Earlier this week the College of the Redwoods football team visited Grant Elementary School to play and visit students as part of the Great Kindness Challenge Week.
“It started with Coach (Jason) White telling us about this opportunity to go to the elementary school, play football and mess around with the kids and get them all excited,” Corsair offensive lineman Adam Symonds said. “It was fun, they were all really cool. They were young and they loved us to be around them, a few of them kept bringing us flowers they picked and gave us hugs, stuff like that.”
Symonds was one of about 10 Corsairs who visited Grant Elementary. It provided him with an opportunity to spend time with the youth in the area, a newer experience for Symonds who is from Great Falls, Montana, before heading to Eureka to join the Corsairs.
He appreciated the fact that he’s a sort of a role model to the students, showing them that it’s achievable to continue an athletics career, along with continuing his education past high school. It was new for the students to have college football players join their recess and it was new for Symonds as well.
“That’s very new to me personally,” Symonds said. “I didn’t end up starting on my high school football team till my senior year. I was never really a name back home. Then coming down here, I was named spring captain for the football team, I’m doing fundraising stuff and people are starting to know who I am a little bit. It’s very different, but I’m enjoying it.”
The team hung around from recess with the kindergarteners, all the way up to fifth-graders, playing pass back, games of football, wall ball, hula hooping and however else the students desired to spend their recess. At one point evolving into the students chasing the football players with Symonds adding, “They were fast.”
“When the fifth graders came out, they all really wanted to pick teams and play a big football match on the basketball court and that was a lot of fun,” CR offensive lineman Scott Griffith said. “The teams had way more than 11 people on it, it was kind of chaotic but it was still a lot of fun.”
Griffith, like Symonds is from out of the area, coming to Eureka from Service, Alaska, and he said that it reminded him of when he was in school and local college hockey players would visit his schools similarly to how the football team visited Grant Elementary.
“It really brought me back to those memories, I really enjoyed helping out the community here,” Griffith said. “I was a Boy Scout growing up so community service has really been a backbone, I guess, for me as a person.”
Griffith called Humboldt County his second home and values how welcoming the community has been to him in his time with the Corsairs and was happy for the chance to help pay some of that back.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better home,” Griffith said. “Just seeing the excitement on the kids’ faces, them coming up to us giving us high-fives and asking us when our next game is because they want to go with their families. It’s just a giant loop of community service because they come out and support us at our football games.”
The team spent a few hours at the school but left memories that will stick with the students for much longer.
“It’s hard to explain how great it is,” Symonds said. “It’s weird right now but I love that it’s coming to that. I like to try and help when I can.”
