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Pelham’s football and cheerleading teams got the community fired up for football season and learned from the senior community’s experiences while serving lunch at the Pelham Senior Center. (For the Reporter/Tracy Wood Franklin)

By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

PELHAM – When the Pelham Panthers talk about seniors, they typically mean students in their fourth year of high school. However, for the second straight year, they spent some time with a different kind of seniors.

Pelham High School’s football and cheerleading teams visited the Pelham Senior Center on Thursday, July 18 for a season kickoff event with the senior community.

“It’s just a fun, informal get-together where you kind of bring all ages together for a fun day with some little games and lunch and fellowship,” Pelham head football coach Mike Vickery said. “Always great to get kids out in the community, get them involved, especially with our more experienced populations.”

The event started last year with players and cheerleaders serving lunch to the seniors while they interacted with them and led different games and cheers. It was a hit with both the seniors and the team, and they decided to come back for a second year in a row.

Pelham Senior Center director Katie Augsburger arranged all the event, and her staff came in to cook the meals so the teams could focus on spending time with the seniors.

Vickery said that part is the most important for the student-athletes since the seniors attending either have deep personal ties to Pelham, grandchildren on the team or valuable life experiences from living in the community or across the country.

“It’s always cool to watch,” Vickery said. “A lot of the seniors that are there have either grandkids on our team and/or maybe graduated from Pelham. We had a few there that were in the first graduating class from Pelham. So, they were able to hear those stories and connect.”

That gives the kids a chance to hear from the seniors who can impart wisdom to them from their experiences in life.

“I think the kids do a great job with it, but more importantly, they have an opportunity to learn from those people who have done so much for our community and so many communities around the nation,” Vickery said.

For Vickery, that’s the key part: getting his players to interact with people of character. He hopes that experiences like this give his players memories that they can look back on and draw valuable life lessons from as they grow up and go into the world.

“From a football program standpoint, it really doesn’t matter as much as it does for just having our kids around good people,” Vickery said. “We want our kids to be in contact with as many good people as possible. We want our kids, when they finish with us, to be able to pull back for some of those experiences that they’ve had from the last few years and then help them down the road to become the kind of leaders that we need in our communities.”

As for the seniors, Vickery believes it’s rewarding for them to see the youth serving out in the community and giving back to the people around them.

“It’s always cool for them, the other seniors, though especially the ones that have grandkids there, that they get a chance to watch them in a different setting,” Vickery said. “They get to watch their grandkids do some different things in a service role and so it’s always fun.”

He knows that an event like this is valuable to building a community around the football program. However, he also believes that the experience also shows his team what a true service-oriented, self-sacrificial community looks like so they can model that in the classroom, on the field and in life.

“To have successful programs, you have to have complete buy-in from your community and when I say buy-in, that’s just everyone’s working the same direction, when someone’s in need, there are people who step up and do that,” Vickery said. “We want to show our kids the people who are out in the community doing so much already for others.”

Vickery and the teams hope to continue working with the senior center in the near future as the annual lunch has become a highly anticipated event for both the football and cheerleading programs.

“It’s really just a fun day we look forward to, and looking forward to continuing that relationship and doing more and more over the next 12 months or so,” Vickery said.

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