Penns Grove players come out of their comfort zone to learn a valuable lesson about teamwork
SALEM COUNTY FOOTBALL
Thursday Games
Overbrook at Pennsville, 6 p.m.
Woodstown at Clayton, 6 p.m.
Friday Games
Burlington City at Schalick, 6 p.m.
Penns Grove at Buena, 6 p.m.
Saturday Game
Paulsboro at Salem, noon
By Al Muskewitz
Riverview Sports News
CARNEYS POINT – The players sat around the drivers ed room in a big circle. Some were tapping sticks. Some were banging bongos. Others were shaking an egg.
It might seem like odd exercises for a football team heading towards its season opener, but it carried some valuable lessons Penns Grove coach Damian Ware wanted his players to experience.
It was all about rhythm, timing and knowing how important your role was to the collective good.
“It was good for them boys,” Ware said. “We need all the outside voices that talk about the same thing we preach every day.”
This time the voice was of Cee Truth, a 34-year-old Brooklyn-born former Division I conference champion sprinter who goes by many names and titles depending on the platform and the audience. Ware connected with him through Steve Brown, a former Penns Grove state champion and Truth college teammate, on one of his salsa dancing trips to Puerto Rico.
Truth has taken his ministry of holistic cultural healing to groups around the United States for about five years and has gotten sports teams involved in the last two. He’s worked with teams from Florida Gulf Coast University, Wagner University and the University of Albany as well as the Santeros de Aguada, a top-tier pro basketball team in Puerto Rico. He recently returned from a campus visit to Clark Atlanta. Penns Grove was his first interaction with a high school team.
He hopes to one day extend his reach into the schools and youth organizations.
“We share holistic cultural healing practices that take the form of nervous system regulation, using breathing and rhythm to achieve that,” he said. “Our intention is to plant a seed in young people that we hope grows into a lifestyle, (that) they’ll be able to take what we teach them that day and for the rest of their life be better equipped to deal with conflict and uncertainty and all of those things that life brings.”
Ware has been coming up with novel ways to engage his players since becoming their head football coach last winter. Earlier this summer he brought former Eagles receiver and fellow salsa aficionado Jason Avant to impart some wisdom on the players. He may invite another special guest who worked with his Penns Grove basketball team a couple years ago later in the season.
It’s all part of his continuing mission to change the culture of a program that went winless last season and won only two games the last two years.
“Part of that program was something to get them out of their comfort zone because it’s something they would normally not do, and as far as the mental aspect of the game sometimes you’re going to be out of your comfort zone,” Ware said. “How do you handle that situation, can you still thrive and can you still overcome that? So, getting kids out of their comfort zone is something I wanted to do with that program.
“With the instruments, that’s all part of being one, being unified. If you can do that together and have different people playing different parts, that kind of goes along with football. They had the instruments and had to kind of do everything at the same time but make it sound like they were together. That’s how football works. Everybody has to do their job in order for us to have success and that’s kind of the message behind the whole thing there.”
To that end, the players didn’t know what to expect as they watched Truth set up eight sets of drums in the middle of the floor and his assistant Shadura Lee set a relaxing mood carrying a smoldering stick of incense around the room. Junior linebacker-receiver Isaac Wright harkened back to his Jamaican heritage and thought they were going to participate in a ritual of some sort. But they quickly got with the program as Truth took them through a series of breathing exercises to evoke calmness and then incorporated the instruments into his message of working together.
“I was wondering how that was going to help,” receiver-linebacker Jerry Wooten said, “but I figured out breathing is really a key to sports because it helps you maintain focus. When they brought out the drums I felt we were going to start dancing, but that had us working together and that coming together is going to help us on the field. It’s going to help us be in sync with each other, knowing what people are going to do, how they’re going to do it, when they’re going to do it. Now that we’ve done that, everybody has been together and we’ve been doing better.”
It may have been a non-traditional lesson for a group of football players, but by the end of the session they really came around. At least one player said he’d take one of the approaches into Friday’s game at Buena.
“Me, personally, I will be using that breathing method to calm my brain down and my nervous system, (to) think straight so I don’t mess up on the field and actually hear the plays that my QB is telling me,” Wright said.
That, was music to Truth and Ware’s ears.
Riverview Sports News 