WHS players raise funds with foul shots
By Bill Cain

It was either this or go through the grueling task of washing car after car for hours on end. For several reasons, Watauga girls’ basketball coach Todd Dixon preferred this method of fund raising.

When his girls’ basketball program was figuring out how to raise some money, he said the decision to go with a foul-shooting fund raiser that would share its proceeds with the Boston Cure Project was a no-brainer. The charity funds research in an attempt to find a cure for multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease which Dixon said affects members of and friends to the girls’ basketball community.

“We did a pretty good job of raising money for something that is not only important for a lot of people out there, but important to this team,” he said. “We’ve got a couple kids, one who has a parent with MS and one who has a grandfather with MS and almost everybody in there knows someone with it.”

Another reason to try this type of fund raiser is that it requires nothing more than soliciting of sponsors and then shooting of free throws, which also helps improve the team’s performance on the court. A car wash or bake sale, which would likely yield a small fraction of the $5,264.30 the team had turned in so far, would have required more preparation, possibly an off-campus site and, perhaps the biggest deterrent, some degree of manual labor.

The team cut a check for $2,500 to the Boston Cure Project, an amount that was more than half of the money turned in at the time. Since then, more has rolled in and the team ended up with a hefty portion for its program.

Many charity-sponsored events give the team hosting the event a larger amount than they take for themselves, sometimes nearer 75 percent than 50, but this event was not run through the charity and Dixon said he decided it would be better to donate around 50 percent to the charity.

“It’s just what popped into my head,” he said. “I wanted to make sure we were not only making money for ourselves and making money for a charity, but to give the girls a sense of duty. There’s more out there than just basketball and books and boys and all those kinds of things. There’s a duty to community and to service and I thought this was a great way to handle that.”

The event is one that Dixon hopes to repeat each year and he said he will challenge the girls in the program to raise more than they had each previous year. He added that the charity they work for will likely remain the same because of how close to home the disease has hit within the program.

In this inaugural event, the girls didn’t take to the solicitation end of it right away, Dixon said.

“It started cold,” he said. “I don’t think they understood what we were doing completely. Some of them felt awkward. Over the first couple weeks, they would say, ‘It’s weird asking people for money.’ But once someone came in and said they already had 15 sponsors and were already sponsored for $300, then the competition started again.”

In the end, the three highest fund raisers were Michelle Rainey, a junior at Watauga, with $780; Sarah Miller, an eighth-grader from Appalachian Christian, with $621.60; and Alanna Calloway, an eighth-grader also from Appalachian Christian, with $525.30.

That competition extended into the actual free throw shooting. Ashlyn Baird hit 179 of her 200 free throws (89.5 percent) and Heather Trexler hit 171 (85.5 percent).

“That makes me very happy, I hope we get fouled a lot next year,” Dixon said. “That’s the fun part. When you get on the line, that one free throw makes a lot more of a difference than it does in a game because there’s some importance behind it. Not only as far as community service goes, but there’s someone beside you who hit nine of 10 and you want to hit 10 of 10, so it brings up the competition level and hopefully raises a little more money for our charity.”

Dixon was quick to recognize that it was not just his girls who raised this money, but a supportive community that not only pledged a lot of money, but gave more than they pledged.

“The great thing about it was that the community was great and really accepted these girls and knew what was going on,” he said. “If someone’s total came to $28.30 that a sponsor owed, the sponsor would right a check for $30. The community went above and beyond what they told the girls they would sponsor them for, and that was nice to see.”