AAU Junior Olympics success next week is just one goal for Wings of Glory, a Milwaukee-based track 'family'
Thirty-six members of Milwaukee's Wings of Glory Track Club will be among a field of thousands of athletes from across the country competing at the AAU Junior Olympics in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a weeklong event beginning Sunday.
Several of those competitors will cram into Wings of Glory head coach and co-founder James Malone's rented eight-seat SUV for the more than 13-hour journey. The rest will carpool with parents over the course of the week ahead of their individual events and relays.
"This is a stress point in the season for us," said Malone, who co-founded the club with Eric Brown Sr. in 2010. "We've had to leave kids back because of finances before, and it hurts every time."
With Wings of Glory's network of community sponsors and parents, Malone exhausts all avenues to get transportation and hotel accommodations for as many kids as they can for the event. He goes to such lengths because he has seen the competitive fire ignited in his four daughters over their years of running track, and wants the same for every Wings of Glory runner.
"When you talk about the AAU Junior Olympics, you’re talking about 14,000 track and field athletes; it is a spectacle," Malone said. "It is something for them to experience, something they’ll take with them the rest of their lives."
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Community sponsors have come and gone over the last decade for Wings of Glory, but what has sustained the group in leaner years has been what several members have described as a unique bond with teammates and coaches.
"It’s family, that’s all it is. It’s like blood family to me," Rufus King sophomore and seven-year participant Jalanai Hervey said.
Ja'Cey Simmons, a six-year Wings of Glory athlete currently at Minnesota State University-Mankato, said her participation brought her closer with high school athletes from around Wisconsin. The program has primarily served kids in the Milwaukee area, but athletes have been welcomed from other parts of the state such as Lodi and Green Bay.
"When we get on an AAU team, it's like, 'OK, we see each other but right now we're family,'" Simmons said. "We’ve grinded on teams and seen each other ‘die’ after practice, tired, gasping for air. They became more family than friends."
Simmons and fellow Wings of Glory alumni Rose Cramer and Makayla Jackson won an NCAA Division II title in the 4x100 relay this spring, the latest achievement on a growing list for notable alumni of the program.
The program started from a group including Malone and Brown that broke away from the Joe Sims Milwaukee Striders Track Club. Wings of Glory featured 24 members in its debut season and doubled the following year. Brown retired in 2020 and the program fell from its height of more than 150 members in the mid 2010s, but has recovered from an initial dip at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
More than 100 members from ages 5 to 18 came out this summer, despite little effort to recruit by Malone outside of the occasional conversation with high schoolers in his in-season role as an assistant track coach for Wauwatosa East.
While athletics serve as the platform, Malone takes his greatest sense of fulfilment from growing children into leaders that give back to their communities.
"We have to create and instill this in the kids, because they’ll go out and leave the city and become successful and don’t think twice about coming back and pouring into kids who may be less fortunate than they were," Malone said. "The long-term goal is for them to become a citizen in the community that we can be proud of."
Former shot put and discus throw participant Madison Walker first joined Wings of Glory at age 12 to compete alongside older sister Kiersten. In her initial years with the program, Wings of Glory lacked a dedicated coach for her events. As the program grew in size and staff, Madison saw the impact that coaching and offseason work had on her performance in high school and for Wings of Glory. Now as a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, Madison came back to Milwaukee this summer to volunteer as a coach.
"I just wanted give the kids now the same opportunity that I could have had if I had had a coach," Madison Walker said. "They’re two events that take a lot of skill and hard work. It’s not something that you can learn by yourself."
As Hervey and the 35 other current field of Wings of Glory athletes prepare for their shot on the national stage, they will do so with a family they know has their back.
"I’ve just loved being around the team in general," Hervey said. "They’re very supportive, caring for each other, Christian-like. We push each other, stay strong and the coaches really, really truly care about us."
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee Wings of Glory athletes to compete at AAU Junior Olympics
