Jan 27, 2022
Soccer Scholarship in the USA
Everybody is starting to ask you 'So, what are you thinking about studying?' and the only thing you're thinking is 'I want to see the world and play soccer (preferably on a scholarship)!'. What if you could combine both? And, even better, make your parents happy by earning a widely-recognised degree along the way? Sounds too good to be true? Well, United Sports USA has sent hundreds of soccer players to different parts of the US to pursue their dream of traveling and studying all the while playing their favorite sport.
Are you passionate about soccer and would love to be surrounded by the best facilities, equipment and coaches available? Would you like to be part of the American college system where they are starting to produce some of the best soccer players in the world? Would you like to play at a highly competitive level and travel all over the US with your fellow teammates? Studying abroad and becoming a student-athlete will be one of the biggest challenges you will face, but if you are an ambitious young soccer player it is simply something you can't pass up!
The key is to not sit around and wait for a soccer scholarship to just happen. Give us a call or send an e-mail to one of our sports consultants, all of whom are former student-athletes.
Be proactive: apply now and sign up for an assessment game and who knows where it could take you...
Golf scholarship in the USA
You love Golf. Otherwise you would not have landed on this page. You also love the prospect of earning bachelor's degree over the next few years and landing your dream job. The thing is, by getting a golf scholarship in the USA, you could do both at the same time!
Finding the perfect scholarship that suits your needs is not an easy task. This is where our experience and expertise at United Sports USA can make sure you get the right placement! Playing collegiate golf in the US might sound scary and exciting at the same time, and it should! Do not underestimate the amount of time you will spend on (and off!) the golf course - studying for exams and handing in assignments is simply par for the course. Being a student-athlete is not easy, but the most rewarding things usually never are. If this is something you would be interested in pursuing, why not give us a call or send us an e-mail and talk to one of our staff members, we would love to hear from you or your parents.
Swimming Scholarship in the USA
If you're in the process of looking up swimming scholarships that probably means that you roughly know what you will get yourself into. It is not a secret that swimming is an extremely competitive sport. Your training will consist of early morning sessions in the water and land sessions (mostly strength and conditioning) in the afternoon. Going to lectures and having assigned homework throughout the week mean that your days will be fully booked. Needless to say, your commitment and love for the sport needs to be strong if you want a swimming scholarship.
At present, the UK only has 22 Olympic sized swimming pools for aspiring young Olympians to train. In comparison, in the US there are currently over 500 swimming programs on offer. All of them boast an Olympic sized pool and first class diving facilities for their student-athletes. In addition, there you will benefit from continuous support from coaches and sports-specific dieticians and physios. As a result, the University of Michigan, for instance, produced the highly decorated Olympian Michael Phelps.
Do you need help showcasing your abilities? If so, feel free to get in contact so we can help start the process.
Rugby Scholarship in the USA
Why in the world would you play and want a rugby scholarship in the US, you say? Isn't 'American Football' their version of Rugby? Well, rugby is one of the fastest growing club sports across college sports campuses, with an increase in 14% in just two years.
Playing rugby in the American college system will make combining the passion you have for your sport as well as working towards a bachelor's degree in your chosen field of study extremely convenient (for the lack of a better term). You never need to worry about whether you'll have time to train or time to study. Your schedule is specifically set in a way that you can manage to excel in both. Does the idea of joining on of the 900 college rugby teams (both male and female) appeal to you? Then don't hesitate to contact one of our sports consultants, all of whom are ex-student athletes themselves.
Tennis Scholarship in the USA
Have you ever heard of Andy Roddick, Arthur Ashe or Althea Gibson? Do you know what they all have in common? They were all student-athletes at American colleges in the early stages of their careers. This enabled them to keep playing Tennis at a highly competitive level all the while earning a widely-recognized degree. A tennis scholarship that perfectly suits your needs will bring you one step closer to your dream.
The thing about colleges in the US is that training sessions fit around the student-athlete's schedule. This creates the perfect environment for students to excel in their sport with world-class facilities and equipment. In addition, it encourages and pushes them to excel academically. Their programs are designed so that students can succeed in both, providing they have the right mentality and drive to do so. Does this sound like something you would like to be a part of? Then feel free to contact us and talk to one of our (ex-student-athlete) sports consultants to help you start the process.
United Sports USA helps talented student athletes find sports scholarships in universities and colleges around the United States. If you dream about playing collegiate sports in the USA, we can help!
Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Dean_Ambrose/2585054
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10001900
Jan 27, 2022
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Scott Published article sharing information regarding the importance of sublimated baseball uniforms
Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Scott_McDaniel/2583323
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10000988
June 23, 2022
from GD Rogers
I ran across the story, by chance.
The story below is a story about my Cousin. I was four years ahead of him. I also played football in high school, but attend a different high school. We meet at an early age, but we were not close. His mother and my grandmother were somewhat close. My grandmother told me he had gotten into trouble. I never knew the details until now.
Updated: Apr. 24, 2022, 5:47 p.m. | Published: Apr. 18, 2022, 6:55 a.m.
After wrong turns led to incarceration, drug use and homelessness, former Carver Montgomery QB Greg Anthony in on road to success as a truck driver.
By Roy S. Johnson | [email protected]
This is an opinion column.
Wrong turns.
Greg Anthony knows them all too well. Decades ago, in the mid-1970s, he was a promising young quarterback at Carver High School in Montgomery. Promising enough to earn a grant-in-aid from Alabama A&M.
Promising enough, some to still think, that Anthony, at a muscular, square-shouldered six-foot-six and 200-plus pounds, might have even caught a whiff of rarefied air at an NFL training camp.
If not for a wrong turn. For a few, actually.
He’s 65 years old now. A grandfather. A man with a lot of road behind him. A lot of turns.
He’s a trucker. Drives at least 2,800 miles most weeks, long-hauling between here and wherever. Sometimes up to 3,000 miles. The company he drives for pays 70 cents per mile. Do the math.
“I do damn good,” he shares. “I got a Chrysler 300. I’m doing great.”
COSTLY WRONG TURNS
On the road, a trucker’s price for wrong turns is time. Time lost.
In life, the price is often steeper. Much steeper.
Greg Anthony knows that all too well, too.
Knows all too well the consequences of wrong turns—especially when the road ahead seemed smooth, seemed clear.
“Things were set up for me to succeed,” he recalls.
Until the wrong turns.
The first occurred in 1975, in the summer. During a season of change in Alabama.
After stints in prison and battles with homelessness and drug use, former Carver Montgomery QB is successfully on the road with an 18-wheeler and Chrysler 300.
Anthony was all but set to slide under center as Carver’s starting quarterback that fall. For his senior season. All he had to do was stay true to the road ahead, though it wasn’t without bumps and cracks. Without hazards.
Circumstances were not ideal for Greg and his older sister—older by 11 months. Their parents, James Edward and Mattie Mae, divorced when the children were quite young, so brother and sister moved around Montgomery a lot. From a home on Saint James Street to Cleveland Court to Woodcrest—where James lived with a new wife, a source of some family consternation.
James Edward’s entrepreneurial core sprouted on Saint James. He opened a neighborhood grocery in front of the family home—behind a screen door with a sign touting Colonial Bread. He later opened a corner store not too far away. Anthony’s Grocery, it was called.
Those were arduous years of school integration in Alabama. For decades, we, bless our hearts, did our best, or worse, to out arm-wrestle the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. It found so-called separate but equal schools to be decidedly unequal—and unconstitutional.
Twenty years later, Montgomery’s school district lines were worked and re-worked, as if drawn in pencil—families, black and white, shuffled their children to and from the city’s predominantly Black and predominantly white schools.
Some families were running to, others were decidedly running from.
James Edward doted on his son, as proud fathers tend to do. Maybe too much so, as proud fathers tend to do. In that summer of 1975, several white students from Lanier High School came to Carver, including the school’s starting quarterback, Billy Dennis.
“It was a big fuss about whether I was going to start or if they’d let the white guy start,” Anthony recalls. Though it was still summer, the local paper ran a story claiming Anthony would start.
There was a caveat. “I was missing a grade and was supposed to be going to summer school [to make it up],” Anthony says. Nonetheless, proud dad wanted to celebrate.
“He bought me the deuce and a quarter,” Anthony recalls with a laugh. (That’s a sleek Buick Electra 225, for non-autophiles). “I’m 18 years old with a nice, blue deuce and a quarter, full whitewall tires and all that crazy stuff.”
Then came the wrong turn. Anthony took a joy ride, metaphorically — eschewing summer school. “I said ‘Screw summer school, if they want me to start, they’ll fix my grade,” he recalls. “I misjudged it. That was the wrong attitude to have. I don’t know why I took that attitude.”
It might have been just a detour. A&M was still willing to give him a look. All Anthony had to do was complete high school. Get a GED.
HOME ALONE
His sister had moved out of the family home into an apartment after James Edward remarried. She left Montgomery that fall to attend A&M in Huntsville but kept the place for use during school breaks. Baby brother moved in.
Another wrong turn.
“I’m going into my senior year in an apartment by myself while my sister was at school,” Anthony says. “That’s where the trouble started.”
Three-robberies-with-a-friend trouble (not stopping to ponder the high odds of a six-foot-six-inch culprit being identified and caught). “The most we got was like three hundred, maybe four-hundred dollars,” he says. “I was real bad. It was crazy, man. It started when I didn’t go to summer school.”
The skid didn’t end for decades. For those robberies, Anthony was sentenced to 30 years at Draper in Elmore County. He served ten.
“Ten freakin’ years,” he says now.
He wasn’t free for a year before drugs and bad checks—more wrong turns—led to second and third prison stints. At Staton and Decatur.
“When I get out the first time, everybody said it was just a mistake,” says Anthony. “Everybody in Montgomery knew me—knew I was a top-tier athlete.”
Greg Calhoun, a soon-to-be grocery chain mogul, offered Anthony an opportunity to drive a Pepsi delivery truck for Super Foods. But he couldn’t keep the wheel steady.
“I was dipping in drugs; I got strung out on that crack cocaine,” Anthony says. “Broke into coke machines at hotels. Got out then went back for forgery, writing bad checks.”
The proliferation of wrong turns, and their consequences, left Anthony on the streets of Birmingham in the mid-2000s, living among the city’s homeless. A regular place of refuge was a stairwell outside the Boutwell arena downtown.
That’s where Maurice Stoutermire usually found him.
The two men had long shared a road, starting before Anthony’s detours. Though Stoutermire is three years older, they were schoolmates at Carver. Until Stoutermire chose a different route.
“I was a part of integrating my school,” he shared. “I was a little adventurous and transferred to a predominantly white school (as an 11th-grader). At the time, they had what was called majority-to-minority transfers. Since I was going to a predominantly Black school I could go to any school where my race was in a minority. My choices would have been Sidney Lanier, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. And I chose to go to Robert E Lee. I was in probably the second class of integration over at Robert E Lee.”
Their roads re-converged in 1977 when Stoutermire began a career as a prison corrections officer—at Draper. Where Anthony was already a couple of years into his 10-year stay. “That’s,” Stoutermire says, “when Greg (Anthony) and I got re-acquainted.”
The two men got to know each other through their mutual relationship with Larry Calhoun. Stoutermire and Calhoun, also a Montgomery native, were basketball teammates at Alexander City State Junior College (now Central Alabama Community College). Anthony and Calhoun committed the robberies together, which is why they were both at Draper when Stoutermire arrived.
Because of Stoutermire‘s sports experience, he was asked to oversee Draper’s sports department. “Larry, being a former teammate, worked for me,” he says. “Greg (Anthony) participated in just about every sport we had—in his spare time.”
TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME
Stoutermire worked in prisons for 26 years before retiring as Chief of Security at William Donaldson, where he was responsible for 200 officers over about 2000 inmates—including 50 on death row, Stoudamire recalls, another 150 serving life without any possibility of parole.
“My main objective was to try to help guys benefit the most from the time,” Stoutermire says. “I had little to do what I’m getting there, but I thought I could have a greater impact on them getting out as quick as they could. I tried to assist them in just making good use of their time through things offered within the system, like getting a GED or [learning a trade].
“There were a number of opportunities for people who were serious about doing their time and making the stay as brief as they could. Unfortunately, a lot didn’t take advantage of it, so a lot of time was wasted.”
Through their uniquely concurrent journeys in the prison system, Stoutermire and Anthony shared a facility several times. “I was gone from Staton for about three years and came back,” Stoutermire says. “Greg was still there.”
Just as he was on the Boutwell stairwell when Stoutermire couldn’t find him at Kelly Ingram or Linn parks. “We’re not talking about people with cell phones,” the once-corrections officer said. “You couldn’t just call them up and ask where they were.”
Stoutermire brought food, shuttled him to shelters.
“That was just the lifestyle he was involved in,” Stoutermire said. “My thing was just trying to be somebody positive in his life and give him as much encouragement as I could and as much direction as he was prepared for.”
Greg Anthony wasn’t so much prepared for Ron Sparks in 2010 when the state’s agriculture commissioner came to him as Anthony sat on the back of a bench in front of Birmingham City Hall. Wasn’t so much prepared as maybe Anthony had just run out of wrong turns.
“What are you doing?” Sparks asked.
“Just sitting,” Anthony responded.
Sparks was running for governor as Democrat, against U.S. Rep. Artur Davis. Upon leaving city hall, he asked Anthony to join him. They drove to the now-gone Winn-Dixie on Birmingham’s west side, where Anthony helped pass out campaign pamphlets. Later they went, ironically, to the Boutwell, where Sparks was set to debate Davis. Anthony dutifully placed a pamphlet on each seat.
The unlikely pair grabbed food at Rib-It-Up downtown. Afterward, Sparks placed $100 in Anthony’s hand. “He said, ‘It’s kind of cold, you got any clothes?’”, Anthony recalls. “I said ‘Nope’. He took me to Walmart to Bargain stores and bought all kinds of winter stuff.”
Sparks beat Davis in the primary, but, well, this is Alabama, and his general election loss gave us Republican Robert Bentley. At Sparks’ invitation, Anthony was at campaign headquarters in Montgomery on election night.
Afterward, Sparks reached out to then-Birmingham Mayor William Bell for a job—for Anthony.
After so many wrong turns, about the only thing Anthony could do as a public employee was cut grass with the department of public works. He couldn’t even drive a truck as a crew leader because his license was suspended due to misdemeanor speeding infractions—in Utah, Arkansas, and in Tennessee.
Due to more wrong turns—one, though, that Anthony sought to right.
U-TURNS
“I had to go turn myself in,” Anthony said, “I couldn’t just cut grass because I only have a state ID.” He hopped on buses and spent a few days in jail in Utah and Tennessee, and a week locked up in Arkansas to right the wrong turns. He returned to Birmingham, got his license reinstated, and got a CDL (commercial driver’s license).
He received a phone call from someone with the city. “He said Mr. Bell wants to hire you with the city, so I want to know one thing right now,’” Anthony recalled. “‘Can you pass us a drug test?’ I said yes, sir.”
Anthony says he’d been drug-free for “four or five days” at that juncture. He passed the test.
“I had wasted so much time in and out of prison since I was 18 years old, Anthony says. “I knew I would have to work when I got out and wanted to be free and not on parole.”
He enrolled in truck driving school and began driving for R&R Transportation two years ago.
“I give [Ron] a lot of credit,” Anthony says. “He was an angel sent to me.”
“He served his time and did what he had to do,” Sparks says. “It just warms my heart that he can come from sleeping on the bench in your park to driving an 18-wheeler coast to coast.”
Stoutermire was also an angel. He ran community centers in public housing communities throughout the city through a program called PING (Partners in Neighborhood Growth) launched by former Mayor Richard Arrington to combat crime. As Anthony worked to emerge from the grip of so many wrong turns, Stoutermire asked him to share his journey with young men and women in those communities—to help them steer clear of wrong turns.
Stoutermire had another motive. “That way I had hands and eyes on him to help him navigate his path,” he says.
Stoutermire , too, is heartened by the road now traveled by a man he once oversaw as an inmate. He knows, though, that the road remains treacherous.
“I don’t ever say that he’s made it because [recovery from incarceration] is such an obstacle, and there are so many hurdles to cross,” he says. “I just hope it’s something that he sees through. He’s come a long way. Absolutely. And he’s given God the glory. I’m prayerful that he continues on the path he’s on.”
Anthony and I spoke several times for this column—often while during a haul from Birmingham to California and back.
“I share my life story,” he said. “My dad took it to heart [when I went to prison] because I was 18 years old and had an apartment by myself. But it wasn’t my daddy’s fault I went [to prison] three times. That was on me. [I knew] right from wrong.
“Could I say it was my addiction? When I was in the streets in ‘75, I was a baby. I did 10 straight years, came out but did cocaine and everything, just trying to fit in. Don’t ever go back to those old crowds.
“It’s all about choices.”
All about turns. Especially wrong turns. Wrong turns that, as Anthony shows, can still be made right.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly named James Hale as the quarterback who transferred from Lanier High School. Hale was a fullback.