Participants in the annual Chad Greenway Football Camp learn a lot about playing the game during the traditional two days of drills.
But Greenway, a former Minnesota Vikings linebacker, and his fellow coaches also stress that there’s a lot more to life than football.
That message came through again this year as campers gathered near the end of the camp Thursday at S.R. Knutson Field in Hutchinson for a special ceremony to honor the memory of a former Litchfield football player and his family.
Dustin and Michelle Falling, parents of 16-year-old Dylan Falling, who died in a car crash in June, and Dylan’s sister, Morgan, accepted a $5,000 donation from the camp to a scholarship fund established in Dylan’s name.
“It means the world,” Dustin Falling said about the scholarship. “We're not even from Hutchinson, and just to have people that we don't know, many we do, many we don't, but come support us and do things that they don't need to do. But to step up and do things like that, you know, not only for the scholarship, but we're also starting the One Foundation for Dylan's number as a goaltender. We're going to continue helping kids that need help.”
It's tradition during the camp to make a donation to an individual or family in the area. After Dylan Falling’s death, camp organizer Chad Harlander, a Hutchinson teacher, knew the Fallings would be good recipients. As a parent, he said, seeing someone else lose their child made him want to do anything he could to help the family.
The donation was one of the things that was similar to past camps, while much had to be adjusted this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Where the camp normally is a two-day affair, the 12th annual Chad Greenway Football Camp was reduced to just one day.
“In a normal year, we'd come back tomorrow and those relationships that we create on Day 1 get to expand on Day 2,” Greenway said Thursday. “Maybe you're getting to know somebody you didn't even know within your own community. That's really special, so it's harder to accomplish that, but I think we did as good of a job as we could by abiding by the rules.”
Harlander wasn't sure if there would even be a camp this year with COVID-19. He had parents calling and sending emails asking about the camp. Normally, there are around 500 kids that show up, but this year it was capped at 225. But Harlander was determined to have some sort of camp, no matter how different it might be.
“When I talked to Chad (Greenway), we wanted to push through this and to honor that theme we had this year and that was perseverance,” Harlander said.
It took a lot of people to say yes to Harlander to put the camp together. He even sent out a survey to parents asking them if they still wanted the camp, and if they felt comfortable with it.
“Every response that we got from our families in the survey is 100 percent, let's make this work, we're going to respect guidelines.” he said.
