Head football coach summarizes season for Kiwanians

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Chris Hawkins, head foot­ball coach at Galion High School, tells the Galion Kiwa­nis Club about his goals for the foot­ball play­ers. Hawkins addressed the club at its weekly meet­ing on Tues­day, Nov. 8.

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

Galion head foot­ball coach Chris Hawkins chat­ted with the Kiwa­nis Club at the club’s weekly meet­ing Tues­day about the wrap-up of the 2011 sea­son, in which the var­sity team won eight of the 10 games.

“We’re 8–2 and dis­ap­pointed,” he said, “but that’s a pos­i­tive thing.” Hawkins com­pared the stan­dard that team mem­bers held them­selves to this year to the less demand­ing expec­ta­tions the play­ers and the com­mu­nity had in pre­vi­ous years. “We’ve come a long way, but we’re get­ting there,” he said. “We’ve got a ways to go.”

The two goals he always has for the team, he said, are to win the league and play in week 11. “We didn’t attain our top two goals, but we attained our mis­sion state­ment,” he said. The impor­tant thing is to keep one’s focus on what really mat­ters, not on win­ning at all costs, he noted, and he tries to keep the school’s foot­ball pro­gram cen­tered on build­ing fun­da­men­tal ath­letic and char­ac­ter traits that the stu­dents can ben­e­fit from after graduation.

“For the major­ity of the kids,” Hawkins explained, play­ing foot­ball “prob­a­bly stops after the senior year of high school.” So in addi­tion to cul­ti­vat­ing good foot­ball play­ers, he tries to build “good kids that par­ents can be proud of,” he said. “Our kids are start­ing to buy into that, you reap what you sow, and I think that’s why you’re start­ing to see the pro­gram turn around.”

Dur­ing the busi­ness por­tion of the meet­ing, Kiwa­ni­ans dis­cussed sev­eral ways in which they can help alle­vi­ate the hunger prob­lem in Galion both indi­vid­u­ally and as a club. Incom­ing pres­i­dent Doug Greene pointed out that the Kiwa­nis mis­sion state­ment describes the clubs as “a global orga­ni­za­tion of vol­un­teers ded­i­cated to chang­ing the world one child and one com­mu­nity at a time,” and since many chil­dren in Galion go hun­gry this would be an oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice the group’s mission.

“I think most of you know intel­lec­tu­ally that there are a lot of hun­gry peo­ple in Galion,” Greene said. Jill Lee, Kiwa­nis mem­ber and Com­mu­nity Action direc­tor, cor­rob­o­rated Greene’s assess­ment of the grav­ity of the hunger prob­lem by stat­ing that between 275 and 300 peo­ple ben­e­fit from the CAC food pantry each month and 110 chil­dren par­tic­i­pate in the back­pack pro­gram that pro­vides enough food to last a child for a week­end until school starts again.

Tina Eid­son of the county Aktion Club announced that the Octo­ber party pro­vided a good time for the club mem­bers who par­tic­i­pated. Aktion Club has decided to adopt the county Head Start pro­gram this year for its Christ­mas dona­tions and requested a $150 dona­tion from the Kiwa­nis to buy children’s under­wear, socks and other neces­si­ties the Head Start cen­ter is usu­ally short on.

Toys for Tots boxes are dis­trib­uted, accord­ing to com­mit­tee mem­bers Robyn Min­n­ear and Joe Kleinknecht. Toy dis­tri­b­u­tion will be Dec. 10. Min­n­ear said she had received an offer from the Coca-Cola com­pany to pro­vide free snacks and bev­er­ages at the Toys for Tots work­days, to be held in early Decem­ber before the dis­tri­b­u­tion. The club is attempt­ing to gather as many toys as pos­si­ble to replen­ish the dwin­dling inventory.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Nov 10 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.