CLEVELAND — Last year, many of us had long overdue and sometimes tough discussions about race, but those conversations weren’t limited to adults.
Growing up in a family of educators and coaches, Kahari Hicks followed his parents lead.
“And at first I thought I wanted to be a physical therapist, but just watching my father and the impact he had on young people and my mother, the impact she had on young people, I made the decision to go into education,” Hicks said.
That desire to make an impact grew stronger as racial tensions grew across the country last year following the deaths of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. Hicks, who’s a coach for the Cleveland Heights football team, began taking suggestions on how to bring people together.
“A colleague of mine called and said, ‘what can we do to kind of address this?’ And I said, ‘We need to bring together kids that don’t look like each other. Kids that aren’t from the same communities, different backgrounds and socio-economic classes, different races, different religions, and get them to hang out. And when they hang out, they’ll start to recognize that they like a lot of the same things, they like girls, they like video games, they like social media and they have a love for football.”
After talking it over with some coaches, Hicks put out an invitation on social media to see if teams from different backgrounds would like to get together to do a football-related activity and learn from one another. The response was very strong and Build the Bridge began.
“Within the first minute of the tweet, high school coaches were reaching out saying, ‘I want to get involved, I want to get involved,’ and next thing you know, we had people from out of state wanting to get involved and it just grew from there.”
Hicks met with some of the juniors from his team, who were some of the first to try the Build the Bridge program, and admits that their first meeting with Olmsted Falls, a team made up of mostly white players, took some time.
“Nobody really wanted to talk to nobody, we were all just sitting there, but our coaches, after we did a little activity, and did more Build the Bridge programs, like events, we all started talking and being more comfortable with each other,” Elijah Fowlkes said.
And now those conversations are turning into something even bigger. The student-athletes from the different teams are joining together to talk and take part in community service projects, helping them create more unity and understanding along the way.
“There has to be a certain level of uncomfortability for people to have understanding. And once you have understanding, the uncomfortability fades away. And I think that’s been the biggest thing that’s occurred is that the young men are talking and they’re talking about things,” Hicks said.
And Hicks hopes the future leaders will continue to talk, unite and build the bridge.
“It’s not about Black Lives Matter or white privilege, it’s about one word and that’s love. And when you love somebody and you know somebody. And when you love somebody and you know somebody, it’s very difficult to treat them badly,” Hicks said. “When you hear things that just aren’t right, just say something and speak up for somebody who may not be able to speak up for themselves.”
