The Story Of The Starfish Again

The story of the starfish goes something like this:

After a storm, there were millions of starfish who washed up on the beach. And there was a little boy who was throwing them back into the ocean one at a time. An old man walked down the beach and saw the boy and said "You're wasting your time. You can't possibly throw all of the starfish back. You're not going to make a difference."

The little boy looked at the man and then at the starfish in his hand and said "It makes a difference to this one."

TigerBlog has heard Jason Garrett tell that story more than once. It's a lot better when he says it than when TB writes it.

Garrett is one of the very, very best public speakers TB has ever heard. He's also one of the most energetic people he's ever met. When you add to that the longtime commitment to helping people that he and his wife Brill have embraced, you get an extraordinarily inspirational outcome.

All of that and more was on display Saturday at his Jason Garrett Starfish Charities Football Camp. It was a one-day event that brought more than 150 high school football players to Mercer County. The overwhelming majority of them were from inner-city high schools.

From the event website:

Jason Garrett Starfish Charities and AthLife Foundation teach the campers both football and life skills that will prepare them for the next season and beyond.  The purpose of the day is to inspire the student-athletes to excel on and off the field and to focus on having college on their radar screen.

The camp definitely focused on both of those areas, football and life skills. There were sessions on those life skills, there were 16 teams that played five football games each and there were motivational speakers who talked about their own experiences in terms of football and education. 

The lessons were clear. Yes, football is a great avenue for many of them to get to college. For almost none, though, that avenue eventually leads to the NFL, and so there needs to be a Plan B. And, most of all, the young men attending the camp were told that they are responsible for realizing that and executing that Plan B.

Those lessons came from Garrett and from the speakers he brought in, including a former Navy SEAL and longtime NFL players like Greg Comella and Miles Austin. There was also another NFL player, Spencer Conley, who spoke for 20 minutes or so before the championship game and, well, he definitely got his points across. In fact, his presence was simply stunning.

To put his camp together, Garrett reached out to the two constituents with whom he has the strongest ties. First, there were the players he's played with and coached in the NFL, and so there were many current and former pro players in attendance. 

The most in-demand one was Daniel Jones, the current starting quarterback for the New York Giants. When the last game ended (Jones was one of the coaches for the winning team), pretty much every player at the camp wanted to get a picture with him, and he stopped for every one of them.

The other group whom Garrett recruited was the Princeton group. Everywhere TB looked he saw familiar faces, some of whom are current Tiger coaches and others of whom were former players he hadn't seen in years. There was also head equipment manager Clif Perry, who was another coach with Jones on the winning team.

One of those former players was Jimmy Archie, an All-Ivy defensive back and key member of the 1995 Ivy League championship team. Another was Michael Zampardi, one of the first Princeton football players TB ever wrote about, back in his newspaper days.

There were plenty of others too. It was a great scene, with the way Princeton football jumps at the chance to help out one of its own.

As for Jason, he floated from field to field watching the games, greeting everyone, encouraging everyone, oozing positivity everywhere he went. It's what he does. He inspires.

In the end it was a great day for everyone involved. 

Hopefully it was more than just fun, though. Hopefully, it was a difference-making day.

One starfish at a time, right?