By Sam Greenwood, Getty Image

By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
Every college sport, football included, is in constant recycling mode. Stars come. And they go, bound to a four- or five-year clock. New ones come, and they go.

But in Tim Tebow’s case, the routine isn’t … well, so routine.

A week ago, his coach at Florida was moved to tears as the senior quarterback approached his final game at home, against Florida State. Countless cameras and cellphones flashed as Tebow ran through his final series of plays at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. He and the Gators won big, preserving their No. 1 Bowl Championship Series ranking. Now there are but two games left.

Beat the BCS’ second-ranked Alabama in Saturday’s Southeastern Conference championship game in Atlanta — no gimme in a clash of unbeaten heavyweights — and Florida will play for a national title Jan. 7 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. The loser heads to the Allstate Sugar Bowl on New Year’s night.

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Tebow has won a Heisman Trophy. Depending in part on how he performs Saturday, he could become the second player in the award’s 75-year history to collect a second. He owns two national championship rings, and beckoning in Pasadena is a shot at a remarkable third in four seasons.

That would seem a fitting denouement for a rare 22-year-old whose talent, virtue and timing — emerging in an ESPN- and Internet-saturated age — have rendered him perhaps the most exalted college athlete of all time.

Vince Dooley has seen Tebow pile up nine passing and rushing touchdowns in two lopsided wins in the last two years against Georgia, a rival SEC program that Dooley once coached for 25 Hall of Fame seasons. “Football. Athleticism. Leadership. Charity work. His faith. You name it. I’ve never seen anybody who had all that in one package,” he says.

“That’s what puts him in a class by himself.”

Enlarge By Sam Greenwood, Getty Images Florida fans greet Tim Tebow before his final home game at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium last Saturday. This Saturday, the Gators face Alabama for the SEC Championship.

Making selflessness cool

The son of missionaries, Tebow inherited his mother’s and father’s religious devotion and social conscience. He goes on missions, himself. He has spoken and prayed in prisons, in an orphanage, in a leper colony. He’s a frequent hospital volunteer.

Taking his cue, Florida coach Urban Meyer and his family took a mission trip two summers ago, and Tebow’s teammates have joined him in a charity fundraiser the last two years in which they compete in tire-flipping and other strongman events.

“It’s almost like selflessness is now a cool thing,” Meyer says of Tebow’s impact on those around him.

Package that decency into the 6-3, 240-pound body of an elite athlete. Add instinct, natural leadership, an inextinguishable will to win — and not only the will but a knack for winning.

Tebow’s record as a starter at Florida is 34-5. He and the Gators (12-0) carry a two-year, 22-game winning streak into their showdown with Alabama (12-0).

He has no modern reference points. History offers the likes of Iowa’s Nile Kinnick, the similarly principled 1939 Heisman winner who passed into legend when he chose law school over pro football, volunteered for service in World War II and was killed during a flight training mission in 1943. Roger Staubach was everybody’s all-American in the early 1960s, a Naval Academy midshipman who passed and ran his way to the 1963 Heisman, then served in Vietnam before going on to NFL stardom.

In basketball, Bill Bradley led Princeton to its only appearance in the NCAA’s Final Four in 1965 and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and NBA great.

Others have worked their way into the nation’s consciousness as collegians: Illinois’ Red Grange, Army’s Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, Ohio State’s Archie Griffin and Georgia’s Herschel Walker among them in football; Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson, UCLA’s Lew Alcindor and LSU’s Pete Maravich in basketball; Ohio State’s Jesse Owens and Kansas’ Jim Ryun in track.

For many, however, reverence was born of their uncommon playing skill.

None, of course, was followed by the array of 21st-century media — 24-hour television networks, all-sports radio talkfests, bloggers, tweeters — that spreads the word and amplifies the reputation of Tebow.

He doesn’t duck the attention. “There are a lot of athletes out there with a lot of platforms and a lot of opportunities to influence a lot of people and, unfortunately, there aren’t many who take advantage of it and use it in a positive manner,” Tebow says. “That’s very disappointing. They could have huge impact on kids’ lives and people’s lives and even on communities and states and countries.”

He concedes, “There’ve been moments, there’ve been days, when you get tired, you get frustrated, you get exhausted. You want people to believe you’re doing things for the right reason, but sometimes people just look at the negative. ‘It’s fake. Or it’s this or that.’ … That’s when my faith really encourages me that everything happens for a reason and God has a plan.”

Fire and devotion

ESPN was apt in entitling a documentary of his 2005 senior season of football at Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Fla., Tim Tebow: The Chosen One.

Tebow’s presence has grown significantly since then. A Google search of his name delivers more than 600,000 entries. You can choose from nearly 2,500 Tebow-related links on YouTube. He has graced more Sports Illustrated covers — six in the last 16 months, sharing a seventh with two other players — than any other college athlete.

With advertisers showing increasing interest, the company that computes popularity-measuring Q scores took stock of Tebow last spring. He was recognized by 49% of sports fans ages 12-64, equaling their familiarity with the Boston Celtics’ Paul Pierce, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Evan Longoria and Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson. Baseball’s Chase Utley and Johan Santana, among others, scored a tick lower.

Tebow’s Q score of 21, the percentage who identified him as one of their favorite athletes, ranked with that of NFL mastermind Bill Parcells and NBA stars Kevin Garnett, Chris Paul and Steve Nash. And it was well above the average score of 14 for sports personalities.

“It’s a pretty good likability score for someone being measured for the first time,” says Henry Schafer, executive vice president of New York-based The Q Scores Co., which has compiled the ratings since 1963.

Last Saturday, after Tebow took the field against FSU and continued his tradition of inscribing a Bible verse on the glare-reducing black patches beneath his eyes, his chosen “Hebrews 12:1-2″ was Google’s third-most popular search term. When he cited “John 3:16″ during the national championship game against Oklahoma last January, it was the day’s No. 1-searched-for term.

He resonates nationally in a sport in which public interest tends to be regional. And his appeal transcends football.

When Tebow and Florida ran through their final practice of the past spring, Indiana basketball coach Tom Crean was seen scribbling notes to the side. He was in the area to recruit, he said, but he also wanted to see how the Gators coaches ran things. And he was fascinated with their quarterback.

“We used Tim in different video hits this year,” Crean explained, “to show just toughness personified, doing whatever it takes, great leadership, never flinching in the pocket.”

At Tennessee, budding women’s basketball star Taber Spani points to Tebow as her role model. She was home-schooled as he was. Her Christian beliefs run deep, too, and the freshman guard from Lee’s Summit, Mo., says Tebow’s mission work inspires her to do the same.

Plus, “I love the fire he plays with,” says Spani, the daughter of former Kansas State and Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Gary Spani. “It reminds me a lot of my dad when he played football. I think his spirit is contagious, and it spreads throughout the entire team as well as the fans. The way he leads his team is something I aspire to do here.”

When he was a freshman and a backup to Chris Leak on the Florida team that won the 2006 national championship, Tebow commonly saw the field in short-yardage and goal-line situations, running for eight touchdowns and throwing for five more. By the time the Gators won it all again in 2008, Tebow was their centerpiece.

With a 66% completion rate, 84 TD passes and 15 interceptions in 53 career games, the left-hander is on pace to be the highest-rated passer in major-college history — his mathematical efficiency rating of 170.4 now bettering the record 168.9 set by Boise State’s Ryan Dinwiddie from 2000 to 2003. Tebow also has piled up more total yardage (11,389) and been responsible for more touchdowns (140 passing and rushing) than any other player in SEC history.

Even if he doesn’t join Archie Griffin as the only two-time Heisman winner, he’s a decent bet to finish among the top three vote-getters for the third consecutive year. Three players have done that, and they’re icons: Army’s Davis in the mid-1940s, Southern Methodist halfback Doak Walker in the late 1940s and Herschel Walker in the early 1980s.

What about the NFL?

Looming, though, is a great debate: Is Tebow built for the NFL?

Evaluators love his size, athleticism, arm strength and off-the-chart intangibles, but they fret about his slow passing delivery and imperfect footwork. There are suggestions he’d make a better H-back, a power-running cross between a fullback and tight end.

ESPN analyst Todd McShay rates him as a second-round pick in the NFL’s April draft. But in a nod to Tebow’s appeal, he says, “It will not be a surprise if a team takes a chance on him in the first.”

Tebow makes it clear he wants to play in the NFL. That’s partly the competitor speaking and partly the bigger-picture guy. For him, sports and stardom are vehicles.

“In terms of what he has accomplished and the character he’s shown and the things he’s done to make the world a better place and live up to his values, it’s very impressive,” says basketball’s Bradley, 66, whose post-playing career took him to the U.S. Senate.

“Like (with) everybody, the real question is going to be: So what does he do next? I assume the answer is he turns pro. What does he do then? Will he change in five or 10 years? Will he be satisfied being a role model for the rest of his life? … You have to figure out how you get from being a role model to the larger world, where you would have a bigger impact.”

Tebow’s too-good-to-be-true sheen has worn thin on some, who complain of “Tebow fatigue.” It might have been reflected in last year’s Heisman balloting, when he captured the most first-place votes but carried just one of six voting regions and finished third behind Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford and Texas’ Colt McCoy.

But the eye-rolling has remained minimal.

As the once-impeccable image of the planet’s most popular athlete, Tiger Woods, takes on some tarnish, Tebow has stayed beyond reproach. “If you purport to be something or you stand for something, you’d better make sure you’re living up to the message,” says Staubach, 67 and 4½ decades removed from being the Tebow of his time. “I think with Tim, that’s just who he is.”

Contributing: David Jones of Florida Today, Dick Patrick, Kelly Whiteside

Assemblyman Al Stirpe (D-North Syracuse) recently learned of the cheer team’s accomplishment.

“These 10, 11, and 12 year-olds are to be congratulated for their effort and hard work which has enabled them to compete for National recognition,” Stirpe said. “I join with the rest of our community in trying to make this trip to Disney World a reality for these young people.”

The Cicero Falcons have already planned a number of community fundraising events over the next couple of weeks which will ensure their participation and allow the organization the ability to send their coaches, chaperones, parents and these very deserving children to these finals. The next scheduled event is as follows:
From 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday Dec. 3 cheerleaders will host a fundraiser at Doug’s Fish Fry will be at Rite Aid on the corner of State Route 31 and Thompson Road.

Donations will be accepted and candy sales will take place during the Dec. 4 Cicero Tree Lighting Ceremony that will begin at 6 p.m. at Sleeth Park.

Those interested in donating to this very worthy cause can also go to the Cicero Falcon’s Web site cicerofalcons.org.

The chapter is raffling authentic game helmets from West Virginia and Marshall football programs. The Marshall helmet is green. The tickets are $5, with all proceeds going to Tolsia High.

The winning ticket will have the option of which helmet to take and will be signed by former coaches Don Nehlen (WVU) or Bob Pruett (Marshall) personally to the winner. The second drawn ticket will get the remaining helmet.

Tickets are available by sending $5 per ticket to: Legends Helmet Raffle, P.O. Box 521, Ravenswood, WV, 26164

ELLINGTON – Golf outings, car washes, tag sales and comedy nights are some of the fundraisers that have enabled the Ellington/Somers co-op team to compete in high school football this season.

That plus $500 a player.

Football is not funded by the Ellington school board, and its $500 pay-to-play fee — double the $250 of last year — is the highest for the sport among the 42 area schools that responded to a Courant survey. Of the 42 schools, 17 have pay-to-play for various sports.

Pay-to-play has been in Connecticut for almost 20 years, said Fred Balsamo, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Athletic Directors [CAAD]. With town budgets being tightened or slashed throughout the state, the Ellington/Somers team had to figure out its own funding after finding out last spring that it would receive no budget money. Funding was eliminated for some other sports and activities, too.

Football was made a varsity sport at Ellington in 2000 and has received only partial funding each year, but this season was the worst.

Coach Keith Tautkus said it costs about $35,000 a season to field a team, so $19,000 came from pay-to-play fees because Ellington/Somers has 38 players. The rest came from fundraising events and donations.

Tautkus said he was hoping for 50 players this season after having 42 last year, but that was before funding was eliminated. He estimated that eight to 12players did not go out for the team because of the $500 fee. Of the 38 players, 10 are from Somers, and they also pay $500 to play, but Ellington athletic director Tim McCluskey said the town of Somers supplies no funding for the cooperative team.

Tautkus, the only coach the team has had, says the financial status of the program is worse than when it started in 1999 as a junior varsity team.

Ellington is not alone. Balsamo has seen the increasing trend of shrinking budget dollars throughout the state. He said a CAAD survey in March showed that 33 schools, or 19.5 percent of the 169 that responded, had fees. There are 183 high schools in the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference.

“Pay-to-play started in the Midwest in the ’70s and ’80s,” Balsamo said. “Many states have it in various forms today. Here in Connecticut, pay-to-play started around 1990; there were one, two, just a few schools. Then a few more over the years. But in the last three or four years, the number has increased probably by 15 percent. The future of it depends, in part, of course, on the economy.”

Since the inception of the football program, the Ellington Board of Education has paid for some of the annual costs, such as Tautkus’ salary [$6,000], referees and transportation.

Last year, McCluskey, Ellington Superintendent Stephen Cullinan, high school Principal Neil Rinaldi, business manager Tony Littizzio, middle school athletic director Jim Matroni and middle school Principal David Pearson devised a three-year Athletic Restoration Plan. The board of education agreed to a gradual funding arrangement, and the team received about $10,000 last season.

The team was due $18,000 this season for year two of the Athletic Restoration Plan. But that money was eliminated in the spring, one of many cost-cutting moves by the board of education.

Football wasn’t the only sport or activity affected. McCluskey said that ice hockey (a co-op with Somers and East Windsor), boys and girls lacrosse, tennis, swimming, cheerleading and dance also had their funding eliminated. The main intent of the Athletic Restoration Plan of 2008 had been to increase partial funding for these sports and activities through 2010.

“Not to belabor our budget, but we lost a number of positions, took no raises and have a furlough day,” Cullinan said. “Despite that, the funding for those activities was dropped for the school.”

Last summer, it was announced that the pay-to-play football fee would be $500 to help offset the lack of town funding. Senior running back/linebacker Nate Tembi was stunned when he found out.

“I just said, ‘Wow,’” he said. “It was my last year of organized football that I’ll probably ever play. So I really wanted to play, even with the $500.”

So Tembi, whose summer job was busing tables at Ellington Ridge Country Club, worked as many hours as he could.

“We’ve done so much, but we’re back at it for the whole thing, $35,000,” said Rich Gelsomino, president of the Ellington Football Boosters and an Ellington/Somers assistant coach. “We were told the board would gradually provide more funding. Then this happened.”

Still, there is plenty of energy for football. The Knights are 5-4 after going 7-4 and 7-3 in the previous two years. The team closes out the season on Thanksgiving morning at Coventry.

Last season, the players raised $2,200 for new home jerseys; the original ones had worn-out numbers. They get by with some old equipment, such as blocking sleds that Tautkus, an Ellington tech-ed teacher, has welded and bolted together to keep in working condition. The blocking chute, made by the tech-ed class six years ago, is covered in rust.

The team will make it through this season, and Tautkus is confident that there will be a team next season. Cullinan is working on a new restoration plan, which he said the board of education asked him to present in January.

“I’m hoping the town will step up, and it won’t cost a player $800 or $1,000 to be on the team next year,” Tautkus said. “We aren’t a big town. How many fundraisers? How many times and sports can you ask people to donate for? It’s mind-boggling that after 10 years it’s still not known if football is a priority or not.”
Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant

By Courtney Linehan | A-J SPORTS EDITOR
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Story last updated at 10/18/2009 – 1:10 am
Two male prostitutes were looking for Patrice Majondo-Mwamba, and everyone on the football team knew it.
The teenagers heard a Congolese man was playing in NFL Europe in 2007, so they positioned themselves everywhere the Amsterdam Admirals went, trying to pick out their fellow countryman among the hoards of big, burly linemen.

One night, Mwamba stepped outside a Dutch restaurant after a long dinner with teammates and decided to walk off all the food and wine. The former Texas Tech defensive tackle noticed the two boys, no more than 16 years old, on his way back to the hotel where he was living for the 10-week season.
Frustrated by their persistence, Mwamba identified himself to his stalkers.
“I have no idea how they were in Amsterdam, but they were there with no papers, no food, no parents, displaced there because of the war,” Mwamba said. “I was touched by their story.”
The boys escaped to Amsterdam from a five-decade war that had ravaged the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They could not work without government documents, so they prostituted themselves to get money. Learning the Admirals included an NFL star from their homeland, they sought Mwamba’s help.
“Sometimes in life you have to recognize when God puts you in a position to create change,” Mwamba said. “These guys made me realize, ‘Hey, you’re at a crossroads.’ ”
Mwamba could only give the boys new shoes, some clothes, and directions to the proper government office that night.
Now, two years later, he hopes to use his new Fight for Five Foundation to protect other children from a similar fate.
A royal upbringing
Mwamba is Congolese royalty. His maternal great-grandfather was a king in the southern part of the country, part of a system of tribal government reaching back before the country’s 1908 colonization by Belgium.
Mwamba’s father was among a select group of youth educated after the Republic of Congo gained independence in 1960. A government installed by a military coup renamed the country Zaire five years later, but the country’s political climate never stabilized.
Mwamba’s parents, fearful of the building violence in 1991, sent their seven children to foreign boarding schools for good educations and protection from the growing civil war.
“I’m very lucky and I’m very conscious of that,” he said. “I don’t take that for granted.”
He attended boarding school in Belgium, then moved to the United States to enroll at Georgia Tech.
One day he was eating at a McDonald’s when a group of football players entered the restaurant. Friends explained they were athletes. A few days later he tried to sign up for the Yellow Jacket team, only to have a coach tell him to go to junior college to learn the game.
In 2000 he followed his cousin, Belgian-born Loliki Bongo-Wanga, to Hartnell Community College in California, where Mwamba learned to play football. In 2002 they reunited at Texas Tech. Mwamba redshirted, then spent two seasons primarily as a backup for teams that went to the 2003 Houston Bowl and 2004 Holiday Bowl. After graduating he signed with the now-defunct NFL Europe, which led to stints with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs.
Mwamba said he lived all of it in a bubble.
Violence worsened in Zaire while Mwamba lived abroad. Rwanda and Uganda backed a 1997 rebellion that led to a new government and name: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Another civil war erupted a year later. Foreign troops from seven countries marched through trying to influence politics, a cease-fire agreement failed and an assassin killed the president.
The CIA estimates more than five million people have died in the turmoil that began in 1998, according to the agency’s World Factbook. Fighting displaced more than 1.4 million Congolese.
Mwamba said he heard about the violence, but was too removed to care.
“You’re busy; by the time you’re in the NFL you go to work at 7:30, you finish at 5:30 and in your off time you have to do rehab,” he said. “You see those things, but there’s only 24 hours in a day.”
A firsthand experience
It took a recent trip to the Congo to show Mwamba how impoverished and dangerous his homeland had become.
He remembers a 5-year-old boy approaching him and chatting with the maturity of a teenager. Mwamba was impressed until the child asked for some money, or maybe a piece of meat.
Mwamba realized he was being hustled by a 5-year-old.
“I have a nephew who is 5 years old; all he thinks about is playing G.I. Joes or video games,” he said. “They don’t even know. That’s automatic. But for these kids in the Congo, they’re just so poor.”
The Congo’s natural resources include diamonds, gold, copper and cobalt, but corporate control means money rarely trickles into the hands of its citizens. A 2009 report by the International Red Cross said much of the violence today is a struggle to control that mineral wealth. Sexual assault, kidnapping and looting are all effects, the Red Cross reported.
“Everything that is horrific that you can think of,” Mwamba’s wife, Deborah, said, “is happening in the Congo as we speak.”
Mwamba wanted to help the teenagers he met in 2007, but didn’t know where to start. He called his attorney and asked for help creating a foundation.
He established the Fight for Five Foundation to raise awareness of and support for aid to the Congo.
Mwamba spent more than three months there this spring and summer, meeting with government officials and securing 20 acres of land on which he plans to build a school and eventually a medical center.
“That is his origin; those are his people,” Deborah, said. “We believe strongly in leaving a legacy, something that is of value. He feels that opportunities, if they are given, can make a difference. It’s not about changing the world, but changing things life by life, child by child.”
Athletics and education
The school comes first. More than 32 percent of the population can’t read, making it difficult for Congolese to land lucrative manufacturing jobs in their own country.
Mwamba wants to give students at the Mwamba Sports and Education Academy the same opportunities he received, using athletics to further their education. Tennis, basketball and football will be part of the program.
Amadou Gallo Fall, the director of scouting for the Dallas Mavericks, established the model for the program with his SEED Foundation.
Fall runs a school in his native Senegal where students learn basketball along with a traditional academic curriculum. Organizers hope the basketball skills might give graduates an edge for scholarships to continue their educations.
“In Senegal, the caliber of education is really good, but you’re not able to have as much opportunity after that,” said Brian Benjamin, SEED Foundation director of U.S. operations.
“To use their natural abilities and gifts to take them to the next level, that’s what we’re facilitating. We can connect the dots.”
The SEED Academy has a maximum enrollment of 30 students. A new bilingual French-English program should help students overcome what Benjamin called their biggest challenge in American colleges: the language barrier.
Benjamin warned operating the school can be costly, particularly in a weak economy. SEED Academy sponsors include Nike and the NBA.
“Fundraising, especially in this economic environment, it’s very important to have that backing,” Benjamin said.
Publicizing the cause
Mwamba plans to unleash his full fundraising campaign soon. Fight for Five will host a cocktail hour in Dallas on Nov. 12 as part of a publicity blitz stretching from California to the Congo.
The foundation hopes to sell 250 tickets at $100 each to help pay for a fact-finding mission by a team of Stanford University doctors who hope to establish a hospital after the school opens in 2011.
Mwamba really wants enough publicity to pressure international companies doing business in the Congo to help.
“If a change is to be made, it’s going to be made by heavy hitters,” Mwamba said. “We’re talking about petroleum companies, mining companies. All these corporations have offices there, but they don’t have the stress on them to give back to the people there.”
Mwamba enlisted friends in professional and college football, including Tech football coach Mike Leach, to help highlight the Congo’s problems. Five NFL players have committed to traveling to the Congo for the school’s groundbreaking next March, along with an ESPN crew.
Mwamba wants the school to lead its students to college and careers in the U.S. and Europe. But he also believes education can curtail the decades-old conflict at home.
“I want to give people a chance to let them know what they are capable of, to understand why they are poor,” he said. “Then they can at least fight.”
To comment on this story:
courtney.linehan@lubbockonline.com l 766-8735
terry.greenberg@lubbockonline.com l 766-8700
PEOPLE/Former Texas Tech, NFL player leads foundation to protect children from abuses in war-torn homeland of Congo

Monday, October 19, 2009

The United Way of Mason County will have fundraising activities that encourage unity across the two districts in preparation for the Ludington vs. Mason County Central football game this Friday.

Beginning today both school districts will be selling “Rivals United” T-shirts to middle and high school students for $10 each.

In addition, the elementary school students from both districts will have a “Rivals United” Spare Change Competition — not against schools but against the combined grade levels of the two school districts.

Friday there will be a tailgate party and chili-cook-off from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. on the east side of the Oriole Field concession stand.

The events are a joint effort between the Ludington Football Parents, MCC Sports Boosters and the United Way of Mason County.

For $2 participants may taste the various types of chili and then vote with money for their favorite chili. The winner will be announced at half-time along with the grade that raised the most money.

Also during the tailgate party pizza, pop and ice cream will be sold. There will be face painting and the United Way will hand out “Live United” balloons.

But local fundraising to make the project a reality had gone on for years prior to the county’s grant, and the more than $900,000 in cash and pledges generated by community efforts under the umbrella of Team Green continues to play a role in the project at Somerville High School.

“People don’t realize what a herculean effort this was,” said Billy Garbarini, president of the Somerville High School Athletic Hall of Fame and a co-chair of Team Green.

GOING GREEN: The project includes new synthetic turf at both Brooks Field and a nearby field hockey field. Named after former high school Principal T. Latimore Brooks, Brooks Field has been the site of Somerville High School football games since the 1940s, and Immaculata High School began playing their home football games there in the early 1960s, according to Garbarini.

Spearheaded by the Somerville Education Foundation with the support of district Superintendent Carolyn Leary, Team Green was started in 2005 to raise money for the turf improvements, which were to be tackled in different phases.

Groups that contributed to the project represent a who’s who of local youth sports. The Pop Warner Football Organization made a $45,000 pledge; Immaculata High School, through its Field of Dreams organization, pledged $125,000; the Hall of Fame pledged $70,000; and the Somerville High School Quarterback Club pledged $10,000 ? just to name a few of the donors.

One of the group’s biggest successes was securing a six-figure contribution ? Garbarini declined to say the exact amount ? for the facility’s naming rights. A native of the borough, Jeff Vanderbeek, chairman and managing partner of the New Jersey Devils, pledged that contribution in September 2008, with the facility to be rechristened the Gus Vanderbeek Athletic Complex at Brooks Field after his father, a 1948 Somerville High School graduate, football and track star and longtime football official.

“I grew up there, I literally walked that field probably every other day of my life,” Vanderbeek said. “Just to see it thrive, to see it come back, to see kids playing on it, to see the night football games and just to be proud of it, that to me is going to mean the most.”

Jeff and Gus Vanderbeek will be honored with others during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the field on Sept. 17, according to Garbarini.

REACHING THE GOAL: Garbarini said Team Green and Mayor Brian Gallagher were also pursuing the open space grant from the county. Somerville was among three districts that received grants of up to $1 million for recreation improvements, and freeholders on June 2 unanimously awarded Dakota Excavating Inc. a $1,010,647 contract for the project.

“That took us to the next level,” Garbarini said. “The thing we’re doing now, that was phase two. Phase one was just get Brooks Field done.”

The local share for turf work beyond the county’s grant is less than $20,000, according to county Public Works Director Michael Amorosa, who said work continues at the field hockey field, but Brooks Field is finished. Team Green money is paying for all the other features that will make the complex a place for student athletes to compete and for their supporters to cheer them.

Garbarini said Team Green is behind turf field maintenance equipment; two new, high-tech scoreboards for the fields; a new sound system; bleacher refurbishments; new bleachers for the field hockey field; a home press box; lighting upgrades; and snack shack upgrades. The group has committed close to $225,000, he said.

Some of the work, such as the home press box, snack shack renovations and new bleachers planned for the home side of Brooks Field, will not be completed this year, according to Garbarini, who envisioned Team Green as more of a dormant entity ready to help when necessary once the projects are completed.

“They started out with nothing,” said state Sen. Christopher “Kip’ Bateman, whom Team Green lists as its official spokesperson. “I remember the running races they had, the bake sales – a lot of effort went into raising money and it really paid off. Everybody is anxious to get on the field.”

ednote Martin C. Bricketto: 908-243-6609; mbricketto@MyCentralJersey.com

Bowden (left) is preparing for his 34th season at FSU and it figures that either this season or the next will be his last. At least, that’s the thought given the university’s coach-in-waiting arrangement with Seminoles’ offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher, whom FSU will owe $5 million if he’s not the head coach by January 2011.

Despite the contract — and the logic that comes with it — Bowden has refused to define his exit.

“Because it’s just going to mean,” he said, “[that] every time you play a ballgame, somebody is going to say, ‘Well, this is the last time he’s going to play in this stadium. This is the last time he’s going to play in that stadium. And so I won’t say.

“People are going to put together what they want to, but I won’t say.”

Even so, Bowden’s activities during the past week might have represented the beginnings of the exact kind of farewell tour he so desperately wants to avoid. He began last week with a trip to Florence, Ala., where he joined sons Tommy, Terry and Jeff for a “Day with the Bowdens” fundraising event at North Alabama. There, Terry is attempting to rekindle his coaching career.

Then, on Wednesday, Bowden returned to Tallahassee to be roasted at a $125-per-ticket event put on by the Tallahassee Quarterback Club. The guest list was impressive: Tom Osborne, the former Nebraska coach, and Burt Reynolds; Heisman Trophy quarterback Chris Weinke and FSU legend Ron Simmons; Georgia Coach Mark Richt, among others.

And the implication was clear: They’d all gathered not so much to share a laugh at Bowden’s expense — as is supposed to be the goal of a roast — but instead to pay tribute to a man who in all likelihood will retire at some point during the next 18 months.

Both events — North Alabama’s Bowden Day and the roast — were supposed to be more celebratory than serious. Yet hanging over Bowden at both were reminders of the possibility that he might lose 14 games from his career record because of a cheating scandal in which he played no role.

During a news conference with all four Bowden men at North Alabama, the first question was for the eldest Bowden and, not surprisingly, it focused on Florida State’s ongoing NCAA appeal, which is attempting to preserve Bowden’s victories and those from nine other sports during the 2006 and ’07 seasons.

Later, Bowden, 79, spent another half-hour answering questions, most about his record and his ongoing competition with Penn State’s Joe Paterno, who holds a one-victory lead (383-382) over Bowden in the race to retire the most victorious coach in major-college football history.

The academic fraud scandal was less a focus at the roast, but the contrast of that event to current events was clear: All the luminaries — from Reynolds, the movie star, to Richt, the former FSU offensive coordinator — had gathered to celebrate Bowden amid one of the most difficult times of his career.

Lou Holtz, Bowden’s longtime friend, taped a video tribute for the roast and he threw a “Free Shoes University” joke in there about FSU’s Foot Locker scandal from the 1990s. Others picked on Bowden’s age, or his tendency to substitute someone’s first name with “buddy.”

Yet no one found any humor in the academic fraud scandal, and no one joked about it. Weinke, who helped lead the ‘Noles to the 1999 national championship, was the only one who even alluded to it when he said, “It doesn’t matter what the NCAA says. To me, Coach Bowden will always be the winningest coach in college football.”

People clapped for that, and they later stood and cheered — more than 600 of them in a packed banquet hall — for Bowden. He said during his appearance at North Alabama that his retirement wouldn’t be hastened if the NCAA’s decision to vacate victories is eventually upheld.

And the week before that, sitting behind his desk in his office, Bowden said what he liked most about his Seminoles now is that he thinks they have a chance to resemble some of his teams of old.

“If they all stay healthy, this could be a pretty doggone good ballclub,” Bowden said. “Then, the next year, you’ve got ‘em all back.”

That “next year,” as Bowden put it, in 2010, FSU would figure to have a senior quarterback in Christian Ponder, a veteran offensive line that could return every starter for the second consecutive season and a defense that could have the potential to be the Seminoles’ nastiest in years.

Bowden wouldn’t say it, of course, but it seems he might have reason to stick around until then, to make one last run at a championship and to try and put a perfect ending on the farewell tour he wants no part of.

Andrew Carter’s Chopping Block blog can be read at OrlandoSentinel.com/choppingblock and he can be reached at acarterb@orlandosentinel.com.

Copyright © 2009, Orlando Sentinel

By Andrew Carter Sentinel Staff Writer
10:48 PM EDT, July 18, 2009