Coach Keith helps keep Blaze ‘running’
CHS football coach assists with track
The Clinton Blaze elementary school athletics program gives the student-athletes in the city the unique opportunity to compete in a school-sanctioned program.
The Blaze program offers elementary school students the chance to compete in cross country, boys and girls basketball, archery, bowling, tennis, swimming and track and field.
The program also has a dance team and will add a cheerleading squad and a color guard when school resumes in the fall.
The program, the brainchild of Clinton City Schools Director of Schools Kelly Johnson and CCS Athletics Director E.T. Stamey, has garnered support from the community.
The Blaze doesn’t have football, but that hasn’t stopped Clinton High School football Coach Darell Keith from getting involved and lending a hand to the program as he’s assisted with running track. meets this spring.
And for Keith, the Blaze is about more than sports.
“The city of Clinton needs unity,” Keith said. “Society has changed. “I’m not going to get involved in small-town politics, but society has changed and Clinton is divided and soft is killing us.
“This is something that E.T. came up with to keep his community from going down that rat hole that we’re all going down. Clinton needs to compete against other communities and not amongst ourselves. This is small-town America. We’re living the life here.”
Keith, who spent nearly three decades in the military, is using football to teach life lessons and also credits Stamey for bringing and old-school attitude back to scholastic athletics.
“I spent 27 years in the military and I was fighting the Taliban and terrorist, and I didn’t get a pass because I’m an African-American. A terrorist doesn’t care about money and doesn’t care if you’re Black, or whatever.
“They only care if you’re an American and if you’re an American, they want you dead. Football is under attack because it’s American. It’s a game we invented. Basketball isn’t under attack because it’s international. Baseball isn’t under attack and boxing isn’t under attack because it’s international. Why don’t boxers have to wear helmets and why don’t soccer players have to wear helmets?”
Keith said that the softening of society that is a trying to alter football is bad for America. The game, he said, is also suffering due to divisiveness in athletics
“Football is a combative sport and you can’t have combat that’s soft,” Keith said. “I have guys walking the halls who are 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4, who don’t want to play football, and they say it was because they had a bad experience when they were younger. They say that they just threw the ball to one kid and the rest of them just stood around and it wasn’t fun.”
For Keith the game is about working hard and earning rewards and it’s also about teamwork.
Divisive parents are also destroying scholastic athletics.
“These little league coaches don’t get paid, and maybe if you’re a parent, you shouldn’t be a coach,” he said. “We need to work with all the kids.”
Victory is also part of the athletic experience.
“Allowing the kids to lose is a form of abuse and if kids lose, they’re more likely to become involved in drugs and criminal activity,” Keith said. “They do this because they get sick and tired of losing and they feel like they have to do something over the top so they can win.”
The community and the parents have gotten behind the Blaze program, and that’s what Keith wants to see with the Dragons and their program.
“When I go to these track meets, I see the kids having fun and I see the parents enjoying themselves and that’s what I want at my school,” Keith said. “Those are the kind of kids and parents that I want at my school.”