Title is a tad bit misleading, I highly doubt I'll be posting daily in this. Nonetheless, I decided to stop filling my other books with news articles and such so I've created this one. In this book I'll be sharing articles, stories, and sometimes pi...
Safety pins, a pair of size 17 sneakers, and Brady from Nike customer service.
That doesn't sound like the recipe for a heart-warming success story, but those were the linchpins to a life-changing moment for Palm Springs freshman basketball player Camrin Hampton.
The every-day heroes in the story are two selfless men, strangers until two weeks ago, who combined old-fashioned compassion and new-fangled technology to alter the direction of a young athlete's life.
MEET CAMRIN HAMPTON
Hampton is a Muslim. She lost her mother at an early age and moved in with her sister when she was five years old. Her sister followed the Islamic religion and therefore so too does Hampton.
Now a teenager on the Palm Springs freshman basketball team, Hampton, in keeping with Muslim tradition, wears a hijab – a cloth head-covering – in public, including during her basketball games.
That's been a problem for her because the silk or cotton ones she wears every day at school don't stay on during the rough and tumble action of a girls' basketball game. She has to use safety pins to hold it in place and even then it moves around a lot or her long hair sneaks out of it and flops around in her face.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Camrin Hampton, a freshman at Palm Springs High School, smiles seconds after receiving and putting.
Courtesy of Bryan Stephens
The problem came to a head during an early season game when one of the officials said she couldn't play with safety pins in her hair, considering it to be dangerous in the same way that basketball players are not allowed to wear rings, or necklaces or earrings.
Taking the pins out made playing all but impossible, so a bummed out Hampton sat out most of the rest of that game.
"I don’t know what they thought I was gonna do with the safety pin, but the refs told me I couldn't have them on the court," Hampton said. "It was a white (hijab) that I wore and I don't know the material exactly, but it was very silky and slippery so I needed something to hold it in place."
Also in the gym that night was Bryan Stephens. Stephens is the Palm Springs JV boys' basketball coach and works at the school as a behavioral support specialist in the therapeutic educational program, which helps the emotionally disabled students at the school.
Anyway, we'll call him what the students call him, Coach B.
Coach B saw what happened to Hampton that night and even heard the refs on the phone, calling their supervisors to find out how to handle it. He saw Hampton's smile fade away and it stuck with him.
COACH B AND BRADY
A few weeks later in mid-January, Coach B, a 6-foot, 11-inch mountain of a man, was online at Nike.com looking to add to his sneaker collection. He was checking out the latest styles in size 16 or 17 and up popped "Brady" one of those "Nike Expert" assistants you can chat with in message form while you shop.
