ARTS & LIFE THURSDAY, JULY 27, 2017
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NFL Hall of Famer uses experience to motivate future players FOOTBALL CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
During the 14 to 18 age group’s final game at the Playmaker’s Academy football camp, a camper takes off with the ball around the edge of the field. The academy has been working with youth football players for 35 years, helping kids learn the game from professionals and staff. Katie Jenkins
“The headliners over the years have changed,” said John Cupit, camp director and former LSU football player. “We had Jay Novacek for several years. We had Barry Church and Anthony Spencer. So we’ve had some prominent Cowboys leading these camps.” The camp, open to players aged 7 to 18, is a limited contact camp, and “a perfect median between non-contact and full contact,” according to the website. It’s a place where young players have the opportunity to be instructed in football strategy for all positions from professional players and coaches with extensive backgrounds in the sport. The camp coaches even select standout high school age players and work to promote these potential future NFL stars to over 2,500 college coaches all around the country to help. Their goal is to help these players gain recognition at the college level. “We want to focus on three things — we want to give the kids the necessary fundamentals, help them develop a love for the game and enhance young people’s self-confidence,” Cupit said. “A lot of these younger kids are still trying to figure out where they fit in the world and we try to use our engagement to help them figure that out.” Tom Foley, Irvin’s business partner, said the main lesson they hope to instill in players is a sense of team. “We want to promote the idea that it’s not only about one player because no matter where you are, you’re always part of a team,” Foley said. “It might be with your family, it
might be in your class, but there is always a team involved in everything we do, so we teach them to think about the team first.” Irvin couldn’t agree more. “In this game, there is no such thing as individual, isolated success,” Irvin said. “In every other sport you can do that but not in this game. Like in life, it’s all about the team, and this game teaches you that. The kids will walk away with a sense of team and what it takes to overcome adversity.” Laura Gray, the mother of an 11-yearold player who had traveled from Portland, Oregon to attend the camp, was as excited as her child for him to be able to take part in the academy. “All these kids want to be pros,” Gray said. “And I know here he is being coached by the very best, they know what they’re doing and my son will go back home knowing he learned a lot and he will apply that, but the most important takeaway is the confidence he’s gained.” Irvin and Foley said the confidence instilled in these players is not only important for their performance on the field, but off the field as well. “Each one of us is going to go through things in life this game will prepare you for,” Irvin said. “To have these kids actually see in us what they can accomplish, you don’t know what you can accomplish unless you can see it, and I think that’s important for their future success whether it is in sports or whatever else they decide to do in life.”
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UNT students and professors break ground on the pollinative prairie By Austin Jackson Bye-bye Bermuda grass, hello bees. Members of the UNT biology department, along with the We Mean Green Fund, have broken ground on a pollinative prairie, serving the natural and educational ecosystem at Discovery Park. The pollinative prairie project will repurpose a four-acre lot surrounding UNT’s satellite research facility from its current grass-filled form into a prairie filled with plants and flowers native to the North Texas area. “Before humans came, the North Central Texas area was covered in native tallgrass prairie systems that were a really great habitat for birds and insects,” said Jamie Baxter-Slye, a UNT environmental science professor. “That’s why we’re trying to do this. We’re just trying to reconstruct a piece of that.” Baxter-Slye and UNT alumna Jen Bailey are spearheading the project with support from the We Mean Green Fund and UNT students. Bailey proposed the project over a year ago and expects to see the first acre of the pollinative prairie completed by September just in time for the monarch butterfly
migration. “The migrating monarchs bottleneck right over North Texas [and] they get concentrated right here,” Bailey said. “But what did we do? We put these big corporate landscapes that look cool and you can play football on it.” Now, Bailey and the rest of the team members who are working on the project are filling what was once uniform grass with over 20 species of plants and grasses. The prairie will contain prairie grasses, sunflowers, Indian blankets and milkweed flowers — a plant vital to the survival of monarch butterflies. Baxter-Slye said suburban sprawl and urbanization have eliminated vital resources for bugs and birds native to the North Texas area. Because of this, the bird, butterfly and bee populations have all been affected. “Native bee population is on the decline because of habitat destruction and loss of flowering plants,” Baxter-Slye said. “That’s what we’re trying to fix here.” The prairie will provide an important food source for pollinators, like monarch butterflies and bees. Additionally, the prairie will demand less water than its Bermuda grass counterpart. The group hopes efforts like the
pollinative prairie will catch on and quell the trend of planting foreign grasses that yield little benefit to the surrounding ecosystem. The pollinative prairie will provide a variety of plants and resources that will hopefully set an example for other fields and yards throughout Denton. “These [plants] don’t require any additional water,” Baxter-Slye said. “They are native, drought tolerant tall-grass plants that are pretty and don’t require irrigation systems to maintain. I think everybody’s front yard should look like this.” Beyond serving the birds and the bees, the prairie will nurture the educational ecosystem for UNT students, as well. Gary Cocke, UNT’s Sustainability Coordinator and We Mean Green Fund administrator, has been involved with various sustainability projects at UNT, including the inception of the community garden and the university’s efforts to run off 100 percent renewable energy. Although he’s seen many projects come to life all over Denton, the pollinative prairie provides new opportunities for the university and its students. “[The pollinative prairie] ranks right up there — it’s one of the most impactful projects we’ve done,”
Cocke said. “What I like about is how it provides a service to the environment and also creates learning opportunities for ecology students.” The pollinative prairie will provide UNT with an official outdoor classroom like the ones Baxter-Slye and Bailey found so useful and fascinating when they were growing up. Baxter-Slye, who was
brought on due to her role as the instructional lab supervisor of the biological sciences department, said students have already logged over 400 service hours working on the prairie, transforming plots of uniform grass surrounding the facility with wild flowers and plants. Students will also track the progress of the prairie quantitatively by measuring the
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Large sheets of black plastic cover the ground at the site for a new sustainability project for student research, called “Pollinative Prairie.” The plastic is a solarizing method that prevents photosynthesis and burns up the non-native bermuda grass on the plot. Katie Jenkins
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water required to maintain the plots, as well as the biodiversity of the prairie compared to surrounding fields of grass. “It’s a great outdoor classroom,” Baxter-Slye said. “It will help students learn and it will help our native ecosystem thrive.”
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