SPIRE Summer 2019

Antonio Dawkins sitting where he would sometimes sleep in the Fort Mill boys locker room (Karisa Maxwell/ Sporting News).

“ There were a lot of times I thought about what was going to happen once I got out of practice, where I was going to go... ” –Antonio Dawkins

ANTONIO DAWKINS: From Homeless to College Grad and Beyond (cont’d)

Dawkins acknowledges he wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t opened up to his Fort Mill coaches and teammates. And, he said, he wouldn’t be here without football. Off the field, Dawkins kept quiet, at least about his home life. On it, there was no one louder. He loved the feeling of belonging that Fort Mill’s football team provided him. He loved lining up at cornerback, jawing with the receivers against whom he faced off every day in practice. Those few hours after school were a precious distraction. During the day, Dawkins worried about how he’d get home after school, or where he’d stay for the night. He worried about finding something to eat, or maintaining secrecy about his homelessness. Those problems disappeared on the practice field. But not always, and never entirely. “There were a lot of times I thought about what was going to happen once I got out of practice, where I was going to go and stuff like that,” Dawkins said. “The moments that I started thinking about that during practice, I would have a bad practice.” It was in one such moment that former Fort Mill defensive coordinator Bill Geiler pulled Dawkins to the side. “Coach Geiler told me, ‘Sink or swim,’ and it’s stuck with me since,” Dawkins said. “He just told me, ‘It’s either you sink or swim.’ You be successful or you become like everybody else that you have

seen. I don’t have too many options. It’s either I be different, I go to college, I do my thing, or I become a failure.

proud,” said Susi, now offensive coordinator at Lancaster (S.C.) High School. “That’s a very tough thing for any high school kid to do - to say, ‘Hey coach, I haven’t eaten, I haven’t taken a shower, I haven’t done this or that.’” Coaches made sure to load Dawkins down with protein bars during breakfast and lunch. Before Freeman lost her job, he’d get rides from coaches, or they’d give gas money to teammates so they could drive him home. In the spring semester of Dawkins’ senior year at Fort Mill, Freeman was able to find work again. That allowed her to rent a house just across the street from the school. They sometimes went without power, or water, or heat. It didn’t matter: Together, they called it home.

“I told him, ‘I want to swim.’”

It was one day after practice that coaches finally got the sense of Dawkins’ struggle. They asked players whether any leaders wanted to address the team. Dawkins stood up in front of teammates to speak, but found he couldn’t. His body was seizing up, betraying the secret he’d tried to keep. Not long after, Dawkins sat down with Geiler and Fort Mill coach Ed Susi to explain his situation. “We were like, ‘What do we got to do to help this kid,’ because he was very

Antonio Dawkins outside the home his mother used to rent when he was in high school (Karisa Maxwell/Sporting News).

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