This Pro Football Player Fulfills an Extraordinary Promise to His Old High School

How many people promise to do something but never make good on their pledge? We’re guessing lots. But NFLer Darrius Heyward-Bey isn’t one of them.
Back when Heyward-Bey was a senior at McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, he made a thoughtful promise to Mickey Deegan, the school’s athletic director. “We were on the sidelines, and Darrius asked me why we didn’t have lights in the stadium,” Deegan said in a blog post on the college-preparatory school’s website. “When I told him lights were expensive and it would take a very generous gift to make that happen, he put his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘When I go pro I’m going to buy you some lights…because night games are what high school football is all about.’”
Well, the young man certainly made it and now he’s paying it forward. After playing college football for the University of Maryland, Heyward-Bey was drafted by the Oakland Raiders in 2009. Currently, he’s a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Making good on his promise, the entire McDonogh School community will experience the real-life thrill of Friday night lights starting next fall — and maybe even nurture a path for the school’s current football players to make it big.
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“Young players dream of playing under the lights, but the reality is that 95 percent of athletes don’t play after high school,” 27-year-old Heyward-Bey told the school. “I’m glad McDonogh football players will now have that opportunity.”
The school says the move will certainly bring the community together and raise school spirit to another level.
The Maryland-born athlete added that his gesture is his way of showing appreciation to the place he came from. “Giving back is showing that you appreciate where you come from, and McDonogh is where I come from,” Heyward-Bey said. “I learned so much from my teachers and coaches. I would not be the person I am today if McDonogh was not along my path in life.”
 

Remembering a Remarkable Woman Who Raised $1 Million for Charity

The Denver community is mourning ultra-distance runner Essie Garrett, a formidable force for good as an educator and a charity fundraiser who died April 1 at age 74.
According to the Denver Post, Garrett was born in Texas, and at age 16, she joined the Army, serving for three years before she moved to Denver. Around that time, she began to follow Sri Chinmoy, an Indian spiritual leader who taught his followers that they can achieve enlightenment through the discipline of exercise. She took his teachings to heart and then some.
At the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, a Denver public technical college and alternative high school that has served thousands of low-income and minority students since its founding in 1916, Garrett taught refrigeration mechanics to mostly male classes full of students — some of whom were surprised to learn a woman knew so much about electronics. (She worked as a teacher until her retirement in 2010.) During this time, Garrett began to run distances unfathomable to most.
Garrett ran to raise money for a variety of charities, including Children’s Hospital Colorado, Colorado AIDS Project, Max Funds Animal Adoption, multiple-sclerosis research institutions, and the Denver Rescue Mission that serves the homeless. Starting on Thanksgiving in 1991, she began an annual tradition of running around Colorado’s Capitol building for 48 hours to raise money for the homeless. According to Claire Martin of the Denver Post, she often told friends complaining of hunger, “Don’t you ever say you’re starving. An appetite is not the same thing as starving.”
Essie Garrett ran more than 25,000 miles, raising more than $1 million for charities between 1981 to 2012. Chris Millius, her colleague at Emily Griffith Opportunity School said, “She was always coming up with different ideas for fundraising.”
The sight of Essie, her long dreadlocks gathered into a ponytail that bounced as she ran, will be missed around Denver’s City Park — but her contributions to charities will be long remembered.
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Meet the Paraplegic Man Who Inspires Others to Think Outside the Chair

Most of us can’t begin to imagine scaling walls of ice, let alone doing it without the use of our legs. Yet, that’s exactly what Sean O’Neill, a climber from Maine, did.
On February 26, Sean became the first paraplegic to climb the treacherous 365-foot-tall iced waterfall known as Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Colorado. O’Neill didn’t attempt this dangerous feat simply to get a rush. Rather, he did it to inspire other disabled people to reconsider what is possible for them to accomplish.
This is only the latest adventure for the 48-year-old Sean and his 44-year-old brother Timmy, a documentarian who captured the eight-hour ascent on film. In years past, they’ve scaled the 3,000-foot cliff of El Capitan in Yosemite and thousand-foot ice walls in the glaciers of Alaska’s Ruth Gorge. According to Rock and Ice, Sean developed special equipment that allows wheelchair-bound people to climb, using a technique he calls “sit climbing.” Timmy told Jason Blevins of the Denver Post that Sean is “the Leonardo da Vinci of aid climbing.”
It took a coordinated team effort for Sean to accomplish the feat — long considered one of the most difficult ice climbs in America. His crew used a sled to pull him to the climbing site and cleared avalanche debris off the road so he could crawl to the bottom of the waterfall. Friends set the ropes he needed and helped him position his padded seat and customized tools. “For a paraplegic to get out of their chair is really uncommon. In fact, you can not only climb out of that chair, but live outside the chair,” Timmy told Blevins.
Timmy, who co-founded Paradox Sports in Boulder, Colorado along with Army veteran DJ Skelton and others to provide adaptive sports opportunities to the disabled, hopes to premier the film about his brother’s climb — tentatively titled “Struggle” — in May at the Telluride Film Festival.
For Sean, reaching the summit was the perfect cinematic moment: “You are at the top, and it’s like I’m born as a new person,” he said.
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The Surprising University That’s Educating a Huge Number of Olympic Athletes

DeVry University, the learning institution you might know from commercials and subway ads, is actually one of the leading feeders to next month’s Olympics. Seriously. According to the New York Times, the institution has 15 students heading to Russia next month to compete in the Winter games. That’s pretty impressive for a school that has no coaches, mascot, stadiums or notable sports teams. In fact, the for-profit school is not far off from the top Winter Olympics feeder, Westminster College in Salt Lake City, which has about 20 students on Team USA.
So what’s the secret? First, DeVry is an official Olympic education provider and offers reduced or waived tuition for classes. Second, because there are about 90 campuses nationwide and tons of online courses, it works especially well for athletes with busy training schedules who also want to pursue higher education. Bobsledder Elana Meyers, 29, is currently studying business administration at DeVry to prepare for life after the Olympics. She told the Times, “Whether I win a gold medal or I finish dead last, come March, I’m going to need to find a job.”
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