hollywood, Fl. But some of these young men and their coach found out what it takes to be a different kind of hero.

It was a bad day for the team. While participating in USF Sling-N-Shoot tournament, Alvin Arnold for maybe the first time in his life, dropped a pass thus eliminating the team from the competition. Disappointed and tired, Coach Barnwell began the drive home with Alvin and three of his teammates; Clarence Murphy, Jared Moldonado, and Anthony Yerou.

Southbound on US 27, they saw a man on the northbound side frantically waving at drivers passing him who were pretty much ignoring him. The boys could see a truck overturned in the canal and they asked the coach to turn around and go back.

Coach Barnwell put together a gameplan; stick together, listen to him and go for children first, then any adults. When they arrived on the scene, the SUV was upside down in about four feet of water. The coach jumped in the water in search of the two year old and the boys followed him, literally yanking the doors off the SUV in order to reach the trapped family.

They quickly rescued the baby and the man, who was the child’s grandfather but the grandmother was a little harder. By the time they got her up the embankment, she had no pulse and then Jared Moldonado did an extraordinary thing; he started doing CPR and brought Juanita Bryan back from the brink of death. Unfortunately, she would eventually die from her injuries, but at least it would not be at the bottom of a muddy canal.

"We have great kids and we have great parents," Barnwell said. "These young men showed that the discipline and teamwork and preparation that you learn can be used in any situation in life."

Nowhere in the retelling of this story by the participants did I see the mention of any concern about race, political affiliation or sexual orientation of the victims or the rescuers. Just some human beings coming to the aid of other human beings in peril. There's a lesson here for us all about how real Americans conduct themselves. And it is into the hands of young people such as these that we should desire to entrust our future.

GO SPARTANS!