University of North Carolina Athletics
Tar Heel Men's Lacrosse In The Community
November 13, 2010 | Men's Lacrosse
Nov. 13, 2010
By Logan Corey
Junior Midfielder
Chapel Hill, N.C.
Thursday afternoon I shot off a quick email to the listerve of the UNC men's lacrosse team: "Kids cart tomorrow, text me if you want to go. -Logan". Within 10 minutes I had seven teammates signed up. For those of you who don't know, the Kid's Cart is a daily event where the Nutrition and Food Services at the UNC Children's Hospital take ice cream, cupcakes, and even coloring books with crayons to hand out to the children staying on the 5th, 6th and 7th floors.
I first got involved as a freshmen through "Carolina Dreams" (a great organization that is built around student-athlete led community service) and over the last couple of years, especially this fall, the men's lacrosse team has become a huge part of what the Kid's Cart is. This entire fall there have been only two weeks when someone on my team has NOT gone to visit the children at the hospital.
Despite what a bystander might intuitively think my biggest challenge as the co-community service coordinator (along with Thomas Wood) is not finding enough guys to fill all these service roles, it is finding enough service roles for my teammates to fill. Of course, everything comes from the top, classic trickle-down: Without the kind of people our coaches are, and the ideas and philosophies they emphasize (Family, Academics then Lacrosse) the drive to give back would not be as strongly instilled in my teammates as it is.
However, back to the story at hand: This is how it has been all fall. My teammates bend over backwards to participate in any kind of community service they can. Just for emphasis, if I attached a "works cited" page to this article, listing off all the people on my team who have volunteered and the places they have volunteered at and what they have done, it would be multiple times longer by itself than this article is.
Enough rambling! Today was one of the best kid's cart visits I've ever done, and I've seen quite a few. The very first room to start us off was a mom and daughter tandem that we saw two weeks ago in the same exact room. Two weeks ago we walked in to see orange and black sheets, a jack-o-lantern on a side table, black cardboard cut-out black cats and every other kind of Halloween themed object that can fit inside a patient's room.
Fast forward two weeks and this same room has become Santa's workshop. There are Christmas lights surrounding the ceiling, stockings on the walls, candy canes, fake snow, and sticky stars all over. Red and green is everywhere. Out of habit I scan for a crackling fireplace and a Christmas Tree, half expecting to see them. Alas, fire and evergreens are not permitted into a patient's room. But ice cream is! She wisely chooses the Nutter Butter. It's a striking and little known statistic, but nine out of 10 doctors at the UNC Children's Hospital recommend Nutter Butters for all pre and post op meals. (Editor's Note: Associate Athletic Communications Director Dave Lohse is 100 percent sure that Logan Corey made that up!).
We speak with the mother and daughter for a while and move on. We luck out this afternoon; every patient seems to be feeling much better than before, which coincidentally I discover is around the time the football team visited earlier in the afternoon. When I find this out, my competitiveness kicks in and I immediately poll every parent and child we visit asking if the lacrosse team or football team were better visitors. They all said we were by far and away the best visitors they've had all week (Note: This is not a scientific poll, the survey may illustrate biased results due to the use of delicious Snickers and Reece's ice cream as bribes for a positive reply).
Every one of the kid's loves the Tar Heels. All of them love UNC sports, and especially basketball. GO HEELS! I know this because one of the patients asked if we played basketball, and when I confirmed that we did in fact play basketball (I forgot to mention it wasn't for the varsity team, mainly recreational) his face LIT up. His parents were not so easily tricked however, as they took a second to scan my "UNC Lacrosse" T-shirt and deduced I had just told a white lie to their child. By visiting all of the children and their families today, I am confident that we did everything in our power for them to forever remain UNC fans.
I, for one, feel that the community service we do as a team, and every time we give back to the community is not anything mandatory or required. It is not a statistic that helps an attackman shoot more accurately or a defensemen pick up more groundballs, it is a debt to this great town we are paying off in the best way we can. Being a student-athlete at UNC is one of the greatest privileges any young man or woman can have, and when I see my teammates and my classmates give back as often as they do, it says a lot about their character, their gratefulness they feel towards the community that surrounds our school, and ultimately for their love of Blue Heaven.
Logan Corey is a junior midfielder from Chapel Hill, N.C. and a Chapel Hill High School graduate in 2008. Logan is one of the team's leaders in community service, being referred to by junior teammate Thomas Wood as the CEO of UNC's community service program. Associate Athletic Communications Director Dave Lohse wants to thank Logan for his contribution to TarHeelBlue.com.
