Coaches, parents balance safety and desire to play pee wee football after Akron shooting

Sgt. Mike Murphy Jr. leaned against the chain link fence under blue skies Sunday morning. His tinted sunglasses reflecting the anxious adults and excited children waiting for referees at Erie Island Park in West Akron.

Two other Akron officers posted up around the field where a new camera on the concession stands pointed toward the crowds. Behind the visiting team’s bench, 200 yards of baseball diamond separated the kids and a pair of parked SUVs. Coaches told the children to run to the vehicles should anything go sideways.

A police dispatcher relayed a 911 call about shots fired on Sheffield Drive, which borders the park to the north behind a row of bushes. The officers could not confirm the shots, they responded on their radios. And the distant gunfire behind them on the Copley side of Interstate-77 sounded like target practice, the officers and some parents said.

Coaches, fans, families and officers at the return of organized youth football in Akron this past weekend were keenly aware of what happened two weeks ago when gunfire hit a 7-year-old player and a young adult at Lane Field. Some people refuse to return to those fields in the Lane-Wooster neighborhood at the foot of Sherbondy Hill.

The injured boy is out of the hospital and recovering at home, said his coach, Jatone Stephens, who is also the boy’s cousin and was supposed to be his ride home the day he was shot.

The boy’s teammates who play for the Bengals traded practice for a few days of prayer after the incident. Then, “they started gradually coming back,” said Stephens. “But there was a lot of parents who really didn't want their kids to play again because they were like, ‘How could this happen? We’re supposed to be in a safe environment.'”

The alleged shooter, a 16-year-old who was apprehended in his home near Lane Field after people in the community spoke up, is accused of nearly killing a boy and a 19-year-old in a hail of nearly 20 rounds fired at the playground.

But those bullets also pierced a program where children ages 6 to 11 find confidence, pride and comfort through the mentorship of positive role models and friends.

Any shooting is tragic, particularly when a child is hit, said Sgt. Murphy, a community relations officer for the Akron Police Department.

“But then there are other people, the kids, the trauma of seeing someone that you play with, or a friend from your neighborhood, get shot. And that's something that kids should not see at such a young age. And I don't want that to be a thing that becomes normal in our community.

“Sports is supposed to be the tool that we use as an outlet for kids to keep them away from violence,” said Murphy, who grew up playing sports in Akron. “So, to have something like that happen in our community, that ultimately impacts the kids, where people don't feel safe having their kids play, their daughters cheer … We can't have that.”

Parents eager to get kids back in the game

Brandy Fields watched her son play Sunday at Erie Island. Her thoughts traveled back two weeks to the shooting.

“My son and his dad went to that game where the shooting occurred,” she said. “It happened literally like right in front of them.”

Most shootings seem to targeted, she said, with bystanders caught up in the collateral damage. But she felt safe Sunday, she said. Like other parents, the benefit of getting the kids back on the field outweighed the concern that their safety can never be guaranteed.

“It teaches them structure, discipline, helps keep them in a routine,” she said. “This is beneficial for them. It's like an outlet for getting frustrated with school or not being able to do things.”

But Fields and others won't send their kids back to Lane Field for any event that isn’t well-organized and secure.

Felisha McCray said she’s praying for the injured boy. Her own son played on the other team that fateful Sunday.

“He actually went out on the field when the shooting happened,” she said this past Sunday while watching her son's team, the Bears, sweep the Kings. “So, he was devastated to not be able to play because, you know, little boys and football. This is their dream. They want to do this immediately when the season starts.”

McCray said her son’s father, who is a coach, is very involved with all his kids. The sport gives dads a platform to positively impact their children, and the community's children. Pee wee football, parents said, is a means to disrupting the cycle of gun violence as victims and shooters in Akron continually get younger.

“We're just hoping parents start taking initiative and accountability for their children,” said McCray. “The young adults, that is. It’s sad — younger and younger. And I just want to try to keep my baby in a bubble. But he loves football so much I can't keep them from it.”

This is the first year Dion Cargill’s son is playing. The dad doesn’t think that what happened at Lane Field could happen at Erie Island. But that’s no reason to be complacent, he said.

“It starts with security, making sure the environment is safe,” he said. “It starts with the parents in the community. If we all sit together as a community and let each other know what's going on, stuff like that won’t happen.”

Coaches see all sides of the issue

Cargill said he's at his son's practice every day. He’s never heard the kids, who play for a team that wasn’t at Lane Field two weeks ago, talk about the shooting.

“I don’t think none of those kids really know what happened,” he said.

But players who’ve been practicing without a teammate can’t ignore what happened, said their coach, who sometimes passes Lane Field while driving his players to and from their homes to practice each weekday.

“Some of them stay in the neighborhood down there,” said Stephens, the injured boy’s coach and cousin. “They’ll point over there and say, ‘That's where [our teammate] got a shot. We don't want to play down there.''

He said some people downplay the situation because they are "football driven" and don't think about the kids' mental well being.

“A lot of people just push them," he said. "They push the agenda like it's for the kids. But when something tragic happen to have kids, you all have to take that into consideration. You all have to put a pause to a lot of stuff. There's nothing wrong with an extra bye week. It's nothing wrong with it. Let the kids get their mental [health] together because you don't know what they're going through. We grown. So a lot of stuff, we can probably take it easier. But you don't know what's going through their mind.”

Youth coaches like Stephens teach more than football. They’re teaching life to impressionable kids in an age social media.

“It's just how the world is right now,” said coach Darsean King, whose Kings played the Bears Sunday at Erie Island. “It’s society, you know? We just have to keep wrapping our arms around the kids, just keep loving on them, protecting them. And that's what we do, try to just will them up and just teach them on and off the field that it’s more than just football. Try to teach them about life.”

King and his fellow coaches took their players to church last week during the bye week. They learned, among other lessons, about reconciliation. King can relate. He coaches the sons of men he may have had a beef with growing up. They have to put those feuds to rest, he said, for kids whose futures hang in the balance.

“I played football,” said King, who still has the build of a nose guard and center. “Everyone’s dreams are to make it to the NFL. You might not make it there. But you still can succeed in life.

Games resume without incident

The first games since the shooting were scheduled for Saturday at Lane Field. At their home field, where they will finish their season, the South Rangers played the Firestone Park Rams.

The series of matches among the three age groups went off without a hitch, attendees and organizers said. Children went back to the playground. And everyone cleared out afterward. The next day, the soccer and football fields, as well as the playground and track and basketball courts, were virtually empty.

The Blimp City Bears — one of the two teams that played two Sundays ago at Lane Field — swept the Kings at Erie Island, where coaches, parents and police officers said they felt safer.

“It’s just a different, laid-back atmosphere,” said Akron police detective Sean Taylor, the commissioner of the North Coast Youth Football Conference, which includes the Bears, Kings and Titans.

After the Lane Field shooting, Taylor met with North Coast families to explain how security would be enhanced. Police, including Taylor, have always been around. But now they’re uniformed, highly visible and required for any private sporting event that rents a city park.

Hiring police security is costly

At Lane Field Saturday, the Akron Parent Pee Wee Football league hired Akron police officers. The police union contract requires the officers to be paid for no less than three hours at a set rate.

The cost of the security is now the top expense for some leagues and teams.

“Those officers, they're in the neighborhood of $30 to $40 an hour. And you have two of them (per location) and you have four or five sites every week,” said Donald Christian, who runs the Akron Parent Pee Wee Football. “So, it's costly. It actually eats up a major portion of our budget. And we don't have any grants or any funds coming in from any entity to help us with it.”

Lt. Mike Miller, who leads community relations for the police department, said there’s nothing preventing the leagues from hiring private security.

The city is aware of how the additional cost of security, which is ultimately covered by the fees paid by players, could make opportunities like youth sports cost prohibitive if leagues are forced to push the expense onto their member families.

“I think that the service director and the mayor, certainly, we are concerned about that,” said Melvin Blake, a supervisor in the Akron Parks and Recreation Department who coordinates the leasing of city land for private sporting events. “And there's going to be some ongoing conversations regarding it.”

The politics of youth sports have left the city with multiple football leagues and teams that rent space at public schools in the North, East, Ellet and Buchtel clusters. It would be logistically easier and more economical, Blake suggested, if the teams all got together in the same league.

Locking down Lane Field

Stephens, the Bengals coach whose player and little cousin was shot two weeks ago, will not take his team or his family back to Lane Field. His daughter was cheerleading when the shots rang out.

“Nobody wants to go down there. Kids down there think something will happen the whole time,” Stephens said of Lane Field.

Coaches said they’ve been asking for cameras for a while. The city installed them at Lane Field and Erie Island Park the day after the shooting.

To prevent cars from driving onto Lane Field, Blake said the city installed permanent bollards this season. But the streets around Lane Field, in a neighborhood with the highest frequency of gun homicides and 911 calls for shots fired, offer shooters multiple routes to get away — up East Avenue, down Vernon Odom Boulevard, over Thornton to Main Street or any of the side streets in between. The focus, Blake said, could be on controlling the flow of pedestrian traffic at the games to deter violence by funneling egress.

“You don't want to put fencing up because then you look institutionalized like a jail,” said Blake. “But that certainly is something that we have already started discussing. Since the shooting, we have discussed about how we can enclose it a little bit more.”

Erie Island is geographically much easier to secure, said coaches and police officers who were present Sunday.

There’s one way in or out. Streets that run into the park have been dead-ended with guardrails. Police can see every car that pulls into the parking lot as they stand with their backs to the natural barrier of the highway behind them.

“You can control the flow,” said detective Taylor, who met with the coaches and families to discuss new security protocols after consulting with his board at North Coast, which is based in Cleveland. The talks reassured parents of a more visible police presence and a new escape plan in the event that violence breaks out.

But police, like several attendees and coaches, said safety starts in and with the community.

“It’s going to take a village to do this," said Sgt. Murphy "While we can’t guarantee everyone’s safety, we can deter the violence. If you see something, say something.”

Reach reporter Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron pee wee football back in action after Lane Field shooting