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ECU News, Notes and Commentary
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The
Bradsher Beat
Friday, June 24, 2005
By Bethany Bradsher |
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Summer camps
mold budding Pirates
©2005 Bonesville.net
When
10-year-old David Breece signed up to attend the East Carolina Football
Camp, he made the commitment even though it looked like none of his friends
from Fayetteville would be able to join him.
Just two
days before the camp was to begin on June 12, that all changed when five of
his friends decided they wanted to come along with David. His mother Ginny
Breece tried to call the football office that Friday afternoon but was
unable to reach anyone. So she called information in an attempt to contact
Clifford Snow, the new director of football operations, and she reached him
at home.
“I called
and said, ‘Can I bring six kids?” said Breece, who was sending his son for
his first overnight camp ever. “He couldn’t have been nicer. When we arrived
on Sunday, he came up to us and said, ‘Are you the Fayetteville group?’ ”
Ginny
Breece, whose father Charles Smith played football for ECU in the late '60s,
is just one Eastern North Carolinian who got to know some of the new Pirate
coaches this month through one of the ECU sports camps. The new leadership
can only hope that victories during the season are as plentiful as satisfied
summer campers.
“I had a
wonderful experience,” Breece said. “I felt good leaving the boys there.”
While Snow
and the rest of the football staff were reaching out to prospective football
players on one part of campus, the new basketball coaches were leading their
own drills with young hoopsters in Minges Coliseum. Heather Eveleth’s
seven-year-old son Lanier was one of the youngest boys there, and she was
impressed with the accessibility of the coaches.
“I felt
like they were just available, if you had questions,” Eveleth said. “They
were just hands-on. Coach Stokes was so awesome with the kids. He was very
caring, wanting to know them.”
Over on
the football practice field, Lori Holden knew something about watching out
for the little guy. As an employee of the ECU football department, Holden
already knew and trusted the coaches with her eight-year-old son Josh. She
was also perfectly situated to check in on him from time to time.
“I was
very impressed on how the coaches made him feel like part of the team, even
though he was the littlest,” Holden said. “They treated all the younger kids
as if they were their own.”
Brian
Summers of Greenville sent two of his sons to the ECU basketball camp, and
he was pleased at the emphasis the coaches and other instructors placed on
the values that aren’t directly related to on-the-court skills.
“I felt
like they taught them more than just basketball,” Summers said of Mitchell,
13, and Matt, 9. “Good sportsmanship was emphasized.”
On one
hand, staffing the youth camps takes time that coaches could be using for
recruiting or plotting out schemes for the fall, but ECU offensive line
coach Steve Shankweiler said that the camps actually serve the program in
several ways. First, they allow coaches to return to the foundation of their
craft by teaching fundamentals to young boys, and they can even use the camp
as a setting to experiment with new drills or coaching techniques.
Another
benefit of the camps is their potential to enrich ECU’s recruiting efforts,
Shankweiler said. Summer campers should also be viewed as would-be Pirates,
and when they spend time on campus and interact with the coaches they get a
favorable view of the program — and coaches get a good look at their
abilities.
Shankweiler’s son Kort, now a fullback for ECU, grew up attending football
camps when Shankweiler worked for Steve Logan, and the experience was not
only an important component of his football development but also a source of
great memories.
“When I
think back to him growing up, he looked forward to that more than anything
he did,” Shankweiler said.
The
basketball program, with its smaller recruiting classes, may not get many
players from summer camps, but assistant coach Jeremy Shyatt said that the
June event gave the coaches a chance to give back to the community. On June
11, the coaches also got to watch dozens of area high school players in
action during the Team Camp One-Day Jamboree, which featured local teams in
a round-robin format.
Shyatt,
who organized the camp with fellow assistant Larry Dixon, said that the
coaches put a priority on communicating with the moms and dads who were
dropping off their sons and giving them an opportunity to watch the action
on the court.
“You’ve
got a lot of parents who have a vested interest in Pirate basketball and
want to see how stuff is done,” said Shyatt, who also grew up with summer
camps as the son of former Clemson coach and current Florida assistant coach
Larry Shyatt.
As the
mother of 8-year-old basketball camper Nate, Margaret Turner placed a
premium on the fact that the coaches sought out the parents who lingered in
Minges Coliseum. Stokes, in fact, approached Turner and some other campers’
mothers one day and told them that the true test of a camp’s success is
whether the moms are pleased.
“He just
continually asked, ‘Are the boys having a good time?’” Turner said of
Stokes. “One night my husband asked Nate, ‘How is the camp on a scale of
fun, really fun or really, really fun?’ He said it was really, really fun.”
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02/23/2007 01:11:27 AM |
