Thanks to my best pal, Kara, an amazing good Samaritan and the New Balance company, my athletes will finally have actual running shoes!! Not hand-me downs, not lightly used donations, but top of the line New Balance running shoes.
So here's the story about how amazing the blogging community and people in general can be. My friend Kara runs an amazing health/marathon training/wellness blog over at . She is actually the reason I started blogging. She has made so many positive changes in her life and is able to successfully juggle so many things in her life and she somehow manages to document it all on her blog. I don't know how she does it. She is seriously such an amazing inspiration to me. Anyway, back to how she got my kids shoes! I told her one day when we were chatting about how frustrating it was to see these kids run around the asphalt track in skateboard shoes and basketball sneakers. She mentioned it on her blog. One of her blog readers works for New Balance. This amazing reader thought New Balance might be interested in helping out my track team. She asked for sizes and I got 17 sizes and emailed them to her, still very hesitant that anything would actually happen. That was last week over Spring Break. I returned Monday to discover an email that said New Balance was getting all the sizes together and just needed an address where to send them. I sent them her way, completely amazed that this was taking place, but still somehow skeptical. Maybe I'm just a pessimist. Maybe I was just in shock, but I resigned myself into thinking that it would take a month for the shoes to get there. I know, I know, I'm such a pessimist. I think I was honestly just in disbelief. I could not believe that a company could possibly be so generous. She emailed me the next day to tell me New Balance sent the 20 pairs of the New Balance 760's in both men's and women's sizes!
They should be here early next week! I am hoping they miraculously arrive on Monday so our kids will have them to the meet that day. We don't have sweats or jackets or cool t-shirts or anything like that. The track team, despite winning a state championship about 4 years ago, is pretty much the lowest team on the totem pole at this high school. Football is king and baseball and softball, especially, are really popular. The kids that run track get very little notoriety or respect at this school. It's a hard sport and I'm immensely proud of the kids who have stuck with it. I CANNOT wait to see the looks on their faces when they get these shoes. I am definitely going to bring my camera and cannot wait to get a picture of them holding up the shoes and then trying them on. I am hoping to submit an article to the local paper thanking New Balance. I am still in shock that they would so freely donate almost $2,000 worth of shoes to a school in need without any annoying paperwork or verification of students "in need".
I just cannot wait for the shoes to arrive. The other coaches who know these kids, the community, their families and where they come from, have told me most of them have nothing. They told me I'd be appalled if I saw where they live. One of my favorite kids is a talented and hardworking sophomore who runs just about everything we ask him to, from the 100m to the 4x400 in basketball sneakers and never says a word or complains about injuries or being tired or anything. He wears shoes that are a size too small and, apparently, he lives in a house where you can practically see the dirt floor. And now he's going to get brand new $100 running shoes!
Is this not the most amazing story EVER??? Thank you so much to everybody involved. Kara, Emily and most importantly NEW BALANCE!!!
2 comments:
That is so amazing. I am so glad you updated your blog too.
Hope the kids love the shoes!! Like I said before, I'm so, so happy this all worked out :D
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