As a response to several violent incidents in Flint over the summer involving young people, two local coaches tapped into their vast network in the community to put together an event intent on showing kids that they are loved, valued, and protected.
Marcus Wickham and Aaron Jackson hosted a ‘Coaches vs. Coaches’ basketball game on September 5 at Flint Southwestern that allowed kids and families in attendance to turn the tables a little as several area coaches and trainers were the players on the court this time around.
“Man, I feel good,” said Jackson, who is an assistant coach at Grand Blanc and a Flint fireman. “Giving back to the community is always a good thing, and I just feel grateful that people wanted to put in and participate.”
The event also included free food, a resource fair with giveaways, and speeches from local law enforcement and community leaders and from Lester Liston, a former Grand Blanc football player who played collegiately at Rutgers. Liston spent time in prison for second degree murder, and spoke to people in attendance about the importance of making good decisions and understanding the potential repercussions of bad choices.
“I lost my grandmother (while in prison),” Liston said. I missed out on eight years of my kid’s life from poor decision-making.”
Liston and the other speakers in attendance addressed kids, but their message was also directed at adults in the community, not just parents. He encouraged people to intervene and correct things in the same way he remembers adults and mentors in Flint stepping up when he was growing up.
“Y’all remember back in the day when you could get a whooping by your neighbor (for doing the wrong things)?,” Liston said. “We got away from that. My message today is really for all the adults in the room, we gotta do better. One kid at a time. We can’t save this whole world, but we can go one kid at a time. That’s my mantra.”
Flint Chief of Police Terence Green also referenced a community-wide approach to curbing youth violence in his remarks to the crowd.
“I want to thank Aaron and Marcus for putting this together,” Green said. “It’s very important to me to participate in events like this because it bridges the gap between law enforcement and community. We don’t want to be surviving and reacting to crime, we want to prevent our youth from getting involved in gun violence. This is a prime example when we talk about it taking a village to raise kids. This issue of gun violence, it’s going to take everyone in here. It’s going to take the police, fire department, clergy, teachers, and most of all parents.”
The game and invited guests and community partners all came together out of a simple desire by Wickham and Jackson to do something. So they turned to basketball, a sport that at its best, builds community and joy. Two teams were coached by local coaches and trainers Malik Ellison, a Beecher basketball great, and Doug Hodo Jr. Players included JuJuan Cooley, Clavontae Brown, Demarkus Jackson, Sammy Toins, Aaron Neeley, Roy Jackson, and several other coaches, mentors, and community members who are active with supporting young people in the city.
Wickham said he and Jackson were motivated to put the event together after seeing so many kids either killed or involved with violent acts in and around Flint in recent months. The event was meant to encourage healing, community, and to provide resources for both kids and parents.
“I started seeing so many tragic deaths of youth in our community, and I was like, we gotta do something to stand out, do something to bring the parents out, bring the kids out, so we can just show the community that we really care,” Wickham said. “As basketball coaches, we get chances to impact about 12 kids at a time, maybe more depending on what sport you coach. If you can touch one kid’s life or two kids’ lives or maybe save their life, it made the whole event worth it.”
Jackson and Wickham are happy with the community response on short notice in putting the event together, and they hope to do more to reach young people in the future.
“In order for our community to thrive, our children must survive,” said Deon Smith II, a sergeant in the University of Michigan-Flint Police Department, prior to the game.
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