Tigers put Roanoke Valley kids on right track

Coach Tra wasn't playing.

"Does anybody out here understand what you're about to do?" he demanded.

A jumble of vaguely affirmative mumbles came back from the Roanoke Valley Tigers Track and Field Club.

Tra Wilson overrode them: "I don't think you do."

He stalked back and forth in the high jump area of the track at William Fleming High School. Mostly smiles and hugs, Wilson calls his athletes his "babies."

But not now.

"We shouldn't have to tell you to work hard in your last practice."

Their last practice before heading to Ypsilanti, Mich., for the AAU Junior Olympics, a practice he'd disrupted for this scolding.

The team, just 2 years old, exploded on Wilson and friend and co-founder Brenton Blake this spring, ballooning to more than 80 kids. They range from preschoolers to college-committed high school seniors. They are black, white and biracial, rich, middle-class and poor and from every corner of the valley.

Nearly half qualified for the Junior Olympics.

Driven by reminders of his own squandered chances, Wilson's influence has already transcended running fast and jumping far to the broader principles of working hard and going far. His insistence on a family spirit and respect for self and others is drawing kids and parents to him.

He is most definitely not playing. The kids staring up at him knew it.

"Get your mind right!" he said, and dismissed them back to their workouts.

‘We're all like family'

The team started with just four boys: Wilson's and Blake's sons.

Wilson, a Salem native who sells insurance for a living, had moved back to his hometown from High Point, N.C., where there are multiple youth track teams, and found only one small team in Roanoke.

So he and Blake started their own. By the end of their first season in 2012, 35 kids were wearing the Tigers' orange and blue.

The number more than doubled this year, purely on word of mouth.

"I knew it could happen," Wilson said. "This fast? No."

The kids came from all over, from the city to the suburbs, from tony south Roanoke to the poorest places north of the tracks. At practices, kids in Nike and Adidas running gear line up next to kids in blue jean shorts. Kids in track spikes stretched alongside kids in basketball shoes.

"This is one of the first teams I've seen where the kids respect each other, the older ones help the younger ones and they respect their elders and they want to be here," said John Langhammer, a volunteer coach with the team whose son joined this spring.

"This has been invaluable to my kids," said Victor Cardwell, an attorney who also helps coach the team. "They've interacted with kids they never would have met ... and they've bonded."

The parents have bonded, too. At meets and practices, Cardwell sat off by himself at first. Wilson told him they'd all be sitting together soon. Within weeks, Cardwell said, "We were tight," taking each other's kids to practices, organizing cookouts and hosting sleepovers and birthday parties together.

"It's like we're all like family, and it happened instantly," said Maurice Garrison Sr., a Roanoke Pizza Hut manager who has three kids on the team. "It's a beautiful thing."

A team membership is $145, with other event fees for meets, which are often out of town.

The club makes accommodations for lower-income families, setting aside money from the club, a tax-exempt nonprofit, to help with travel expenses for out-of-town meets. The team facilitates a shoe exchange, passing on outgrown track spikes to kids who need them.

Wilson's wife, Kristy, is the team's treasurer.

One team member's grandmother alters and repairs uniforms.

Kids on the team must maintain a C average in school, or they don't compete.

At practices, the young athletes run to Wilson to hug him, but every team member is expected to speak respectfully to all adults. Failure means a chance to build their pectoral muscles with push-ups.

"You're going to say ‘yes sir' and ‘no sir,' or you're going to have the biggest chest in Roanoke," Wilson tells them.

All of the dozen other coaches on the team back Wilson in holding the line on behavior.

Wilson figures he's got a handful of athletes on the team capable of competing at a high level in college, but every kid, gifted athletically or not, can benefit from expectations, hard work and discipline.

"If you don't have character, you're going to squander your opportunity," he said.

And he would know.

‘We're supposed to be here'

Salem High School football fans know Wilson's name.

An All-State quarterback for the Spartans in the early 1990s, he led the team to a state semi-final game one year, and to the final the next.

Coaches from Virginia Tech, Clemson and Georgia Tech were talking to him, but he didn't have the grades for those schools.

He accepted an offer to go to Concord University, but grades kept him ineligible there, too. He transferred to North Carolina A&T and practiced with the team one spring. All he had to do was pull up his grades in summer school and he was on the roster.

He didn't do it.

"I didn't play one down of college football," Wilson said.

Meanwhile, he watched his contemporaries from the Roanoke Valley, Ronde and Tiki Barber, finish at the University of Virginia and go on to storied pro football careers.

"That was a really hard time," he said.

But he got over it, and by the time his boys were old enough to play sports in High Point, he started helping coach them in track. All he'd learned as an athlete from coaches like Willis White and Billy Miles, he could pour into his chance to shape young athletes now that he was a coach.

Much of the way he approaches things with the Tigers, he says, he freely admits he borrowed from the head coach of the High Point Panthers, his mentor Ken Roberts. It's coupled, he says, with strong family values and belief in God.

Wilson's wife - "the French in my fry," he calls her - is integral to the team's success, he said.

"Tra, we're supposed to be here," Kristy Wilson tells him.

"And that's what it feels like," he said.

The walker

In two seasons, the Tigers have never hosted a home meet.

At times, they've barely had a place to practice, moving around until William Fleming High School welcomed them.

The annual Commonwealth Games, held July 20 and 21 at Fleming, would pass for their first home event.

"Everybody's going to want to see what we've been doing all year," Wilson told the team at their last practice before the games. "This weekend, they're going to find out."

With just a few teams and a lot of individuals entered, the games didn't present the highest level of competition, but the coaches and athletes found ways to push themselves.

Cynasia Harris, 12, was never much of an athlete. She struggled through a year of basketball, but decided to give track a try. She found a home in race-walking and the discus.

She's lost weight, and gained confidence.

"You just see it on her face," said her grandmother, Sandra Wilson. "Little things that have bothered her before don't bother her anymore."

At the Commonwealth Games, though, coach Bekka Loder asked her to try a new challenge: the 1,500 meters. Cynasia had never run that far before. But with only a few girls in the race, she was guaranteed a medal if she finished, so she agreed to try.

With a steady, if not speedy, pace, she ran every step. As she rounded the last turn, Loder ("my best friend," Cynasia calls her) met her and told her to make the last 100 meters a good 100.

Cynasia bolted away in a kick no one knew she had. It brought Loder to tears.

The next week, looking back on it, Cynasia was proud.

"I can really run now," she said.

The runner

While Cynasia was psyching herself up for the 1,500 meters, Tayrik Burgess was doing what he always does before a race: throwing up.

Teammates have grown accustomed to it. His coaches say it just means he cares.

Tayrik, 11, had joined the team as a sprinter, but his performance was middling at best. His behavior was also just about more than the coaches could handle, Wilson said. Plenty of push-ups and running laps when he didn't listen cured that.

Still, he was frustrated as a runner - until he found the longer distance events, the 1,500 and the 800 meters.

At the qualifiers for the Junior Olympics, he ran the 1,500 for the first time and qualified to go to Michigan.

Since then, his goal has become to beat his teammate and friend, Eddie Ball.

"Tayrik don't worry about no competition out there but Eddie," said his mother, Donna Burgess, 31.

At the Commonwealth Games, he trailed Eddie by 10 meters or so as the two pulled away from the rest of the pack. Tayrik pulled even on the last lap, only to have Eddie pull away and win it.

Tayrik's drive on the track has materialized at home and school, too. Always an A student, his teachers tell his mother he's showing up more organized and prepared.

At home, Donna Burgess said, he's begun reminding his brother and sisters to brush their teeth and take their baths.

Many days, he wakes up his parents and asks to go to the track. A week before the Junior Olympics, he was scouting the times of his competition and scribbling them into a spiral notebook.

His dedication is paying off. Later that day at the Commonwealth Games, he finished third in the 800, but for the first time ever, he beat his friend Eddie.

The jumper

Not quite a year ago, Maurice Garrison Jr. was laid up with a broken hip and missing his eighth-grade football season at James Breckinridge Middle School in Roanoke.

By spring, he was fully healed and tried the high jump for the first time, clearing the bar at 5 feet. Tigers coach Brenton Blake saw him as a natural talent and recruited him to the team.

Garrison came into the Commonwealth Games with a personal high jump record of 5 feet 4 inches. His parents, Stormy and Maurice Garrison Sr., are hoping that for a kid who hasn't attended his first day of high school, his performance in that event, and in the triple and long jumps, already indicate he's college scholarship material.

Both parents work in management for Pizza Hut restaurants. Maurice Sr. didn't go to college. Stormy made it to North Carolina A&T State University.

"I left college because I couldn't afford it," she said. She wants to do anything to eliminate the financial barrier for her oldest son.

He's already a high achiever in school. Since joining the Tigers, he's shown character his parents didn't know he had.

"Every high schooler," he said, "they [the coaches] expect them to set an example for the little ones ... not act a fool."

"We're trying to teach him all that, and he already knew it," his father said.

Not that he was above fighting with his mother about how to wear his pony tail during the high jump at the Commonwealth Games. She wanted his dreadlocks pulled above his head so they wouldn't hit the bar. He wanted the ponytail down low.

All that fell away when Maurice Jr. matched his personal best with ease.

"Boom! You got it! Move it up, baby!" Stormy Garrison screamed. "I'm so proud of you dude. You can do anything you set your mind to."

He cleared 5-foot-6 on the second attempt. He'd already won the gold medal for the day, but pushed the bar up to 5-foot-8, and cleared that, too.

"I see you," his father shouted. "I see you shining, little man!"

He couldn't clear 5-foot-10, but he'd made his point. He was ready for the Junior Olympics.

‘We make it happen'

Just getting to Michigan would be a feat for many families.

With a kid competing in multiple events, they might have to stay most of a week there. Costs could run into the thousands of dollars for a family.

The Garrisons plan to just let their bills lapse for a month and make it up later.

"We make it happen," Stormy Garrison said.

Tayrik Burgess's family planned to do the same, along with forgoing their usual summer beach vacation.

Some parents were skipping the trip and sending their kids in the care of others.

"My child is your child," Terri Walker told a group of parents at one of the last practices before the trip.

Wilson warned that, with more than 15,000 athletes competing, and up to 10,000 people in the stands, the team members would be wide-eyed, and potentially overwhelmed.

Older athletes, those with interest in competing in college, were admonished to be on their best behavior because college coaches were on hand.

"They never know who they're sitting beside. They never know who's watching," he said.

Stormy Garrison told parents not to worry about their kids' ability to keep up with the competition. She'd studied the other competitors, she said.

"Our kids are good."

Bringing home some medals

Ariana Cardwell, 9, was the first Tiger to strike.

On July 27, the first day of the Junior Olympics, she competed in the 1,500 meter race walk, finishing fifth and scoring the team's first medal. The top eight finishers in an event receive a medal and status as an AAU All-American.

Cynasia Harris was next up in the 3,000. She finished 12th out of 13 competitors, but knocked a stunning seven minutes off her best time.

"She was really pleased," Wilson said. "At this point, nobody's going to be able to tell her she can't do anything."

Tayrik never got his chance to compete. His mother, who was starting a new job, unexpectedly couldn't get out of training in time to make the trip, his father had to work, and efforts to have Tayrik travel with another family didn't work out.

"He was really upset about it," said Donna Burgess, "and I was really upset about it."

Some athletes were unfocused in the early days of the meet, so Wilson and the other coaches called a meeting.

They admonished the athletes to take things more seriously. They may not ever get this chance again.

Maurice Garrison Sr. overheard his son talking to a friend after the meeting ended. He'd had a disappointing performance in his first event, the long jump.

"Yeah, I'm focused now," Maurice Jr. said. "I ain't playing tomorrow."

And he didn't.

In the triple jump, he advanced until he was head-to-head with a boy from Georgia who had earlier this year posted a jump of more than 43 feet - two feet longer than the best Garrison had ever done.

They traded jumps until the final round. The boy from Georgia jumped 41 feet, 9 inches - still a full 8 inches further than Garrison's personal best.

Garrison took his mark, took a breath, launched into his approach. The jump was clean, and the tape came out to measure it.

Forty-one feet, 10.75 inches - a personal best, and just enough for a gold medal.

That proved to be the highlight of the week for the Tigers.

The coaches were told to come to the medal stand to see Garrison recognized, but weren't told how he'd done.

When they saw him climb to the highest spot, all burst into tears.

In all, the Tigers brought home nine medals. Many kids came close, and still more set personal records.

Wilson wasn't sure what to expect. From the start, kids were coming to him saying they were scared.

"I spent a lot of time playing psychologist," he said. In the end, though, "They really showed me something up there competing against those kids."

Back in Salem, Wilson confessed how hard it had all been.

"I'm physically and mentally beat right now," he said.

Next season could mean an even bigger team. He and his wife have talked about how to manage it.

But with this season behind him, he said, he didn't even want to think about it.

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