Aaron Davis and A.J. Cole III have never lined up against each other in a football stadium, but both players are on the same special squad off the field, having been named to the 2017 Allstate AFCA Good Works Team based on their extracurricular charity work.
Davis, who graduated from Luella High School in Henry County, plays safety for the Georgia Bulldogs. Cole, a College Park native who attended Woodward Academy, is the punter for North Carolina State University’s Wolfpack. They are among 22 college players named to the Good Works Team, sponsored by Allstate Insurance and the American Football Coaches Association.
The end of this football season will also mark the end of Aaron Davis’s tenure at UGA. He already completed a degree in finance but is using his last semester of eligibility to take courses in computer systems engineering.
Davis began volunteering for a variety of community service organizations through the Student Athletic Advisory Committee. He’s helped install smoke detectors in mobile home parks, handed out supplies and advice to elementary students, visited patients at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and participated in programs to reduce bullying and domestic violence.
Davis says one of his most meaningful experiences was helping the Georgia Lions Lighthouse Foundation provide vision screenings to low-income children who might need glasses or surgery. “That really touched me,” he says.
He has also been involved with Special Olympics. Spending time with kids who delight in the pure fun of sports “allowed me to humble myself and connect with them,” he says.
He acknowledges that some athletes don’t always behave in exemplary ways. But Davis says “coming together as a team should be the first initiative” when confronting poor behavior, and intervening whenever possible.
Cole’s community work began when he went on a high school mission trip to Mexico to help build houses. Through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, he signed up to go to Nakura, Kenya, to volunteer at Mountain Park Academy. There, nearly 1,000 students — some of them orphans — attend classes supported by donations.
Cole says seeing students struggle to take notes in the margins of scrap newspapers using pencils they must sharpen with knives was a stark contrast to his ability to attend classes with air conditioning and laptops.
“They have so much less and want so much more,” he says. “That’s their avenue for success.” The stakes are high: only about 10 percent of eighth graders go to high school, and only about 10 percent of those attend college.
Playing sports with the kids, sharing Bible study with the teachers and helping the students with their English are all part of his annual spring break. Cole plans to graduate in 2018 with a degree in industrial and systems engineering, but he’s learned life lessons in Kenya, too.
“You realize how much you really have, and how much you don’t really need,” he says.
Football players put a lot of energy into getting the ball past the uprights. But players like these who do good works off the field are the uprights.
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