Supporting Sports

This Friday will offer something unique to the scholastic female athletes in the school district.

The organization Women Athletes Assisting Women Athletes (WASWA) will conduct its third annual Young Women Athletes Conference.

The conference will feature remarks by former Olympic softball coach and founder of Higher Ground, which promotes achievement in life through athletics, Bobby Simpson.

Simpson conducts camps and clinics around the country and was a coup for the conference.

As was Gulf Coast Community College’s women’s basketball coach Roonie Scovel, who will also speak with some of her players joining her to be on hand for discussions.

Scovel is the embodiment of southern grace. Her teams consistently contend for conference and national titles and her players graduate. They also tend to stay out of trouble.

Almost from scratch, she has created a program to be envied, a program built on discipline and team play.

“She’s an old-fashioned coach and teacher, which is why I like her so much,” said Zebe Schmitt of WASWA.

Dr. Carrie Butler, associate director of Student Retention and Student Diversity at GCCC will also be present to speak at the event at the Gulf/Franklin Center.

She will emphasize the importance of maintaining good grades, of taking personal responsibility for the outcomes of one’s life.

The administration for Gulf District Schools has provided easy access to the event for all female athletes in the county as a field trip. More than 100 athletes are expected to attend.

“It is just so wonderful,” said Schmitt. “It is amazing how far we have come. I can’t tell you how hard people have worked to make this happen.”

The focus of the conference is several-fold, from setting goals early in life to personal responsibility for achieving those goals.

For example, last year the young women wrote down and placed in envelopes a goal or two that they hoped to achieve in the ensuing year.

At this year’s conference those who return will open their envelopes and discuss what they and have not done to achieve those goals that they set last year – if they haven’t, they will discuss why, if they have, how.

“If we can just break the ice with these girls we will have better citizens,” Schmitt said.

Good citizenship and involvement in the community will also be a central theme of the conference.

The young women will have the opportunity to form teams under the WASWA umbrella for the upcoming Relay for Life event to battle cancer and promote awareness and research.

With several of the ladies of WASWA having personal experience with cancer, be it themselves or a family member, this is also an opportunity to earn scholarship money from the group.

WASWA awards a scholarship at graduation each year. Kayla Minger of Port St. Joe High was awarded one last year, but it is not just about athletics, Schmitt said, but also about giving back to the community, being an engaged community member.

In addition to the overwhelming assistance from GCCC, Vision Bank has been a partner of WASWA in pulling off this conference.

There will be door prizes and food and the chance, as Schmitt said, to “listen to these wonderful speakers.”

This is the kind of community outreach that scholastic sports needs in these times of tight dollars and squeezed budgets.

Funding for sports by the district has always been nominal, but the higher costs associated with competition combined with emptier wallets in the community, from booster clubs for example, makes any support of scholastic sports critical.

WASWA also sponsored the Port St. Joe High School fall sports banquet. The fall sports banquet at Wewahitchka High School also was funded in significant measure from the community.

And those who simply enjoy sports, who relish the competition and the sight of young people at play, can support sports by attending games.

There are a host of teams hard at work this time of year – from soccer and basketball playoffs to baseball and softball ramping up – and every team can use every dime at the gate to ensure that student athletes have their field of dreams.

In the grand scheme of things attending a game is a low-cost, high-reward proposition.

Research has long showed that athletics is one of the last bastions of true discipline in public schools.

Watch a Kayla Parker, who takes a sprinter’s speed and a 3.7 GPA to Kentucky, sign a college scholarship and understand.

But in these difficult economic times that old cliché about it taking a village has never been truer when it comes to scholastic athletics.

And in Gulf County young athletes are fortunate that there are individuals and groups such as WASWA who are willing to help construct that village. 

* Thousands of Floridians from all walks of life will gather on beaches from Pensacola to Key West and Miami to Jacksonville this Saturday in a massive, statewide coastal protest against legislative proposals to open Florida’s waters to offshore oil drilling.

Locally, a gathering will take place at 1 p.m. ET at the Indian Pass boat ramp, with protesters spreading in a line in the direction of Cape San Blas.