CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) The Austin Peay football team recently took time to help the Lincoln Homes community. In a joint venture between the Austin Peay athletics department and the Clarksville Housing Authority, the team spent Wednesday afternoon hanging out with children in Lincoln Homes and cleaning up trash.
Haley Randell, the sustainability coordinator for the Austin Peay physical plant, had been working to schedule monthly trash pick-ups around the Austin Peay campus. “Once we realized it would be the whole football team, we felt it would make a more meaningful impact if we went out into the community,” Randell said. “Lincoln Homes is right next door, so it just kind of organically happened.”
The team split into eight different groups, and each focused on a specific area for picking up litter. A few kids from Lincoln Homes joined each group of players. After cleaning up their designated area, the players had the opportunity to play basketball, throw footballs, and play on the playground with the kids who came out.
The student-athletes, along with Randell, The Housing Staff, and APSU Athletics staff picked up between 20 and 30 large garbage bags worth of litter and enjoyed a day of play with the kids in the community, but at the end of the day their impact on the community of Lincoln Homes runs much deeper than that. The connections they built can last a lifetime.