Conducted by Andrew Pearlmutter

Tyrone Keys, a former career NFL football player from the 1986 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears, is the founder and director of All Sports Community Service, a prominent community service organization in Tampa, Florida.

All Sports Community Service has been a major service organization in the Tampa Bay area for many years, and is an important part of your life. Who or what inspired you to create All Sports Community Service?

Well, I was part of an informal mentoring program during high school. At that time, I met a gentleman by the name of Odell Jenkins. He had come to my high school as a football coach, and saw a lot of potential in me. He quickly became a father figure to me; he was the guy who helped me and a lot of other students in the community develop a game plan for college and beyond. He had helped a lot of others get onto college football teams and eventually play professionally, so his guidance greatly helped me. He was the one who showed me the importance of giving back to the community, which was a big part of why I founded All Sports. He and I have stayed in touch for the last 30 years, and we’re actually working together on starting several mentoring programs for students in Jackson, Mississippi to keep Odell’s dream of helping students in that community alive. For the past three years, one of those projects has even included a trip to Washington, DC, to take some of our students to the JC Watts leadership program. Odell was a big influence in my life, and it was his mentoring that inspired within me a desire to mentor others and give back, which is what I feel is the purpose of All Sports and groups like it.    

All Sports Community Service has a great deal of committed volunteers. How has All Sports become such a successful organization at recruiting and maintaining such a large, dedicated volunteer force?

My personal belief that what you do for others will come back to you was the basis of the vision I had for All Sports and its volunteers. My belief with All Sports was that the student volunteers, who would themselves be mentored, would come back when they could to help others through mentoring and volunteering. This is exactly what I have done with Coach Jenkins and his students over the years; whenever I would go back home to Mississippi, I would come by and talk with his students and help them. I work with the student volunteers at All Sports, and, as time goes on, they continue to return and give back as mentors themselves. That was the vision for this group, and that is how our volunteer force stays strong.

Your community service organization sponsors a plethora of projects in your community, including activities at local children’s homes, mentoring programs for students in local schools, and work with other groups such as the Special Olympics. What do you feel are some of the most significant benefits of these projects for each of those groups? How do such projects also benefit the volunteers?

In 1985 I was traded to the Chicago Bears, and that year we organized a Thanksgiving drive and delivered Thanksgiving baskets to some of the less fortunate in the community. Having a chance to go out there and help so many people that holiday gave me a really special feeling, and that experience for me best expresses what I feel community service does for its volunteers. Groups such as All Sports help their volunteers have meaningful experiences giving back, and give young high school students the chance to earn service scholarships and be mentored. The projects themselves can benefit the less fortunate in all kinds of ways, depending on the project. Community service really benefits both the volunteers and the community, and is a great way to bring people of all different backgrounds, races, religions, and ethnicities together for a common purpose.

How do high school students that you have mentored typically become involved with All Sports?

All Sports has just finished its 13th year working in the community, and so many of its current volunteers have actually become involved through former students. All Sports has greatly benefited from having many former volunteers who have become teachers, coaches, assistant principals, and principals in local high schools, and so these former students are now formalizing after-school programs in their schools to allow high school students the opportunity to work in service projects that All Sports has. My theory is that a lot of service programs fail early on because they work too much with a lot of students who are not motivated enough, instead of focusing on working more closely with fewer students who are strongly motivated, which is what we are trying to do through working with the local high schools and the alumni of All Sports at these schools.

Many high school students are coming to realize that, while acquiring strong academic knowledge is very important, other, more experiential forms of ‘real-world’ education are in some cases equally important to their development as individuals. How important is community service to a rich high school education?

Well, education alone is not enough. If education alone were enough, everyone with a great education would be at peace and happy, which is not the case. There is something beyond education that gives our lives meaning, and I would say that something is the heart and desire within each of us to do something good for somebody else. We feel that the role of a volunteer organization is to provide an opportunity for students to give back through service projects in order to satisfy this equally important drive that we have. It builds a character that education alone cannot; when enter into a truly selfless cause, and you see that someone else is in a worse situation than you are, you realize that all that you’ve had to complain about in your life is nothing, and that helps us to learn and develop as people. While education is valuable and important, there are some things you have to experience outside of the traditional classroom to fully grasp.

An increasingly controversial issue throughout many school districts across the United States is the issue of compulsory community service. Would requiring students to participate in community service undermine the altruistic nature of volunteerism, or teach them about its benefits?

One of the things I would say it’s not about what you mandate, it’s what you make of the mandate. Colleges are looking for the extra mile in community service, not just at whether or not students participate. So if it is required, it still is up to the students whether they treat community service as valuable, or just something to do for college. That’s how life is; when I played football, I played on three championship teams and one bad team, and the difference was that, on the bad team, the players and coaches did just enough to get their paychecks, and so they never went far, while on the good teams, we went the extra mile in practice and it paid off. Students involved with community service will continue either to do the bare minimum, or go the extra mile, and colleges will notice students who are in it for the wrong reasons. So all we would be doing in mandating community service is giving more students the opportunity to experience its important benefits and then they can go the extra mile with it if they choose to.
    
To what extent should high schools be involved in the realm of community service? Should high schools mandate community service?

I do feel that there are certain things that you have to mandate to benefit students. If we are able to mandate certain subjects for school that students have to take for their well-being, then community service should be a core part of that curriculum. And it shouldn’t just be community service through school clubs. It should be a core part of the classroom curriculum just like any other subject. Such a class would teach you different types of projects you could do, so your view of volunteerism isn’t limited. More importantly, it would teach you how to appreciate the way others around you have to live and would allow high school students to develop a lifelong empathy for their fellow citizens, and that is what America is all about. If we want America to continue to be what it has been, we have to maintain the value of community, and the quickest way that society can begin to produce caring individuals willing to come together to help others can be within the four walls of the classroom, provided that they are also made to apply these lessons outside of those walls and in their communities.

Florida’s Bright Futures Scholarship program currently gives academically successful Florida students tuition money for in-state public colleges and universities. To be eligible for the highest tuition coverage plans, Florida mandates that students complete 75 hours of community service in addition to maintaining high grades. Does this requirement serve as an effective mechanism for creating a culture of dedicated volunteerism among Florida’s youth?

I definitely think so. A number of students that I have met and worked with are students that I would never have met had that requirement not been in place. Community service puts you around like-minded individuals, and those students, once involved, continue to come to projects well after they had fulfilled their requirements, which shows they learned the value of community service and grew because of it. Just recently we had a carwash benefit and several of our volunteers and local high school football players from around the community came out to help, and they didn’t have to, didn’t need to, but they did it because they wanted to make a difference. And many of those kids I wouldn’t have met without this requirement.
 
Florida in particular has a unique educational system in that it rates its public schools on an A-F scale based on factors such as test scores, the number of students graduating to the next grade, and other school-specific criteria. More importantly, it has a controversial “voucher” program that allows students in schools with failing letter grades the option of going to a private school of their choice for free.  If community service were to be mandated, should it become one of the standards that Florida uses to determine grades for its high schools, and hence distribution of school vouchers?

I would like to see that happen, because in life, outside of school you’re not just measured on the knowledge you are given, but on your real-world application of knowledge. Since community service is such a great way for students to learn about the world and see that they matter in the world around them, the quality of the service programs provided by a high school should become an important factor in determining the quality of the education that the students are receiving. And since it is such an important part of their development, if schools are not providing their students with good service-based opportunities, than students ought to be able to get that elsewhere.

What advice do you have for high school students and young adults currently wanting to become involved in community service?

There is nothing better in life than being able to serve others who are less fortunate than you. Go there, get involved, and be a selfless instrument for those you are helping there. Don’t go with any ulterior motives and go there with strictly unconditional love. Go to the project or activity willing to be a part of a team and just give with all your heart, and you’ll be blessed for it.

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