Remember Courtney Hawkins?

[Chavez]

Giving back to the community

FLINT -- He wanted to be nice. He really did. All his senior cornerback had to do was fess up. Instead, the excuses kept coming: "Coach, it wasn't me. Coach, I didn't do it. Coach, I didn't say anything."

 

A referee had just jogged to the sideline to warn Courtney Hawkins that one of his players was about to get penalized for talking trash.

 

"Where is he?!!" Hawkins demanded, swiveling his head in search of his cornerback, who had slipped off the field and behind a wall of beefy teammates.

 

From the moment he took over the downtrodden program, Hawkins, 38, had preached perception. It mattered, he told them, especially in a place like Flint Beecher, one of the poorest communities -- and school districts -- in the state. That's why he wore pressed khakis and a crisp polo shirt on game nights. That's why he didn't tolerate sagging pants. That's why he told them the only voice a referee should ever hear was his.

 

So when the ref threatened to throw a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct, Hawkins didn't care that it was the same player who had broken up a pass in the end zone to seal the school's first-ever playoff victory last year, or that it was the same player's chirpy, often comedic onslaught that kept the kids loose in the locker room, or that it was the same player who didn't have a mother in his home.

 

Hawkins loved the teenager's spirit. And he didn't want to break it, not on homecoming, when the stands were packed, when the team was winning, when a cool, fall night under the lights could make a community forget about its struggles for a couple of hours.

 

So when he found the cornerback he calmly told him to behave on the field.

 

Yet the player kept talking. And the excuses kept coming. And with each one, Hawkins inched closer, so that his nose almost touched the cornerback's face mask. When that didn't work, the coach finally exploded: "Shut your #%@$ mouth," he said, clenching his jaw.

 

Several teammates turned away, not wanting to catch any fallout. The cornerback grew quiet. Hawkins' message, it seemed, began setting in.

Hawkins' history

 

In the span of less than a minute, the coach had channeled the most important forces of his life: the mother who once yanked him from a pregame lay-up line because she'd found out his grades had slipped that day; the grandfather who'd taught him how to care for a paraplegic after he'd been gunned down in a random shooting outside a grocery store; the high school coach who'd informed his mother he was running with a couple of punks that led to a grounding at home; the college coach who'd told him to work hard and keep his mouth shut.

 

Not that Hawkins ever needed to be told that; he was naturally reticent and stepped from the shadows only when necessary. That's how he became an All-America receiver at Michigan State. That's how he survived in the NFL for nine years with 180 pounds on his 5-foot-9-inch frame.

 

Hawkins had grown up in Beecher on the shoulders of a mother, a grandfather and a coach. He'd taken pieces of them to East Lansing and Tampa and Pittsburgh. Now, he was bringing them back.

 

 

It's not often that a professional athlete replants roots in the neighborhood that shaped him. But in one of the bleakest places in Michigan, where almost a third of adults don't have a high school diploma, where almost half the kids live in poverty, where football players were showing up for Friday night games with nothing more than a bag of potato chips in their stomachs, a soft-spoken, former football star is trying to pass on the little things.

 

Show up on time. Study. Keep your pants up.

 

Listen.

 

Flint Beecher isn't technically part of Flint, although it hugs that city's north edge. It isn't really part of Mt. Morris Township, although that entity provides police, fire and tax collection. Genesee Township governs a sliver of the community, although it doesn't run its schools. That distinction is left to the Beecher school board.

 

So how do we define Beecher? Well, the U.S. Census Bureau describes a community as "census designated place." But all that cold label does is allow the government to gather statistics every 10 years: roughly 12,000 people inhabit it.

 

Hawkins thinks of Beecher as a state of mind; it is also a 5-square-mile rectangle on the outskirts of metropolitan Flint. It is a place that is, in some ways, unrecognizable to Hawkins, who graduated from Beecher High when the town still survived on the auto industry.

 

Since he left for college, Beecher has lost its McDonald's, its Wendy's, its Arby's, its Kmart. "All that is left are party stores selling liquor and Lotto tickets," said Brenda Bauer, whose 15-year-old son, sophomore Matt Bauer, plays offensive tackle for Beecher.

 

When Hawkins was winning state championships in basketball and track in the middle and late 1980s, some 900 students attended Beecher High School. This year, only 455 students are enrolled. That high school is now shuttered, an empty shell home to crickets, pigeons and weeds, except for Hawkins' office, which the district keeps open because the gym and lockers are used for sports, as is the football field that's still on the property.

 

Certainly, Beecher has seen tragedy before -- one of the deadliest tornados in Michigan history ripped through in 1953; and in 2000, a 6-year-old boy shot a classmate at Buell Elementary in what was the youngest school shooting in history. Kayla Rolland became the face of everything that had gone wrong with the inner city. Hawkins remembers that well. He still was playing for the Steelers and couldn't fathom that this was happening in his hometown.

 

These days, the sensational headlines are gone. What remains is more insidious, a suffocating kind of poverty, where almost 90% of school kids qualify for free lunch, where grandparents are often responsible for raising their grandchildren -- of the 30 players Hawkins had on his team last year, only five had a father in the home.

 

Lack of fathers may not directly correlate to a breakdown in the athletic fabric of a community, but an overall social decline can make it difficult to compete, particularly in football, the most resource dependent sport in high school. In the 11 football seasons before Hawkins was hired in 2006, Beecher lost 82 games. In 1999, the team was outscored, 377-32. Five times it won one game. Three times it won none.

 

"It was embarrassing," Hawkins said. "I'd come home and go to a game and couldn't watch."

 

It wasn't just the losing: It was that few cared, that few students tried out for the team, that the school lost its spot in the conference, meaning it had to scrape to find teams to play.

 

"A losing tradition," said Marty Crane, who coached track at Beecher in 1969-2002. "We needed someone to step in and say: 'This can't go on.' "

 

But before Hawkins could move home to try to push his community forward, he had to let go of the past.

 

Technically, Hawkins stopped playing when the Pittsburgh Steelers didn't re-sign him after the 2000 season. But in his mind, it took several more years. Like many professional athletes, he found no substitute for a crowd 80,000 strong or a boisterous locker room.

 

Weeks turned into months that stretched into years. He dabbled in real estate and spent his afternoons at the gym, watching the waiver wires, checking in with his agent, pretending it was just another off-season. This status had his wife worried. His mother was blunt. She told him he couldn't play forever and to be thankful for how long he did play.

 

Hawkins' mother, Rene, has been a commanding force in his life. Click here for more photos.

 

"Courtney didn't like that," Rene Hawkins recalled.

 

His mother always had been the commanding force in his life, from the evening she once yanked him off the basketball court because he'd earned a "C," to the afternoons she kept him from track practice because he hadn't pruned the rosebushes, to the mornings at home, when she never let him forget he was responsible for his two younger sisters.

 

"He knew that in order for them to eat I had to work," she says.

 

(His father was never in the picture and to this day, Hawkins refuses to talk about it. He only says that he is raising his own daughters based in part on what he didn't have.)

 

Toward the end of those aimless days in Pittsburgh, Hawkins' mother grew ill. Every week, he was back in Beecher. Slowly, he realized he wanted to return home. After a two-month "discussion" with his wife, Candy Hawkins, the family packed up and moved to Michigan, buying a 14-acre wooded spread in Goodrich, a rural hideaway southeast of Flint. Candy had met Hawkins while they were at MSU and had grown up in Kalamazoo. Still, she wanted to retire in Florida, or Charlotte, N.C., where a burgeoning population of ex-NFLers was settling.

 

"I didn't want to come back and watch him run around with all of his old buddies from the neighborhood," she said. "I was nervous."

 

A couple of years after they moved back, with his mother healthy again, the high school's head coaching job became available. Candy discovered she no longer needed to worry about her husband running off with his buddies. A different kind of group began competing for his time.

 

Few could have imagined that for the second year in a row, Beecher had a shot at the playoffs. Yet that's exactly where the team found itself as it made the 20-minute trek to Burton Atherton last week. Win and make the state playoffs. Lose and disappear into winter.

 

Certainly Hawkins couldn't have foreseen such opportunity. When he was hired as the head football coach in 2006, he was taking over team that had lost eight games the season before. But even that didn't tell the story.

 

A few days into practice, the coach noticed that most of players on the line couldn't get down into a simple three-point stance. He turned toward his defensive coordinator, a Beecher alum from his own era who was now a Flint cop.

 

"Do you see what I'm seeing?" he asked Marcus Wilson. "We are going to scrap the plan."

 

Whatever hope Hawkins had of installing sophisticated designs he'd picked up from Bill Cowher and Sam Wyche and George Perles was gone. Fundamentals were in. He had to break a generation of bad habits.

 

"We had some good athletes," Hawkins said, "but they didn't know how to play football."

 

The team won two games that first season. He took a little flak in the community: What's wrong with the golden boy? It didn't help that he asked Andre Rison to help him coach, a flamboyant former Pro Bowl receiver who, like Hawkins, had starred at MSU. That's where their similarities ended. They parted ways after the season.

 

The next year, 2007, Hawkins began adding layers to his offense and defense. His team ran off eight victories, including that first-ever playoff victory. Hawkins was selected coach of the year in the local paper.

 

He came "from an era gone by," said the high school's physical education teacher, Donnie Odom. "He brought that back to the district."

 

It wasn't just the winning, Odom explained, it was the emphasis on grades, on dress, on hygiene, on the way the boys carried themselves in the halls.

 

Hawkins told every teacher in the school that if one of his boys was messing around to let him know. After his first season, he was hired as the athletic director, too. That meant he was in the school all day and could help keep an eye on things. He also encouraged his kids to come visit him.

 

"A lot of players don't have a father figure," explained Fredarryl Brown, 17, a senior tight end. "He makes you respect him."

 

Brown credits the coach with improving his grades -- he's at a 3.2 so far -- because he instituted an after-school study hall, where the kids study, work with tutors and do homework at least twice a week.

 

Many of these kids wouldn't be in school without football, Hawkins said.

 

"If we have to use sports -- dangle it, and I know that's not politically correct -- then that's what we have to do," he said.

 

Hawkins lost 21 seniors from last year's playoff team. Only five varsity players returned. Though the team had played well enough to earn a shot at the playoffs, inconsistency befuddled the young squad all fall. Twice, opponents muscled Beecher off the field, ending the games before halftime.

 

Neither of those defeats was as painful as losing to neighborhood rival Flint Northwestern in late September. That school -- roughly twice the size of Beecher -- exploited the Bucs' confusion on the offensive line and crashed into the backfield all night.

 

Communication wasn't a problem at the start of the Atherton game on Friday. Under a steady drizzle, over a slick, muddy field, Hawkins called a fundamental fullback smash to start the game: 32 Dive, an in-your-face play that demands the center and the left guard to pick up rushers, knock them back and create a running lane. It was a test, like all the others, to see who these kids are.

 

Beecher fullback Elbert Butler found that gap and rumbled through it for 12 yards.

 

Three plays later, Beecher tailback Tory Cordell ran off the left tackle and raced 32 yards to the end zone.

 

By halftime, the Bucs were up, 45-0. Hawkins pulled the starters at halftime, warned the backups from engaging in any taunting or trash talk and began thinking about the following week.

 

An hour later, after a 45-12 victory, the players pressed themselves into a circle, held their helmets high and briefly bounded up and down in the misty chill. Then Hawkins raised and lowered his arms like a minister requesting his congregation to kneel.

 

"Great job," he told them. "We played like we practiced."

 

Only 3% of those who live in the Beecher district possess a degree beyond high school. Yet nine of Hawkins' 21 seniors who graduated last year are in college.

 

"Most of these kids have never been beyond this 5-square mile area," Hawkins said one day recently, as he drove through a neighborhood that was more plywood than window. "This is all they know."

 

Many of them have never been to Detroit, only 50 miles south. This is why he and his coaches take groups of them to dinner in different parts of the city, why they organized a trip last year to MSU.

 

Sometimes all it takes is a peek beyond the backyard and someone to nudge you to look. The coach had that in his life a generation ago when he walked Beecher's streets. He is now trying to give it to them.

 

"Maybe that's why this seems to work," he said earlier this fall, contemplating his place in the Beecher community. "I tell the kids: I am them."

[Skippy]

Only 3% of those who live in the Beecher district possess a degree beyond high school. Yet nine of Hawkins' 21 seniors who graduated last year are in college.

Making a hugh difference.

 

I always like Courtney.