Reservation for a Clinic

The idea was born at a dinner table in January 1996. In Baltimore for a Dartmouth Club event, Nick Lowery '78 listened as Allison Barlow '86, program director for the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian and Alaskan Native Health, described health on the reservation, where young people desperately need role models to steer them away from drugs, alcohol, and gangs, and toward staying in school. "Nick just said, 'Tell me what I can do,'" recalls Barlow.

That June, Loweryin partnership with Barlow's organization and aided by seven other NFL players—hosted 90 youngsters for a two-day football and life skills camp on fche-Navajo Reservation in Chinle, Arizona. "We were there to show them we care," says Lowery, NFL tecord-holding place kicker. "We talked about role models and discipline and hard work, that fitness matters and that those kids matter."

This past June the camp swelled to 17 NFL players and 175 teens from eight states and some ten tribes. Partly to include girls, the clinic added a soccer component, with help from Todd Beane '86, an indoor pro soccer player with the Reno Rattlers. Next year the program, cited at the President's Summit for America's Future, will be on the Gila River reservation outside Phoenix and bigger than ever.

Youngsters got a kick out of Todd Beane '86.