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Drew Brees and Marshall Faulk Build Football Stadium in New Orleans’ 9th Ward

 
Saints QB and ex-Colt Launch “TEXT THE DREAM” Campaign; Seeks to raise $800,000 by end of the 4th Quarter

TEXT “DREAM” TO 50555

NEW ORLEANS, LA/ MIAMI, FL (Thursday, February 4, 2010) – As the New Orleans Saints prepare to play their first ever Super Bowl in Miami on February 7, Saints Quarterback Drew Brees and Marshall Faulk, New Orleans native and former Indianapolis Colts player, have made a commitment to support a state-of-the-art, free-to-the-public football stadium and track in New Orleans’ 9th Ward.  The campaign seeks to raise the money necessary to complete the project by the end of the Super Bowl’s 4th Quarter.

“This is a time of unparalleled excitement for the city of New Orleans,” says Brees, “but as a city we are still facing challenges.  By texting “DREAM” you are making a commitment to the 9th Ward and the rejuvenation of the city.” 
Donors participate by texting “DREAM” to 50555 and will be asked to confirm a donation of $10.00.  All proceeds will go through The Brees Dream Foundation (www.drewbrees.com) to build the facility, with any additional funds going toward the redevelopment of George Washington Carver High School where the stadium will be built. 
Marshall Faulk, an alumnus of Carver, says, “I grew up in the 9th Ward, so I understand the real effects this stadium can have. Its more than just keeping kids off the street and more than just playing sports–this project can act as a catalyst for the coming together of the community and the redevelopment of this neighborhood.” 
The 9th Ward Field of Dreams, a project started by 24-year-old, New York-native Brian Bordainick, seeks to rejuvenate the decimated neighborhood by using sports as a rallying point for the community.  He began the project 2008 and has already raised $1.1 of the $1.9 million needed to complete the project and counts Nike, the National Football League and the Louisiana Recovery School District among his supporters. He hopes the partnership of Brees and Faulk will bring the project to fruition. 
When asked about the probability of raising the funds in so little time, Brees says, “As a New Orleans resident, I think if this season has proven anything it’s that this city can accomplish anything we put our minds to.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: For media requests, contact Joel Mandina at 504.912.0646 or Joel.Mandina@vice-marketing.com. Drew Brees will not be available for interviews or comments until after the game.
The 9th Ward Field of Dreams is a nonprofit seeking to build a state-of-the-art football field and track in New Orleans’ Upper 9th Ward, one of the areas most decimated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  With the goal of raising $1.8 million dollars, the Field of Dreams seeks to provide a safe, healthy and readily accessible environment for all New Orleanians and sees sports as a way to build and support communities.

Field of Dreams supporters include the National Football League, the New Orleans Saints, Nike, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, and the Louisiana Recovery School District.

For more information please visit www.9thwardfieldofdreams.com

Hope is a game changer.

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His implausible post-Katrina saga is inspiring.

“I never set out to be an athletic director,” he says, “and certainly not a fundraiser or an entrepreneur.’” Read the rest of Sheila Stroups story on Nola.com:
The Can-Do Man

But Bordainick, 24, is now leading a citywide rally to bring a veritable “Field of Dreams” to the battered Upper 9th Ward.

The goal is to build a 1,000-seat football stadium with an eight-lane track for the students at G.W. Carver Senior High School in the 9th Ward, crushed under 10 feet of floodwater during Hurricane Katrina four years ago.

Donations started small — students brought in $2 and $3 checks from their parents — then quickly grew with corporate donations, including a $200,000 grant from the National Football League and $237,000 from Nike. Local attorneys offered pro bono advice. Architects drew up plans for free.

Now the project is heading toward a $2 million goal. Raised so far: $1.25 million.

“It shows we can pull ourselves up from the bootstraps and do something, not just wait around for government funds,” says Ronnie Burns, a New Orleans entrepreneur who has introduced Bordainick to local groups.

The son of educators from Rockland County, N.Y., Bordainick got a dual degree in history and education from the University of Georgia in 2007. After graduating, he spent two months volunteer teaching at a public school in rural Tanzania, learning to connect with children who had next to nothing.

After returning to the USA, while many of his college friends got jobs in finance and sales, Bordainick joined Teach for America and was dispatched to New Orleans. Thin and energetic with a boyish face that makes him appear younger than his age, Bordainick at first struggled to reach his Upper 9th Ward students, he says.

When Carver’s athletic director left in late 2007, Bordainick was offered the position and he quickly accepted, even though he had no prior experience.

“My whole goal was to relate to the kids,” he says. “I thought sports could be an avenue to do that.”

Athletics play a major role in getting students from the Upper 9th Ward out of poverty and into college, Carver football coach Shyrone Carey says. The community is poor and was wrecked by the floods, he says. Rows of abandoned homes still pockmark the neighborhood and the original Carver High sits boarded up and abandoned. Students study in trailers in the parking lot.

Four years since the floods, 37% of residents have returned to the Upper 9th Ward’s Desire neighborhood, where Carver is.

“For most of the kids in this area, two things will bring them long-term success: school and sports,” says Carey, a former Carver running back who later played for Louisiana State University.

As athletic director, Bordainick soon noticed athletes at Carver lacked a lot: no uniforms, no gym, no track, no money. He heard about a $200,000 matching grant offered by the NFL to rebuild football fields and decided to apply. As donations trickled in, he felt his chances dwindle.

A tech-savvy colleague helped him set up a website to draw more donations. Local TV stations heard about his efforts and featured him on the evening news. Donations began stepping up. Nike offered him $100,000. Local architecture firm Eskew+Dumas+Ripple jumped in with free designs, put together over a weekend in December, Bordainick says.

He won the $200,000 NFL grant. Nike has since given an additional $137,000.

Suddenly inundated with funds, Bordainick created a non-profit group and assigned a board of directors to help him manage the project, he says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is out of control,’ ” Bordainick says. “This is really happening.”

Bordainick finished his Teach for America commitment earlier this summer. He says he plans to stay at Carver, monitor the school’s sports programs and continue pushing until the stadium is built.

“We have to get this done,” he says.

Originally published on USATODAY.

By Thom Patterson

(CNN) — High school athletic director Brian Bordainick felt like he’d been shot when he learned the crushing news about his “9th Ward Field of Dreams” project.

Architects who had agreed to help the Katrina battered Carver High School in New Orleans, Louisiana, win an NFL grant to build a $2 million stadium were pulling out — the weekend before a Monday deadline.

The firm apologized, Bordainick said, but it would not be able to provide a design proposal for the facility, which was critical to winning the $200,000 grant.

“I’ve never been shot, but I imagine it felt something similar to that,” said Bordainick, recalling that day in December 2008.

To make matters worse, swarms of news media were gathering at the school to interview the 23-year-old boy wonder — the self-described “youngest high school athletic director in Louisiana” — who was leading an effort to bring Carver’s athletic program back from near death.

“I sucked it up, did the story … and when they left, I picked up the phone book and started calling architects in the city.” Watch update on New Orleans’ schools after Katrina »

In an amazing moment of serendipity and opportunity, an entrepreneur friend of Bordainick’s happened to be at a party and cornered a partner in one of the city’s top architectural firms.

“You’ve got 30 seconds to give your best elevator schpiel you’ve ever given,” Bordainick said he was told.

The target of the elevator schpiel was Steve Dumez, design director for Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, who agreed to help, despite Bordainick’s preposterousplea.

“The one-day turnaround came as a bit of a shock,” Dumez said. “What was crazy about it was trying to pull together an entire design proposal — and that’s just something that doesn’t happen in 24 hours.” Usually such design proposals require as long as a month to complete.

“How could you not get sucked into such an amazing story?” asked Dumez’s partner, Mark Ripple, a 30-year veteran New Orleans architect. “There really isn’t a good outlet in the area where kids can develop skills and self-esteem and all the things that come with a healthy recreation program.”

The next day, the firm organized a small army of construction companies, civil engineers and architects who offered their support. “We got the satellite images and the renderings done in 8 hours,” Bordainick said.

The proposal worked. In March the school learned it had won the NFL grant.

Nike also has backed the project — donating $100,000 and joining thousands of individuals who have offered $1.5 million in pledges, cash and services so far.

All this during one of the nation’s worst-ever economies. Bordainick credits much of the fundraising success to a network of e-mailers who started with a Web site created by a Web-developer-turned-Carver teacher.

He crafted an e-mail touting his “passion for building character through sports,” and “creating something from nothing” while working with “people crazy enough to believe that they have the power to create change.”

“I made it a goal to just e-mail a couple hundred people a day,” he said. “I was teaching and calling people during my lunch break, and trying to get other people to make calls during their lunch break, and e-mailing people and doing all these things to get the word out about what we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish.”

The proposed stadium — which would host football, track, soccer and lacrosse — is just one facet of Carver’s struggle to regain its former self four years after the ravages of Katrina. A perennial football powerhouse, the team re-formed after Bordainick arrived at Carter in 2007, his first year in the Teach for America program.

He touts athletics as “changing the dynamics of the school and having it not be someplace where the bus just drops you off in the morning.”

But four years after the storm, Carver students on the 65-acre campus are still struggling to learn without the benefit of permanent classrooms.

All of Carver’s 530 students — down from more than 1,000 students before the storm — still attend classes in FEMA trailers.

The actual building which used to be the school is now boarded up. The cafeteria is a hollowed-out shell. The school district has plans to rebuild Carver’s classrooms and other facilities, but it’s not clear when.

“If you kick a field goal on one side of our football field — the ball goes into the gym, which was condemned after the storm,” said Bordainick. “And, if you kick a field goal on the other side, it goes into a house which was knocked off its foundation from Katrina.” The track team, he said, now practices on nearby city streets.

Last season, the Carver Rams failed to win a single game. But many fans, school officials and alumni are hoping the proposed stadium will increase pride and confidence for the revitalized team and student fans.

“If we give kids some constructive things to be involved in — guide them and give them discipline, we can help them achieve their dreams,” said Charles Webb, a project board member and 1965 Carver quarterback. “It’ll bring back pride the way it used to be.”

“With a sense of pride and teamwork, anything can happen,” said Carver head football coach Shyrone Carey.

Carey — a standout running back for Louisiana State University from 2001 to 2005 — arguably couldn’t have chosen a more challenging post as his first head coaching job than rebuilding Carver from the ground up.

“The overall motivation that comes from athletics is an overall lifelong lesson,” said Carey, who’s pushing his players hard in advance of a big game Saturday. “If you make the right decisions then positive things can come.”

Backers of the 9th Ward Field of Dreams hope to break ground sometime next year and complete construction in time for the 2010 football season.

Supporters are trying to bolster support by offering the stadium for use as a free jogging track and a venue for middle school sporting events.

“If we’re able to lock sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in at a younger age, we’ll be able to train and get them into mentors’ hands so they’re able lead a more successful life, ultimately,” Bordainick said.

“This school — and these children overcoming the odds stacked against them — can be a real catalyst for rebirth in this city,” Bordainick said. “I think it can be something that people can look to, and something that people can rally behind.”

Originally Published on CNN