Hoover High’s track coach teaches youth spiritual strength, how to run for Christ
- Aug 26, 2008 - comment
It’s not every day that you find a high school coach who writes weekly encouragement letters to his players. Then again, it’s not every day you find one like Devon Hind.
Hind, the track and field coach at Hoover High School, writes each student on his track team a letter that highlights results and has an inspirational message. Then, when students get ready for graduation, Hind presents each student with a binder filled with the letters that he wrote them during their high school track careers.
Hind, who is a deacon at Green Valley Baptist Church, Hoover, in Birmingham Baptist Association, has impacted numerous lives through his encouragement on and off the track.
“He teaches you not to settle,” said Christopher Smith, a past member of Hind’s track team who is now a fifth-year senior at Samford University in Birmingham. “Whatever you do, (he tells you to) do your best at it.”
Hind has not only impacted the lives of his players, though, he has spent time with students who were struggling in school, he has prayed with students who were going through trials in life and he has offered up himself whenever someone has a need.
“He would help kids out who were struggling with grades or family issues, whether they had him (as a teacher) or not,” Smith said. “He was always there talking to somebody or helping them out.”
Smith said many times after practice there would be a student waiting by Hind’s door ready to talk or get tutored. Many times, students would show up early in the morning to have him pray with them.
“A lot of students come to ask me to pray for their mother, father, brother or sister,” Hind said. “Sometimes we will stop right there in front of the track and pray. I think they appreciate the fact that I am real, that I care for them.”
Hind also has opened up his home to students and families who needed a place to stay. Last year, after a foreign exchange student’s host family sold their house in Hoover and were moving to a different school system, Hind offered the student a place to call home.
“He was in a panic because he didn’t want to change school districts,” Hind said.
A few years ago he and his family invited a mother and her four children to stay with them for a while. “Someone had broken into her house and raped her in front of her kids,” he said. “She couldn’t go back to that house and didn’t have anywhere to go.”
Though Hind is generous, don’t mistake him for a softy.
“He was as competitive as any of us,” Smith said.
Hind, though, understands what real winning is.
“He would break down in tears of joy if one of the lower kids made an improvement,” Smith said. “Even if the kid was still in the back of the pack.”
Hind, who also teaches health at Hoover High School, is not known as an easy teacher either.
“I am told I am a hard teacher. I don’t feel like I am a hard teacher, but they say I am,” he said. “I don’t take excuses. I guess the fact that I mean what I say makes me hard. I don’t do extra credit — there isn’t extra credit in the real world.”
Smith said students at Hoover High School want to live up to the expectations Hind has for them, even though they are hard to reach. “There are a lot of really good teachers, but with Coach Hind you felt more of an attachment to him,” he said. “You wanted to do well because you didn’t want him to be disappointed in you.”
Those high standards come from Hind’s relationship with Jesus Christ.
“I … preach at them all of the time, not about Christ, but about the things that He would expect out of them,” Hind said. “I don’t say ‘This is what Jesus would want for you,’ but I teach Christ’s moral standards without telling them who the authority is.”
Hind’s wife, Mary, describes her husband as influential. Students seem to respond to him very well, she said. “He instills in them that they need to have good morals and a good outlook on life.”
Rhonda Freeman, the children’s minister at Green Valley Baptist, said Hind uses his job to teach kids about running a different kind of race than the one on the track.
“Devon uses the job to teach people about running the race — the race that Scripture talks about,” she said.
Last year, Hind was recognized at Hoover High School with the Finley Award, an award named after Bob Finley, a coach with high moral standards and strong character who died on the field.
“I was overwhelmed that so many people would think me worthy of that,” Hind said.
But others agree he is definitely worthy. “That is the kind of person I want to be one day,” Smith said.
This article is reprinted from the August 7, 2008, issue of The Alabama Baptist, the newspaper of the Alabama Baptist State Convention.