Author: jayson-whitehead

One sunny but chilly Saturday afternoon in mid-February, UVA Head Football Coach Mike London stood behind a wooden podium inside Chestnut Grove Baptist Church in Esmont, Virginia.

“Thank you very much. Amen,” he told the African-American congregation who assembled to hear him speak in commemoration of Black History Month. “This is truly a blessing and an honor to be here.”

About to begin his third year as UVA’s head coach, London had sat patiently through more than an hour of invocations, scripture readings, prayers, hymns, and an offering to get to his part of the program.

“There’s a lot of love and excitement here,” he told the packed church. “I wish y’all could run out of Scott Stadium with me.”

For the next 15 minutes, London addressed the small crowd with remarks that were part sermon, part locker room speech, effectively combining his role as UVA’s football coach with his status as a believer in Jesus.

“The reverend says it’s O.K. if I act like y’all are my football team,” he continued, before moving on to his stated topic of serving with commitment. “Coaching is like serving with commitment,” he said. “Teaching is like serving with commitment. Being a brother or sister or friend is like serving with commitment.”

Heads nodded and murmurs of amen punctuated his message. Commitment requires teamwork, the 2011 ACC Coach of the Year reminded the audience, and a selfless attitude.
“I don’t care if the quarterback gets the credit,” he said, using the game of football as an example. “The center has to get the ball to the quarterback, the wide receivers have to run the right route, and the offensive line has to block. A touchdown means everybody scores. It requires giving without expecting something in return. That’s hard to do.”

In 2011, London’s second season leading the team, UVA posted an 8-4 record and went to its first bowl game since the 2007 season. He’s been credited with reviving the school’s recruiting profile in the 757 area code and restoring order in the locker room. And he’s done it unapologetically following the mantra of “faith, family, and football.”

“I’ll try and take us this way before we go and play our bowl game right now in church, getting ready to get going here before we run out of that tunnel,” London preached, getting to the meat of his address (which I’ve condensed). “Be careful what you think, because your thoughts can become your words. Be careful of your words because your words become your actions. Be careful of your actions because your actions become your character. Be careful of your character because your character becomes your destiny—who you are, what you are, what you want to be, who you say you want to be. All those things are wrapped up.”

Sitting in a back pew of this small church on the southern fringes of Albemarle County, it was hard not to get caught up in the spirit of his speech, and I could see how London would inspire his players before a game to run out on the field and destroy an opponent. Yet, I was not one of his players, nor a member of this church, just a reporter who’d come to hear him preach after learning that he was selected by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to receive its 2011 Coach of the Year Award. According to its press release, the award is given to “a football coach who exemplifies Christian principles and who is involved in FCA. The award is also based on the success/performance of the coach’s team that season.”

My curiosity had been stoked. So much was made of former Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow and his Christianity last fall that I wondered to what degree we had an equal merging of faith and football here in Charlottesville, at a public university created by Thomas Jefferson, the man credited with the phrase “the wall of separation of church and state.” More importantly, what effect did it have on the student athletes who play the game?

I decided to do a little digging, starting with the chief source, London himself, but when I requested an interview, the athletic department’s media relations department told me the coach wouldn’t be available. He was too busy recruiting players for the next season, plus, while London felt very strongly about his faith, I was told, he also liked to keep it private.
I tried again a month later, but was told that London was too busy concentrating on spring football. Perhaps he would talk to me in the summer.

Undeterred, I asked to speak with UVA offensive coordinator Bill Lazor. On a website called Catholic Athletes for Christ, a bio for him states that he “loves his Catholic faith and especially loves reading and sharing Sacred Scripture.” Yet, when I inquired into his availability, I was informed that he liked to talk about football but was reserved when it came to his faith. Plus, he was recuperating from shoulder surgery.

UVA’s football chaplain George Morris also balked. “I don’t want any recognition for the work I do,” he said when I reached him by phone. Although he is also chaplain for the basketball team, he is actually a full time employee, not of the University, but of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Morris suggested I speak with someone higher up at the FCA if I wanted to discuss the relationship between faith and football.

The establishment clause
I was starting to get the feeling that while London’s program openly embraces Christian teachings and principles, his athletic department has a less comfortable relationship with the line that prevents a public university from professing a particular faith.

“They have to be careful about what they say,” Covenant School Head Football Coach Dave Rocco lamented. “It’s a business and that’s the sad thing about it.”

His nephew, Mike, plays quarterback for UVA, and Rocco said Christianity has made him the player he has become.

“When I was in college, if I accepted God as much as he does now, I would’ve gone even further,” Rocco said. “I wish I could live the way he lives. I look up to him for that.”

“God is good, isn’t he?” London had asked the churchgoers as he wrapped up his remarks that February day. “I don’t mind telling you that the way the program is being run in Charlottesville is of a personal nature to me, because faith, family, and football are the priorities.”

Afterwards, as I drove the winding roads back to Charlottesville, I thought about the marriage of Christianity and football. Last fall, when Tebow reeled off victory after victory on the way to a last second playoff win over the Steelers, about half of the discussion of the former Heisman winner was devoted to his unorthodox throwing motion. But just as much of it focused on his outspoken Christian faith, though, complemented by his habit of kneeling to pray —called “Tebowing”—on the sidelines.

The values that make good Christians make good football players, and good football players win games. That’s the message I was getting. But professional athletes are paid and they can do what they like. College athletes at public universities can’t so easily walk away from a program if they’re uncomfortable with the level of religion espoused in the locker room.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those words underly the “wall of separation between church and state,” a term Thomas Jefferson coined in a letter in 1802. But the Establishment Clause, as its known, has never created any clear borders, rather it’s always been a legal battleground with a virtual DMZ where conservative and liberal scholars define the terms of engagement.

The ACLU has been involved in many of these cases, and Rebecca Glenberg, legal director of its Virginia branch, unsurprisingly called what I described to her—the chapel services, or coach London’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer before each game (a common practice throughout college football) —troubling. “A school official—particularly one with a great deal of power over students, like a coach—leading or organizing the prayer raises First Amendment concerns,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Such activities send the message to students that the school wants them to participate in religious activities, and that they are not full members of the team if they do not.”

Glenberg also found the locker room Lord’s Prayer problematic since it is an explicitly Christian prayer. “Even in those rare contexts in which courts have allowed government-sponsored prayers—such as in legislative bodies—those prayers must be nonsectarian,” she said.
Both Glenberg and Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor and First Amendment scholar, expressed concern over the voluntary nature of the football team’s religious acts. “Every member of the team should feel entirely free to participate or not to participate in the chapel and in the locker room prayer,” said Laycock. “I hope that is true here.”

If you are a player and your coaches are organizing or even leading a religious event or act it seems like that individual would feel a certain peer pressure to join in. “In a college football team, being ‘a member of the team’ is strongly emphasized,” Glenberg added. “Players may therefore feel pressured to join in prayers even when they are nominally optional.”

God and football
Unlike many NFL players, Tim Tebow has been advertising his faith in the mainstream for years, whether by having Phil 4:13 or John 3:16 inscribed on his eye-black for games in college or appearing in an anti-abortion ad during the 2011 Super Bowl. According to William J. Baker’s 2010 book Playing with God, the relationship between faith and football was not always cozy, particularly below the Mason-Dixon Line.

In 1897—20 years after Washington and Lee took on VMI in the first football game in the South—a statewide gathering of Virginia Baptists denounced what they called “the growing evil of the modern sport of football.” The denomination’s periodical described the game as “that dirtily clad, bare and frowsy headed, rough-and-tumble, shoving, pushing, crushing, pounding, kicking, ground-wallowing, mixed up mass of players any of whom might come out with broken limbs, or be left on the ground writhing with ruptured vitals.”

At the Baptist-run Richmond College, however, the sport was enthusiastically supported by an administration that paid a former UVA player $50 a season to coach its team. To appease its denomination’s concerns, the faculty occasionally urged “such changes in the game of football as will reduce to a minimum the danger to life and limbs.”

As the sport evolved, the evangelical South was slowly won over, particularly when Alabama upset the University of Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl. Their gradual acceptance was trumped by the rapid rise of Notre Dame’s football program. In the 1930s, the Indiana Catholic school created the blueprint for the successful combination of football and religion. “Never in history was there such a mystic blending of religion and sport,” Baker writes.
The team’s chaplain, Father John O’Hara, conducted communion services on the eve of games and regularly distributed medallions of church saints to players before games. Their coach Knute Rockne reveled in the merger: “Outside the church, the best thing we’ve got going is good, clean football.”

Although Protestant denominations were slower to gravitate to this co-mingling of religion and sports, by the time the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) was formed in the early 1950s, football had taken over the South. Its popularity matched the rise of evangelism and its chief proponent Billy Graham, who used football terminology and held his rallies in sports stadiums. In the ’60s, coaches like Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry openly advocated for the role of faith in their sport, offering the game’s clean-cut heroes as an alternative to the counter-culture.

Whether this was actually the case—it obviously wasn’t with a team like the Oakland Raiders in the next decade—the perception became reality, and led to today’s current state, where football and faith are inseparable.

“I’ve been a member of and have coached a lot of teams and worked for a lot of coaches—Steve Spurrier, UVA’s Al Groh, Sonny Randle—and been with a number of assistant coaches who are now head coaches,” said Bob Pruett, UVA’s defensive coordinator in 2009 and head football coach at Marshall University from 1996 to 2004. “I don’t remember many, if any, that religion wasn’t a big part of their makeup.”

Some other coaches who have publicly embraced and espoused Christianity are Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, Georgia’s Mark Richt, Florida State’s recently retired Bobby Bowden, and Ohio State’s newly hired Urban Meyer (Tebow’s former coach at Florida).

“My brother [Danny] at Richmond is very faith-based,” Dave Rocco said of his older brother who recently took over the head coaching position at the University of Richmond, London’s alma mater.

Both older Roccos played at Penn State under legendary coach Joe Paterno. “Paterno was very much into faith, family, and football,” said Rocco, who was a linebacker for the Nittany Lions. “A lot of coaches nowadays preach that and that’s how they want you to run your life.”

The FCA is responsible—at least in part—for this evolution, created as it was to be “the merger of faith in Christ and sport,” according to Jimmy Page, its vice president of field ministry for the mid-Atlantic region.

Today, 60 years after its formation, FCA is the largest Christian campus ministry in the world, and claims to have “reached more than 350,000 people on over 7,100 campuses and worked with more than 46,000 coaches and athletes at camps across the globe” in the last year alone. While the organization also provides a chaplain to Virginia Tech’s football team and various other universities, it is not confined to college campuses. It has active chapters—called “huddles”—in most of our area high schools and middle schools.

Once labeled by Tom Landry as “America’s best-kept secret,” FCA has been outed, at least in one sense, as an “anti-gay organization” by the media and communications initiative Equality Matters. For instance, it highlights one FCA webpage where a coach writes that she was “delivered from homosexuality.” It also targets the FCA’s Student and Ministry Leader applications, which require applicants to agree to a sexual purity statement that says in part: “The Bible is clear in teaching on sexual sin including sex outside of marriage and homosexual acts. Neither heterosexual sex outside of marriage nor any homosexual act constitute an alternate lifestyle acceptable to God.”

When I asked Nancy Hedrick, FCA’s executive vice-president of communications and events, about this, she deflected my question but did not deny any bias towards sexual orientation. “FCA strongly believes that every person should be treated with love, dignity and respect,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Those desiring a student leadership role in FCA ministries are required to fill out a Student Leader Application and agree to certain guidelines. Also, those who desire to be employees or volunteer leaders in any form of FCA’s ministry are also required to agree upon and sign our Ministry Leader Application. These are to ensure unity with FCA’s vision, mission, and values.”

Winning with Christ
Since I was having trouble reaching anyone who currently plays or coaches at UVA, I looked elsewhere, which is why I ended up talking with Pruett. And Brandon Streeter. A former starting quarterback for the Clemson Tigers in the late 1990s, Streeter is also the newly appointed offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach for the Richmond Spiders under head coach Danny Rocco. He occupied the same position at Liberty University, a Southern Baptist college started by televangelist Jerry Falwell in the early 1970s, for the last six years.

Rocco and Streeter led Liberty to four Big South conference championships and a 47-20 record. I wanted to know how coaching at an outwardly religious school like Liberty was different from coaching at Clemson or Richmond.

While he said coaches could definitely be more open with their beliefs in Lynchburg—one of Liberty’s coaches had a Bible devotional with his players before every team meeting—there were many similarities to his other stops. For instance, Liberty had chapel during the week as well as a pre-game prayer, but so did Clemson and so will Richmond likely. “I can’t tell you that it was a ton different than anywhere else I’ve been,” he said.

Now that he is at a secular school, Streeter said he is feeling his way around.

“I’m still trying to figure out what I’m allowed and what I’m not allowed to say as far as faith is concerned,” he said. “I talk about it in a general aspect as much as I can because I truly believe in Christianity and I think it’s helped me in a variety of ways as a player and as a coach, but I’ve got to get a feel for what I’m allowed to say. There is definitely a difference.”
If he’s searching for examples, Streeter might want to look some 60 miles to the west where Christian coaches are firmly entrenched. While I focused on football for a variety of reasons, I could have easily chosen UVA’s basketball program, where the FCA’s George Morris is also chaplain. In November 2010, the Daily Progress ran an entire article on head coach Tony Bennett’s Christian faith and how it relates to his basketball team. “Coach Bennett loves the Lord,” K.T. Harrell, one of his players, told the Progress. “His relationship with God was a big reason why I came here.”

“[I]t’s nice having a coach who shares the same beliefs as you,” said another player, James Johnson. “If you have something you want to talk to him about, you know, walk with the Lord, you can go to him and he’ll give you his honest opinion about it. It kind of helps out.”
According to the article, both players could be found at church with Bennett and his assistant Ritchie McKay, former head coach at Liberty University, on Sundays. Oddly, both Harrell and Johnson have since transferred out of that church and the University.

As I neared the deadline for this story, UVA granted me access to Jimmy Howell, the team’s punter for the last four years and a genuine NFL prospect. I was excited to speak with him. Not only has Howell played under Al Groh and Mike London, he also experienced a Christian conversion as a member of the football team.

“In a sense you can become superhuman in that you run further and faster and jump higher,” said Howell. “You do all those things because you know that no matter how hard it is or what pain you may go through that Jesus went through infinitely more than we could ever imagine.”

Although Howell was raised a Presbyterian and attended chapel and FCA meetings in his first year-and-half, he said that like many college students he was always searching for a temporary high. “Then I’d be miserable. It was taking a toll on me mentally physically and spiritually.”

During spring practice two years ago, Howell attended a bible study hosted by the new team chaplain, George Morris. Near the end of the meeting, Morris asked everyone to close their eyes. “Tonight, you can decide that Jesus is your Lord and Savior,” he told the room. “And if you want to make that change right now, then open your eyes, stand up, and come to the front of the room.”

Howell decided to give his life to Christ right then and there, joining an ever-growing constituency of Christians on the UVA football team. “Ever since Coach London and [chaplain] Morris got here people are more vocal and more out about being Christians and believers,” Howell said. “It’s readily talked about every day around the locker room. You see a Bible everywhere you go.”

The same day I spoke with Howell, I also talked with Cedric Peerman, a UVA tailback from 2004 to 2007 who is currently a member of the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals, and for the next few weeks, a pastoral intern at Jefferson Park Baptist Church in Charlottesville.

Like Howell, Peerman converted to Christianity while on the team (after a fellow player gave him a sermon to listen to on his iPod). Both said that religion dramatically altered their approach to football.

“Winning and doing well was always important to me,” Peerman said. “It still is, but glorifying God has been impressed on me. Now I want to represent Jesus Christ on the football field. My identity is not found in my performance. My identity is found in Christ.”
Neither Howell nor Peerman could say definitively whether Groh and his staff had been believers, but they had no such problem when it came to London. Not only was he vocal about it, but the coach also made decisive changes in the program that reflect an overall belief in God. For instance, where there was once only a Friday night chapel, London opened up the locker room on Thursday nights for Bible study—sometimes led by Morris, other times by players—and instituted a Sunday morning devotional.

The level of locker room religion put me in mind of UVA’s baseball team. Before every home game, a majority of the players march out beyond third base where they kneel in a circle with their arms clasped around each other and pray. Before the last game I attended, the team bowed their heads for two or three minutes in a very public display. Only four or five players remained in the dugout, including the team’s lone Jewish player Scott Silverstein.
Does the fervent belief lead to a missionary attitude towards players who don’t participate?
“Of course, believers advise and like to talk to nonbelievers and try to lead them to Christ but it’s ultimately their decision,” said Howell of his fellow teammates.

As I ran out of questions to ask Peerman, I thanked him for speaking with me and then intended to hang up when he spoke, “Jayson, let me ask you a question: Have you ever understood the gospel of Jesus Christ?” I paused, concerned where this might be heading, but then answered. “Oh yeah,” I said, and explained to him that I was raised in a very religious Christian household.

“God calls for us to cast all our cares on him,” Peerman told me, to repent from our sins, to serve and honor Him. “He is worthy of all our attention and affection.”

Nearly every player and coach I spoke to for this story was adamant that their belief in Jesus had not only given them a new perspective on life, but had also helped them be better athletes.

“No matter who you are or what you believe in you have to have something to give you inner strength in tough times,” Bon Pruett said. “If you don’t have that, then what’s your crutch?”

“A belief in God gives you more discipline, and puts you in the right direction and the right frame of mind to play to the best of your abilities,” said Dave Rocco.

“If you really truly believe that God gave you that gift and that He wants you to use it to the best of your ability, then that gives you that extra gear or extra button to push even harder,” said Brandon Streeter. “And then you glorify God with the successes you have.”

It made me think of something London had said back in February as he closed his sermon at Chestnut Grove Baptist Church. “Y’all continue to keep praying for me because in the world we live in today, professing your faith and standing up for what you believe in is hard,” London told the congregation. “It’s hard folks, it’s hard.”

I think it can be just as difficult to be outspoken if you don’t believe, maybe not in the broader culture, but certainly within the context of a locker room full of Christians, like at UVA.

Howell assured me there was nothing to worry about. “I haven’t seen too many people that felt uncomfortable and if they do they voice it,” he said. “It’s a very open atmosphere. If people believe they’re open about it, and if they don’t they’re open about it. Nobody pressures anybody to do anything.”

(Editor’s Note: The Marquette Sports Law Review published a paper on the subject of prayer in locker rooms at public universities that outlines the relevant First Amendment legal arguments.)

 On March 1, members of the Living Wage Campaign—all students at the University of Virginia—announced that they had ended a hunger strike that began nearly two weeks before. UVA president Teresa Sullivan had refused to meet their demands that the university raise its minimum wage for employees to $13 an hour. On February 18, 12 students started a fast —drinking only liquids—and while only two of the original fasters made it to the last of the month, they picked up 14 other participants during the protest, along with the support of social justice luminaries like Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich and national labor unions like the SEIU.

The university ultimately refused to budge on raising the $10.65 an hour rate they currently pay employees and on the wages of workers hired through contractors—some of whom make as little as $7.25 an hour. The issue of bettering employee wages has been a constant battle since the late ’80s. What were the hunger strikers trying to accomplish and what did they learn from their latest effort to bring the University to the negotiating table?

David Flood, a UVA archaeology grad student who fasted 10 days, and was the only striker to participate in two early morning meetings last week with UVA administrators—including President Teresa Sullivan—could only characterize their outcome as “deeply disappointing.”

“It’s frustrating to realize that going through a hunger strike isn’t enough to encourage the administration to make meaningful steps towards the living wage,” said recent UVA graduate Hunter Link, who made it 11 days without food. On day 9, his face was drawn and pale and he was dressed in head to toe winter clothing—despite the warmth of the afternoon sun—to try and ward off the cold flashes his fast induced.

As the strike ended, though, both Link and Flood found silver linings (perhaps it helped that they had both eaten by then). “The number of people that supported us and joined the campaign and the people that got interested and excited is a victory,” Link said. “If nothing else, we’ve absolutely raised the issue of employee treatment at a university that has historically seen incredibly little student activism,” added Flood.

Six years ago, 17 UVA students also took on the living wage issue by conducting a sit-in in the lobby of Madison Hall—UVA’s administration building—that lasted for four days and three nights. That foray resulted in their arrests for trespassing and little improvement in the pay for the bottom of UVA’s workforce.

Susan Fraiman, a UVA English literature professor, was a vocal supporter of those students, and this time around was part of the negotiating team that met with Sullivan and other top level administrators both mornings. “Even more than the 2006 sit-in, the hunger strike succeeded in bringing national media attention to the plight of low-wage workers at UVA,” she said.

On day 10—after the campaigners’ first meeting with Sullivan—throngs of local media joined a large crowd that cheered on Flood and other striking speakers at a rally in front of the Rotunda, before marching across the street and in through the front door of Madison Hall where they delivered their familiar chant: “What do we want? A living wage! When do we want it? Now!”

Perhaps university administrators were listening. Two days later, UVA Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Strine issued a university wide e-mail wherein he pledged to study the university’s use of outsourced labor, a concession howbeit ever humble.

If UVA turned a largely deaf ear, Charlottesville’s City Council did not. In 2004, they began paying their employees the living wage of $11.44, even those hired through contractors. As a result of the campaign’s latest efforts, Charlottesville Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos confirmed that council plans to consider raising their base pay even higher, perhaps even to the $13 level the Living Wage Campaign demanded from UVA, at its next meeting.

Even so, that does little for those UVA employees on the bottom rung of the pay scale. In hindsight then, was a hunger fast successful or was it the latest in a series of disappointments?

“I think it was an excellent tactic,” said Brad Sayler, UVA faculty and another member of the campaign’s negotiating team. “It was totally non-violent and legal, the University had no way to stop it, and that was the beauty of it.”

At the same time, a hunger strike is typically carried out until the desired results are achieved. “Am I disappointed it didn’t continue? Boy, that’s a tough one,” Sayler said. “Part of me is and part of me isn’t.” Ultimately, he agreed with the students that the fast wasn’t going to accomplish anything more.

“I don’t think there was any one act we could’ve done to get a living wage,” Link explained, “but I know that the hunger strike has set the stage for future actions.”
Along those lines, Flood says the campaign will spend the next couple of weeks trying to capitalize on their momentum. Their prime goal is “to escalate this campaign,” he said. “[UVA] made some promises and we’re absolutely going to hold them to that.”

Last month, the media conglomerate Media General—owner of numerous television stations and newspapers, including the Daily Progress and Richmond Times-Dispatch—reported a loss of $3.3 million on $168 million of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, which is about 12 percent lower than the fourth quarter of 2010.

That decline resulted in major cuts at one of its papers, The Tampa Tribune, which suffered a loss of 165 positions in December.

For years now, so-called “old media” has spiraled downward as it has struggled to compete with the rise of “new,” or digital media and stay afloat in a weakened economy. In 2008 alone, there were almost 16,000 newspaper-related layoffs and buyouts nationally, and cuts were enacted locally as well, according to the website Paper Cuts.

The Daily Progress laid off 25 employees in July of that year when it closed down its printing facility. [Media General absorbed a total reduction in its labor force of 1,500 jobs, 21 percent, between 2007 and 2009].

In March 2009, the bleeding continued when the Progress let four reporters and two advertising employees go (out of a staff of less than 100). Questions of sustainability arose, and a July C-VILLE Weekly feature wondered whether the paper would even be able to continue as a daily. A month later, an unlikely solution presented itself.

Founded in 2005, the non-profit website Charlottesville Tomorrow (CT) provides “more in-depth information to help the community to make informed choices about our future,” according to its executive director Brian Wheeler, with a particular focus on land use, transportation, and community design issues. For the next few years, CT did just that, but labored in relative obscurity until Wheeler was approached in 2009 by the Progress, which was initially interested in airing CT’s podcasts of area meetings.

In August of that year, the two reached a novel agreement. The Progress would run CT’s content, greatly elevating the website’s profile, but as a non-profit CT would receive no direct financial contribution, thus saving the paper money while filling the void left by the departure of its reporters earlier that year.

“We went from maybe 2,500 people getting my weekly e-mail to having our most important stories published in the newspaper of record and going out to tens of thousands of people,” said Wheeler. His claim is bolstered by statistics the site recently published showing a 217 percent increase in its web traffic over the last two years.

The deal was a boon for the Progress as well. “It gives us more local content and that’s our bread and butter,” Managing Editor McGregor McCance said. The March 2009 downsizing affected and potentially hampered the paper’s ability to cover community planning issues, but the union with CT allowed the Daily Progress “to use a smaller staff than we used to have a little more smartly.”

Since partnering two-and-a-half years ago, the Progress has run more than 500 stories generated by CT, both on the newspaper’s website and in print. In 2011, that averaged out to 24 stories a month. There has also been a 17 percent increase in the Progress’ content on growth and development.

“I think our partnership is a national model and a successful model,” said McCance. Since collaborating, the Progress has managed to avoid further layoffs even as other communities across America continue to see their local papers dwindle (there were another 4,000 layoffs and buyouts last year nationwide). While the paper has enjoyed relative stability—McCance maintains that the paper has remained profitable through the upheaval—this is little comfort in the current environment.

Another tactic could potentially help. Under the direction of its parent company, the paper instituted an online paywall in December. After viewing 10 articles, readers are barred unless they subscribe to the Progress’s website for $7 a month (the restriction does not apply to those who have a seven-day subscription to the print version of the newspaper). It is not an uncommon measure; many papers have made the same move in an effort to boost revenue, and last March, even the New York Times implemented a similar system.

It is also full of potential pitfalls. “Any move a media company makes these days is a calculated risk of some sort,” McCance said. “Of course if you start charging for something that’s been free, you run the risk of causing some people to quit visiting you because they don’t want to pay or they feel like they can get the content somewhere else.” This could be even dicier for the Progress since the content supplied by Charlottesville Tomorrow is also available on the non-profit’s website.

“You just hope that you can give them enough content that makes it worth their time and their money,” McCance continued. So in another proactive measure, the Progress recently launched the online only Work It, Cville (Workitcville.com) as a digital complement to the Charlottesville Business Journal published in Monday’s paper.

“A lot of the new stuff that media companies and newspapers are doing is focused on the digital opportunity,” McCance explained. “That’s where the perceived growth will be in the future.”

One day in August, I got up well before the sun and drove over to Darden Towe Park, where I pulled in next to a small group of cars and joined a growing gaggle of people stretching, jogging, and chatting. Within 15 minutes I was face down in a dew-soaked field doing push-ups beside nearly 50 Charlottesville residents, all of whom had signed up for the same rigorous SEAL Team PT (STPT) workout.

By the time I finished a mile-and-a-half run an hour later, my head and shoulders hung as I tried to catch my breath. My arms and legs were covered in grass and dirt, my shirt and shorts soaked. After dismissing all of us for the day, the fitness program’s instructor and founder, John McGuire, pulled me aside.

“I read body language, and I like to think I’m good at it,” he said, standing beside his black Hummer. “You shouldn’t let it get you down that you can’t do certain exercises as well as you’d like.”

He was right. I felt defeated. I could only manage 20 sit-ups in a minute, for instance, and the last three felt like someone was sitting on my chest, but I wasn’t aware that my frustration was obvious. Was he that intuitive? Had my body betrayed me?

I studied him for a second. Unlike the stereotypical image I had of a Navy SEAL —big, brutish, and bald—McGuire is a small, neat man with close-cropped brown hair. With his blue STPT shirt tucked into his running shorts, he looks more like an accountant than someone who used to risk his life protecting the country. But his reserved demeanor doesn’t hide his intensity, maybe it even enhances it. I felt like he was calling me out, and as I got back in my car, I was determined to come back and conquer the next day’s session.

Warrior training
For decades now, America has been captured by successive fitness crazes. When I was growing up, Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons were making millions pushing aerobics, before that it was Jim Fixx and jogging. In the 1990s Tae Bo came along, infusing martial arts into aerobics. As Americans, the kind of exercise we prefer is a sign of the times.

The Internet and digital media have overloaded our senses—effectively giving us each our own version of Attention Deficit Disorder—and our exercise programs have followed suit. These days there is “muscle confusion,” which is employed by the home exercise system P90X and “constant variation,” which is the concept behind CrossFit. While termed differently, both follow the idea that our muscles must constantly be kept guessing by varying exercises so that our bodies will be dissuaded from adapting to the workout regime and hitting a plateau.

“I just do push-ups,” John McGuire is fond of saying, and while there are plenty of those to be had in his program, his statement belies the fact that STPT is very much in line with other current fitness programs. Over the course of my two weeks, each day involved a rotation of various exercises that was never the same twice. For instance, my second day started with a run. Then we crunched out incline sit-ups, followed by some tricep dips, then more running. A minute after that interval, I was doing push-ups in the grass, before flipping over to do leg lifts.

With its incorporation of constantly shifting exercises (and sites…we met at a different park each session) STPT is surely of its time, but there is nothing necessarily remarkable in that—so are Justin Bieber and skinny jeans, so were leg warmers and Duran Duran. Instead, it’s the timeless elements of the program that make it work, like STPT’s emphasis on teamwork, a concept McGuire gleaned from his Navy SEAL training. From day one, SEAL trainees’ focus is placed on the value of the whole, not the individual, and this is repeatedly illustrated with tasks that are impossible for a single person to accomplish, but feasible for a team.

A born misanthrope, I initially scoffed at the idea that teamwork could be an organizing principle for my own physical transformation. During my run on the first day, a couple different STPT members uttered an encouraging “Hooyah” in my direction as they passed. “At first I thought it was a little cheesy,” said Melissa Levy, who started the same day as me. Initially, so did I, but by the second week, I caught myself exhorting others with the Navy SEAL war cry as they struggled to finish a run.

“It takes everyone for a team to succeed, but only one for a team to fail” is another of McGuire’s sayings that gets repeatedly drilled into our heads by the instructors. “You will do more with a team than you will on your own” is another twist on the same message. Either way you spin it, the slogan captures STPT’s ethos, the idea that anyone can do push-ups and sit-ups by themselves but with the help of others they can do more.

Sea, Air and Land Teams
In the late 1990s, at the end of a decade serving as a Navy SEAL, and after one particularly long mission in South America, John McGuire returned home to find his young daughter crouched under the kitchen table. She was hiding from him. “She didn’t know who I was,” he says. So he quit the SEALs to work on his family instead. That decision brought to a close a chapter of McGuire’s life that had remade him.

Ten years prior, McGuire was in high school when he came across a magazine called Gung-Ho that featured the Navy SEALS on the cover and depicted them as the toughest men alive on its inside pages. Suddenly, he knew his life’s purpose. “I wanted the ultimate challenge,” he says. “I wanted to see how far I could go.”

Now he had a new challenge—finding a life apart from the SEALs. Adrift, McGuire enrolled in some college courses and found work with a cell phone company where his boss was out-of-shape, and, worse, mentally weak. “He couldn’t look me in the eye,” McGuire says, so he started training him. “It was such a great feeling that I was impacting someone’s life like that,” he said. The idea for a fitness class started to come together.

A year later, McGuire quit his job and started SEAL Team PT, an exercise program that would take the ethos of Navy SEAL training but soften it for the everyday person—not the easiest task as it turned out. Initially, it was a bust. For the first class, five people showed up and no one came back. “I had to go back to the drawing board,” he said, “over and over again.” McGuire immersed himself in motivational books and drew from inspirational figures in his own life—his high school wrestling coach, a geology teacher—and of course all the military training.

He did whatever it took to pay the bills, tasks like shoveling snow and raking leaves. After a year of experimentation, he emerged with the simple but effective idea of an hour long class to be held five days a week (during the work week), conducted outside in parks so it would require little to no equipment. It would be open to everyone and allow participants to go at their own pace.

With that template in place, STPT started to click with people, then thrive. Today, there are three classes held per day in Richmond with 250 regulars attending the morning session. In August 2009, he expanded to Charlottesville—where a morning class is held from 6:15-7:15 five days a week—and more recently to Washington, D.C. There are plans for one in Philadelphia, too, and it’s entirely conceivable that the class could spread across the country.

Winning bodies and minds
On my fifth day at STPT, a new exercise was introduced that involved a handful of us lifting one prostrate person above our heads and then thrusting them skyward. Thankfully, a 5′, 100 pound woman named Annie Kim gave our deltoids a bit of a break.

“I get lifted or carried at least a couple of times a week,” Kim said. “It can be work for your neck muscles, but I enjoy it. I get to look up at the sky a lot more than I ever have.”

I experienced the same sensation the following Monday when we ran out of women to hoist. I wouldn’t normally appreciate that many hands on my body, but with my arms pointing upward, I got shoved towards the blue sky and clouds, and it was exhilarating.

Truthfully, there didn’t seem to be any great exercise benefit to this, but it united a group of us in a common task. The next day there were more team-oriented routines, like one where two of us clasped forearms to form a makeshift seat for a third person, whom we grabbed by the ankles and lugged a good hundred feet. After one such exercise, our passenger, Diana Branscome, offered up a humorous reference to a Monty Python skit. “What is the airspeed velocity of an un-laden swallow?” she asked. “Well, you guys were laden.”

“The camaraderie is what I really value,” Branscome said a few days later as I sat in her warehouse studio located off of Avon Street, watching as she laid out shards of blue glass taken from old Riesling bottles collected from bars and restaurants around town. From these, Branscome creates ornate and detailed items like lamp shades and bowls that are sold at places like C’ville Arts on the Downtown Mall and in cities as far away as Denver and Atlanta. She had tried various exercise regimes before settling in with STPT. “The only thing that gets me out there in the morning is that I’m going to see my friends.”

Everyone I talked to expressed a similar sentiment: There’s something about rolling around in the wet grass and dirt with other people that creates a bond. You don’t worry about what anybody looks like, or how they might smell, or even larger things, like whether the person holding your ankles while you do sit-ups is Muslim or Christian. It even breaks down class barriers.

“I have teenage kids call me by my first name,” Pat McCann said of his mornings with STPT. I assume that doesn’t happen to the Chief Financial Officer at the University of Virginia Foundation very often, but at Seal Team workouts, “we’re all equal,” he said.

That same idea is something that Sebastian Junger elaborates on in his recent book WAR, a chronicle of his time with a battalion operating in the most dangerous part of Afghanistan. “[M]en can completely remake themselves in war,” he writes. “You could be anything back home—shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular—and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period.” To compare what we were doing to soldiers risking their lives is ludicrous, but our training was distilled from the military experience, and as everyday non-enlisted people we were being pushed to our physical limits and falling back on our peers for emotional support. “The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group,” Junger continues, “and that is almost impossible to fake.”

McGuire discovered how real the devotion was in October 2006 when he suffered a horrific accident. He was bouncing on a trampoline with his daughter when he tried to do a back flip and landed wrong, breaking the C4 vertebrae in his neck. He was not supposed to live through the first night, then was told he would be paralyzed and never again use his arms and legs.

As he struggled with his diagnosis, he was swamped by visitors, many of them students from his class. “They wouldn’t let me get depressed,” he said. A year later, he was walking. Today, McGuire is still weak in his right arm and leg, but doctors tell him his survival was a miracle, that only 1 percent of people accomplish that type of recovery from the injury he suffered.
While the outside support helped, it would not have been enough to triumph over death and paralysis. That would have required pulling from somewhere deep within, and while it’s tempting to attribute this to the steel will he developed as a Navy SEAL, the source of his inner strength is just as likely to have sprung from the positive thinking model he created while honing his fitness class.

During the first year, he spent a good deal of time studying motivational books and it shows in how he communicates. Instead of barking like a drill instructor, he’s more likely to say something that could come from Tony Robbins.

“He’s very good at giving people little victories that help them move on,” said Scott Donald, another instructor with STPT who initially started out as a basic member. “He’s very good at instilling mental confidence, and encouraging people to push their limits.”

I discovered that when McGuire pulled me aside my first morning. If he had come at me with a different approach, I might have just shrunk away. By combining his Navy SEAL self with a New Age way of thinking and speaking, he has transformed into a guru who can theoretically kick your ass. “I want to impact as many lives as possible before I run out of breath,” he said. And I believed him.

Transformation
“If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got” is another maxim John McGuire regularly dispenses, and like his other sayings, it smacks of self-help books. But it’s also the core truth of the program: You get out what you put in.

The most famous example of this is Richmond resident Brooke Page who was 315 pounds (and 28 years old) when she joined STPT. “They literally took me under their wing,” she told a Richmond TV station. “They helped me, and motivated me.” At last count, she had lost 137 pounds and appeared on the national TV show “Dr. Oz” five times to show off her incredible transformation, the last time posing in a swimsuit.

Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney for Albemarle County Elliott “Jay” Casey had a similar tale to tell. “I was a total wreck,” Casey said. “I was falling asleep in the middle of the day.” So he joined STPT. After a year-and-a-half of early morning workouts, he was a different guy. “I feel like I have a new body,” said the 37-year-old. “I can do stuff I couldn’t do when I was 25.” For instance, he went from being able to do 25 sit-ups in two minutes to more than 100.

Moreover, Casey said his physical transformation has imbued him with an overall self-confidence, convincing him that he can overcome any obstacle in life, and “that I should not shy away from doing something hard,” he said. “Difficult is not impossible.”

“I just had a newborn and I want to be around when he grows up,” Christian Ramsburg told me on day four, when I was paired with the computer programmer for a sit-up drill. Sporting glasses, short brown hair, and a rotund belly, he at first reminds me of a character from the 1999 film Office Space. Yet, on that morning, he crunched out nine sit-ups, eight more than my aching abs allowed me. These days he’s up to 45.

“I used to be at the very back, and when I’d run I’d feel like knives were being stuck in my legs,” he said. Ramsburg joined in the early summer and could not even do one sit-up. “I can tell that I’m getting stronger.” By October, he’d lost 30 pounds.

I am not looking for a total makeover of that sort, just a bump in my physical capacity. In the last few years I’ve tried to bike and run, but have tired of the routine and, recently, I have had trouble getting motivated to exercise at all. “If it’s boredom, this’ll get rid of it,” Casey said. That is certainly true, the variety of exercises and the pace prevent any sort of tedium. If only it didn’t hurt so much.

“If you say you’re sore, then you’re bragging” is another saying that McGuire likes to repeat, and it’s supposed to be funny—and I guess it is—but not when every part of your upper torso aches, as mine did by the middle of my first week with STPT. That Tuesday night, I made sure to get to bed early, hoping that my throbbing muscles would heal overnight, but when I woke I was in so much pain that I had to literally roll off and out of bed. I could not sit up. My stomach had apparently been replaced with a big slab of pulverized meat, and my triceps felt so tight I thought they might explode.

Fortunately, Wednesday’s workout focused on legs, so there were lunges, sprints, sideways running, broad jumps, and a bear crawl. There were also lots of push-ups and sit-ups. I could barely do any of either and was mystified when an older man was called up to the front of the class and told to pump out his age in push-ups, plus one to grow on. Fifty-four reps later my mouth was agape as he finished.

“You weren’t paying attention to my form,” Stephen Arata said a couple weeks later, trying to deflect my praise. A professor of 19th- and 20th-century literature at UVA since 1990, he joined STPT in June 2010. “I was super sore at first,” Arata added, trying to make me feel better about my low pain threshold.

After that morning’s workout, I returned home and had to have help taking my t-shirt off because I couldn’t raise my arms over my head. Suddenly, a story I’d heard of a past member made sense, that of a woman who was in a similar dilemma. As the tale went, she could not lift her hands over her head to wash her hair in the shower, so instead she squeezed shampoo on the wall and rubbed her head in it. That’s funny, but again, not necessarily in the moment.

By the end of my fourth SEAL Team workout I was thinking of quitting. Not only was I in serious pain but I was exhausted by the afternoon every day. Then I checked myself: I was there to write a story, walking away would not go over too well with my editor. So I made an adjustment.

The next day, I started to pace myself. I didn’t care if my fitness partner was shaming me with the amount of incline sit-ups she could do while I only managed one. I had to be able to walk around relatively pain free, and I needed to be able to hold my 12 pound newborn baby when I got home. On Wednesday, I couldn’t even do that.

Then something surprising happened. The weekend break allowed my muscles to recover (at least a bit) and by the middle of my second week, I was starting to acclimate. The overarching soreness had dissipated. I still hurt, yes, but I was getting used to the physical fatigue.

Mentally, it was stimulating. The fact that I could take whatever STPT was throwing my way made me feel like a warrior. “SEAL Team PT reminds people to live,” McGuire said one of those last mornings, and I didn’t disagree. His class was starting to take over my life. When each session ended I would return home to drink voluminous quantities of water over the course of the day. I was also watching what I ate and foregoing alcohol altogether. My body was becoming a temple.

Then it all came crashing down. I had only signed up for the two-week introductory fitness class (to write this story), so my growing sense of invincibility quickly subsided. With my STPT stint now finished over two months ago, I’m back to struggling to jog regularly, and, truth be told, drinking more beers in a week than I do push-ups. I might have continued with it, but my workday starts at 7:30am, and that early morning time is also my only window to write. McGurire said he’s going to start running a 6pm class five nights a week in Charlottesville. But then there’s the cost. I don’t have $70 to cough up a month.

These sound like excuses, though, and today, it almost seems ridiculous that I was starting to consider myself part of an elite team of extremely fit people. Although it’s hard to admit, I’m not sure I’m the right type of person for STPT. It takes a real single-minded focus to show up morning after morning (especially in the dead of winter), the kind of focus that translates to the rest of life. Most of my classmates had that quality. They were financial directors, surgeons, attorneys, and so forth. Me? I’m just a lowly freelance writer.

If I keep thinking like that, though, then I’ve learned nothing from McGuire. Maybe I should join SEAL Team PT as a regular, and perhaps it would transform me. With abs like diamonds I’d finally tackle the book I’ve always wanted to write. Yeah, I think I could do it, as long as I had McGuire encouraging me. “We all have negative stuff in our lives,” he’d say. “Let’s put it aside and get a great workout.” 

Most days, his mother leaves for work at 7:30am, and my son is mine to mind until she returns home sometime after 3pm. To keep from just sitting around the house—which can make you feel a little like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining—I try to get B outside as much as possible, particularly when it is warm enough. With summer, of course, it’s always warm enough, and there are no limits on our license to ramble the area’s playgrounds, parks, fields, and really any other kind of space that suits the 3-year-old imagination.

If I were a stay-at-home mom, I might have a network of other moms to rely on for play-dates. Without that resource, I am fully aware going in that I will be playing almost as much as my son, so I attempt to find activities that B and I can both enjoy.

I’ve compiled the following short list of our favorite spots as a resource for play-minded parents, desperate stay-at-home dads, or anybody else involved in the war on Digital Childhood. Admittedly, my picks are highly subjective, but I wanted them to reflect both our personalities and tastes, especially my son’s—my happiness is predicated on his.

Outings can be exhausting, but as a result of our forage for fun my son and I have become best buddies. As B says multiple times a day, “Daddy, let’s play!”

B makes a splash at Forest Hills Park, one of three city-operated spray-grounds.

Forest Hills Park

Where it’s at: Forest Hills Avenue (off Cherry Avenue).

Best features: Of the three city spray-grounds (the others are at Greenleaf and Belmont parks), this is my favorite, and maybe my favorite place to play period—I’ve told other parents about Forest Hills so much that I feel like its evangelist. Only a year old, it is a water wonderland with almost 20 different apparatuses, including a bucket high up in the air that dumps every 10 seconds and a wall of water that my son makes me walk through with him every time. Some of the park’s simplest features, though, can be entrancing. For instance, B loves a little spigot in one corner that billows a 2′ geyser.

The park also has two covered picnic shelters—one with bathrooms—and a playground with two sections, one for kids who are 2-5 years of age, the other for kids 5 and older. There’s always plenty to do.

Watch out for: the slippery surface of the spray-ground, especially if your child is barefoot. I always make sure B wears his Crocs so he never falls, but I’ve seen other kids try to stop when running and really bite the dust. One other slight complaint: There’s not much shade and the picnic shelters are too far away to monitor children.

Great place to meet: a ton of parents and their kids. On a warm, sunny day there’s a lot going on, but, unlike Greenleaf’s spray-ground, it never feels cramped, just alive.

Fun factor [1-10 scale]: 10 absolutely. It’s impossible to visit this park in the summer and not get completely soaking wet, because the kids are having so much fun running through the spraying water that you’ll want to jump in yourself.

Clark Elementary School

Where it’s at: Accessible from Tufton Avenue (off Monticello Avenue) or Belmont Avenue.

Best features: Most playgrounds offer only slight variations on the time-honored features, but Clark’s is different. It includes a three-in-one slide, with each surface uniquely shaped to thrill, a good-sized rubber mountain for climbing, and a long concave bridge that connects it to the rest of the playground. For parents, there are a couple trees just off to the side that shade park benches. The importance of this cannot be overstated. For some reason, park planners always clear-cut whatever trees might have existed where a playground now stands. Why not let a tree or two stand, I often wonder, thus providing the actual play areas with some cover from the sun, particularly the plastic slides that are scorching by noon?

In addition to the stand-alone play-set, there is a concrete terrace level with a life-sized checker/chess board painted on its surface, and above that a vast paved expanse with a basketball hoop and a fitness area that kids can mess around on. Another feature is a ginormous color-coded map of the U.S. painted on the blacktop. Tucked behind the main school building is a smaller but inventive play-set crafted for little children. It’s easy to spend a lot of time there, too.

Watch out for: nearby traffic. The play-set is right by the street, and while there’s a high chain-link fence, sometimes the gate is open.

Great place to meet: neighborhood kids. There’s usually one or two riding around on a bike or shooting hoops. Overall, it’s usually pretty quiet.

Fun factor: 8. There’s so much to do here that my kid loves it, and I just try and keep up with him.

Riverview Park

Where it’s at: About a mile off Meade Avenue, located at the end of Chesapeake Street.

Best feature: the Rivanna River. There is a good-sized playground here, but we spend most of our time near or down in the water. In the early spring I would take B down to look at how ferociously high the river was because of the heavy rains, but usually it is really low, just a foot or two in many spots.

On a recent visit, B headed straight to the river and was soaked in a matter of minutes. Soon enough, he located a stick and was throwing it around, expecting me to retrieve it so we could do it all over again. The sun shone brightly, and a breeze rippled the surface of the slow moving water as I stood in its midst. Eventually, he lost interest in the stick, wandered over, looked up at me and spoke. “The water is good, isn’t it?”

Watch out for: the water. I always keep a close eye on B, especially when we are down in the river. The playground poses no threats. Perhaps the only concern are the dogs that travel the Rivanna Trail with their owners, but I’ve had no real cause for fear.

Great place to meet: On a nice day Riverview is a lively spot, with its playground, benches (picnic or otherwise), open field, and the adjacent Rivanna Trail. There’s always somebody walking around or jogging, along with a few moms and their kids on the play-set.

Fun factor: Even if you never get in the water, this can still be a fun place to play. With river experience: 10. Without: 7.

B improvises on one of the play features at the Cale Elementary School playground, which his dad rates the best in town.

Cale Elementary School

Where it’s at: Avon Street Extended, behind the school.

Best features: Cale has what I consider the best playground in the area. It contains two different play-sets, featuring a large one with two towering slides encased in orange tunnels. There is also a small zip-line of sorts (which is too much for my 3-year-old to handle), a big rope spider-web for climbing, two sets of swings, two full-length basketball courts with rims that are only 8" tall (fun for dads to dunk on), and a combo baseball/soccer field. An excellent view of Carter Mountain offers a splendid backdrop to the play.

Watch out for: the sheer breadth of the larger play-set. Some of this is clearly only meant for kids 5 and older.

Great place to meet: maybe a family or two. Sometimes we are the only ones there, but it depends on what time you go. On some Saturdays, there are youth soccer matches on the field, so the play-sets are a little busier. Also, a church regularly meets on Sunday mornings and afterwards their kids invade.

Fun factor: 8. With all the variety, it’s impossible to get bored here.

Walnut Creek Park

Where it’s at: About 15 minutes south of town, it is accessible from either 29S or Route 20. From there, take Route 708 (Red Hill Road), and then turn south onto Route 631 (Old Lynchburg Road). The park is 1/2 mile on the left.

Best features: Its main draw is a beautiful lake that covers 45 water acres. Sometimes we go and just stand near the edge and throw rocks, and then hike over to a wooded playground. But now that summer is here, our desination is the sandy man-made beach that is cordoned off by ropes at the 6′ deep mark. There are also lifeguards present.

Watch out for: lake critters. I noticed quite a few sunfish swimming around my legs and once I thought I felt one nip at my shin.

Great place to meet: all sorts of people when the beach is open. When it’s not, the lake is quite desolate. Over at the playground (which is close to the beach) we usually only encounter a parent or two and their kids.

Fun factor: with the beach, 9—there’s something exhilarating about playing in water that is teeming with life (if a little daunting), and having lifeguards around is reassuring. Without the beach, it’s still a 7. B enjoys unbridled nature.

Jayson and B hunt crayfish in the creek at Meade Park. A little taste of nature can break up the city play routine and stimulate the imagination.

Meade Park

Where it’s at: off Meade Avenue and Chesapeake Street, behind the parking lot for Onesty Family Aquatic Center.

Best features: Its playground has two play-sets, one for toddlers, and another for older kids (although B likes both). The play-set for the older kids has a plastic climbing mountain on one side that’s fun to conquer. A picnic shelter separates the two play areas and provides excellent cover for parents and a good spot to keep a close eye on the kids.

There’s also a small creek that runs under the paved pathway that is perfect for catching crayfish. On a recent trip with a cup and a bucket, we nabbed four within 20 minutes, including one as big as an Outback shrimp. “Look at that,” I said, as he peered into the cup, and then leapt back.

Watch out for: a tan slide on the bigger play-set that is among the steepest I’ve seen. My son is too daunted to take it on, but it is great for rolling stuff down.

Great place to meet: a couple moms and their kids. It’s generally quiet and unpopulated except for mid-morning visits from a local daycare that are nevertheless unobtrusive.

Fun factor: “I love creeks,” B shouted after one visit, and, taking into account this part of the experience Meade is a blast, maybe even a 9. Without, it drops to a 7.

Belmont Park

Where it’s at: at the confluence of Stonehenge Avenue, Rialto Street and Druid Avenue.

Best features: The first year of my son’s life we lived within walking distance of Belmont Park. I remember dipping his toes in its diminutive spray-ground when he was just a couple months old, so perhaps this place holds some sentimental value. We still regularly visit, though, despite moving away. The park is more than the sum of its attractions—the small spray-ground or the full-length basketball court or the fun enough playground. What I truly appreciate is its vastness and layout. At 3.1 acres, it’s quite a large park with giant oak trees, lots of green grass and a hill to roll around on, just a nice place to have an easygoing time.

Watch out for: traffic. The park is surrounded by roads and is traversed by a city bus. The whole park slopes in the direction of Rialto and it’s easy for a kid—at least mine—to get a head of steam going towards the street.

Great place to meet: moms and a few of their kids. There is rarely anyone playing basketball, and at times the park is surprisingly empty. Due to its location behind a small market, there are sometimes one or two inebriated people under the picnic shelter, but it is way off in a corner of the park.

Fun factor: 8. Last time we visited, we simply took an inflatable bouncy ball, and kicked it around the basketball court, then the playground, and then went back over to the court and the nearby hill. After about an hour-and-a-half we were exhausted and ready to go home and take a nap—the both of us.

Hilltop Berry Farm & Winery

Where it’s at: From Charlottesville, take I-64W to Crozet Exit #107, turn left onto 250W, then left again onto 151 South (as if you were heading to Wintergreen). Go 10 miles, turn left onto Route 612, go across the bridge and up the hill, then turn left at 2800 Berry Hill Rd.

Best features: There are plenty of area places to pick fruit, but Hilltop is easily my favorite. Out in Nelson County, it is only a mile from Wintergreen Resort but off the road enough that you feel lost in its rolling hills. And for one month in the summer—from July 16 to August 14—there are endless rows of ripe blackberries to pick that are like the grapes in the Land of Canaan—giant, juicy and sweet. Gorging ourselves on the fruit is not only delicious but has made for great pictures, B’s face dripping with dark blackberry resin.

Watch out for: sun exposure. Unlike a wild blackberry patch, there are no thorns and no threat of snakes, but make sure you bring sunscreen and a sunhat for everyone. Another word of warning: Make sure your kid’s not wearing a shirt you really care about ruining because it will likely be covered by blackberry juice.

Great place to meet: families also there to pick berries. The hosts of the farm are extremely polite and kid-friendly.

Fun factor: 10. It’s a great time for both parents and children. Of course, Hilltop is primarily a winery, so if you’re able to, take your partner and maybe she’ll agree to drive so you can relax and sip wine (I’m partial to the Mountain Apple variety) under the covered patio while the kids frolic amongst the berries.

 On Sunday, August 1, the seven members of the Hope Community Center’s Charlottesville Lions piled into the team van to head back home. They had spent the last three days in Washington, D.C., competing in the Street Soccer USA Cup, a national tournament that hosted 23 teams from 19 cities, all made up of homeless and refugees. The best teams featured the latter—many who had played soccer all their lives, whether they hailed from Somalia or a Latin country.

Charlottesville only had one player with any real pedigree, a 43-year-old Iraqi refugee who scored most of the Lions’ goals en route to a 3-4 overall record. Apart from him, the Lions were made up of U.S.-born African Americans, most with little to no experience playing European football. 

“If they got more skills than us, we’ll play with more heart,” said Darryl Rojas, team captain, on the ride up. A member of last year’s team, Rojas acted as part cheerleader, part manager for the whole trip, barking commands on the field and corralling the guys off of it. On Friday, July 30, Rojas told his teammates that if they exerted the same energy in Charlottesville as they did on the field, “you’d have a car, a house and a wife.”

“It’s not just about me. That’s what gets us in these cycles, just thinking about ourselves and our immediate problems,” the 39-year-old Rojas says five days later, back in Charlottesville and sitting at a table in the Hope Center’s day haven. “I don’t mind telling a guy, ‘You’re effin’ up, you need to get your crap together.’ But what I’ve learned is that, until I can be a leader by example, that it’s really just blowing a whole lot of wind.”

To that end, Rojas says he has spent the days since he returned trying to channel the goodwill the tournament engendered by spreading it around, mainly to his “lady,” who is pregnant with his child. 

“Within the last two days that I’ve been back, we’ve done nothing but go to the proper agencies, work toward getting her food stamps back in order, and getting housing for her and the child,” says Rojas. For other players, the results are less than tangible. A couple sit around the Downtown Mall’s Haven shelter, one in front of a computer searching for jobs. 

For another member of the local homeless community, though, the soccer trip must seem like divine intervention. 

One early morning in D.C., players looked out of their hostel window at a group of prostitutes and thought they noticed a familiar face. Rojas went to inspect and came face-to-face with a girl—in full streetwalker regalia—that he knew from Hope and the Haven, a regular on the down-and-out scene. 

“When I saw her she literally burst into tears,” he says. The girl begged to come back with the team, citing a desire to see her 9-month-old daughter who lives in town. So they put her in soccer gear, bought her food and gave her a place to stay for the rest of the weekend. By Monday, she was back with her baby.