In a spring crowded with elections, budget fights and courthouse scandal, Mobile paused for an afternoon to hand trophies to a couple of teenagers who are very good at sports. The Sunrise Rotary Club of Mobile presented its annual Youth Sports Awards, an honor the club has given for years to high school athletes across the county without much fanfare and without regard to which school can afford the biggest booster club.
The Honorees
Paloma Perez accepted the award as Player of the Year in soccer. Her coach at McGill-Toolen Catholic High School, Pat Curtis, was on hand for the presentation. Jonathan Kondis of Baker High School was named male Player of the Year, joined by his coach, Jasper Rogers, who spent a good portion of the ceremony admiring the trophy alongside his player.
The two schools sit on opposite sides of Mobile in more ways than geography — McGill-Toolen a downtown Catholic school with a long athletic tradition, Baker a large public high school in west Mobile. Putting their athletes on the same program is part of the point. A selection process that looks at what a player did across Mobile County, rather than within one district or one classification, is the quiet premise of the award: excellence in high school sports does not depend on a school’s enrollment, tuition or tradition.
McGill-Toolen’s athletic pedigree runs deep in the city’s memory, with state titles across multiple sports and a downtown campus whose teams have fed college rosters for generations. Baker, by contrast, draws from the sprawling neighborhoods of west Mobile and has built its own record of playoff runs and college signees. Both programs, in their different ways, depend on coaches who stay late — which is why the coaches stood at the podium.
Soccer itself has grown into one of the quieter sports that anchors the high school calendar on the Gulf Coast. The sport’s club infrastructure along the Interstate 10 corridor, from Spanish Fort to west Mobile, has produced college players for decades, and a coastal Alabama player of the year award now carries the same weight in a college recruiter’s file as it would in Texas or Georgia. For a downtown Catholic school and a west-Mobile public school to share the same program reflects how far the sport has spread beyond its original pockets in the state.
The award also says something about how Mobile’s civic institutions see themselves. Service clubs here — Rotary, Kiwanis, Exchange, Civitan — have long treated the high school athlete as part of their mission territory, on the theory that discipline learned in athletics is the same discipline a community needs in its future engineers, teachers and shop owners. The Youth Sports Awards sit alongside the clubs’ scholarship programs as two halves of the same bet: that the teenager in the gym uniform this spring is the volunteer and board member of thirty years from now.
Why a Service Club Gives Sports Awards
Rotary’s youth programming tends to run toward leadership conferences and scholarships. Sports awards might look like an outlier until you consider what a club like this actually does: it looks for young people who are doing something well and makes sure somebody notices.
For most high school athletes, no one will notice. There is no scholarship, no college roster spot, no newspaper photograph. There is a season, a bus ride, a coach who stayed late, and a parent in the stands. An award from a civic club is, for many of them, the only formal recognition they will ever receive for years of work.
The presence of the coaches at the presentations was not incidental. Curtis and Rogers were there because in high school athletics the coach is frequently the adult who has invested the most in a given student’s discipline, and clubs that hand out these awards know it. The morning a teenager stands up in front of a room of Mobile business leaders to accept a trophy is a morning the coach helped arrange, one drill and one ride home at a time.
Rotary International, for its part, has built its youth work around the idea that habits formed in adolescence — showing up, doing the unglamorous parts, finishing what you start — are the raw material of the service life the organization promotes. That is the logic beneath a sports award handed out by a breakfast club: the same qualities that make a soccer captain or a shortstop are the ones Rotary wants in tomorrow’s members.
A Busy Season for the Club
The awards came at the end of a full spring for Sunrise Rotary. The club hosted a Group Study Exchange team from Arequipa, Peru, whose members toured local industry, visited area schools and traded club banners at a farewell gathering.
The Group Study Exchange program, long one of Rotary’s signature international efforts, sends teams of young professionals abroad for a month of vocational observation, hosted by Rotary clubs in the receiving district. For a Mobile club, a visit from an Arequipa team meant days of arranging plant tours and school visits — the kind of quiet logistical work that occupies club members between their regular jobs. Arequipa, Peru’s second-largest city and a commercial hub of the country’s south, has its own long Rotary history, and the banner exchanges that closed the visit are the organization’s old-fashioned way of leaving a mark: a cloth crest from each club, carried home and hung in the other’s meeting room.
Its Rotaract affiliate — a group of young professionals formed in Mobile earlier in the year — announced an inaugural fishing tournament for June 27 at the Dauphin Island Marina, with categories for speckled trout, flounder, red snapper and king mackerel. Rotaract is Rotary’s arm for members in their twenties and early thirties, and a fishing tournament is the kind of fundraiser the younger generation tends to prefer: it raises money, it draws a crowd that might not come to a lunch meeting, and it sits about as close to the club’s actual community as an event can get. Dauphin Island’s marina sits at the mouth of Mobile Bay, where the state’s charter fleet works the same reefs that make the local snapper season a late-spring event.
The four categories chosen for the tournament read like a map of the local fishery. Speckled trout are the bay’s signature inshore catch, pursued in the grass beds and around the causeway flats; flounder reward anglers who work the sandy edges near the passes; red snapper and king mackerel take boats into the open Gulf, out to the artificial reef zone that extends south of the island. A tournament that covers all four is, in effect, a single morning’s tour of everything the area’s water has to offer.
For the Rotary club that sponsored the Rotaract group’s formation, the tournament was also a succession plan made visible. Every service organization in Mobile faces the same arithmetic — an aging membership and a young professional class with less time for noon meetings — and the clubs that survive are the ones that give their youngest members real work to run. A first tournament, planned and staffed entirely by members who had joined Rotary-age life that same year, was precisely that kind of trust extended in advance.
And Rotary International, like nearly every institution in 2009, was cutting. District Governor Mickey Parish reported that the organization’s trustees had made difficult budget decisions at an April meeting in light of the financial crisis. The global recession had squeezed Rotary’s investment income along with everyone else’s, and district governors spent that spring relaying belt-tightening decisions to clubs that were trimming their own budgets in the same meetings.
Trophies for a couple of high school athletes cost very little, which is perhaps another reason they endure. In a year when civic clubs across the Gulf Coast were watching their rosters age and their treasuries shrink, the Sunrise club kept its calendar full: international guests in the spring, a youth sports award at the season’s end, a fishing tournament in June planned by its newest members. The formula is not complicated, and that is the point of it. A civic club’s work is mostly local, mostly inexpensive, and mostly unnoticed until it stops — and on this afternoon, in a banquet room in Mobile, two teenagers from opposite sides of town and two coaches who had stayed late for them were exactly the kind of thing the club existed to notice.
The 2009 context mattered more than it might appear. Rotary International’s central budget decisions in April were shaped by the collapse in endowment income that followed the financial crisis, and district governors like Parish carried the news club by club, meeting by meeting, all spring. Some organizations responded to a recession by retreating; Rotary’s response, in Mobile and elsewhere, was to keep its youth programs — the exchanges, the scholarships, the recognition ceremonies — on the calendar first, on the theory that cutting them was the one economy that could not be undone later. The trophies that afternoon were small, but they were also the reason the club had been filling its weekly meetings since long before anyone had heard of a credit default swap.