Buffalo Bills players ran drills at the Bills Gatorade Junior Training Camp on June 18 for 200 children at the Johnnie B. Wiley Amateur Athletic Pavilion in Buffalo. The athletic pavilion was a recent recipient of a $200,000 grant.
The Gatorade Junior Training Camp is a non-contact interactive football program that is designed to stress the importance of physical fitness, good sportsmanship and teamwork for boys and girls between the ages of eight and twelve years old. The children were from the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center.
Bills players Kyle Calloway, Naaman Roosevelt, Antonio Coleman, Ed Wang, Brett Johnson, Donald Jones, Sean Allen, David Nelson, Dominique Harris and John Destin assisted with different football stations which included wide receiver, defensive back, quarterback, linebacker and running back drills.
The Gatorade Junior Training Camp is a part of the Buffalo Bills Play 60 program which encourages children to be physically active for 60 minutes every day.
"It's so important for the kids to stay fit and exercise each day and today was such a good example of fun exercise," said Harris. "Exercise doesn't have to be something boring, it can be really interactive and fun and I think the kids learned that today."
Some of the children participating in the camp surprised Bills rookie offensive lineman Ed Wang when they sang to him in Chinese.
"My favorite part of the day was when a fourth-grade class sang to me in Chinese," said Wang. "They sang 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' and did really well!"
The National Football League, Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) provided the Johnnie B. Wiley Amateur Athletic Sports Pavilion with a $200,000 grant. The grant was used for the installation of an artificial turf field for football and soccer at the facility.
The NFL Grassroots Field Grant Program provides non-profit, neighborhood-based organizations and high schools with financial and technical assistance to improve the quality, safety and accessibility of football fields in underserved areas of NFL markets. A partnership between the Youth Football Fund and Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the program makes available matching grants up to $200,000 for capital improvement projects including field surface grants and general field support.
