Fund-Raising Teamwork Saves a Football Rivalry

Some good news...from an article of the same title in the NY Times by Bruce Lambert:

Friday night's season opener pitting the Cold Spring Harbor Seahawks against their perennial championship archrival, the Roosevelt Rough Riders, is the football game that almost didn't happen. The Seahawks come from a wealthy white Long Island district with top-rated schools, while the Rough Riders live in a working-class community of blacks and Hispanics whose dysfunctional schools forced a state takeover in 2002. Four years ago Cold Spring Harbor officials canceled the Seahawks' trip 14 miles south to play Roosevelt, citing safety concerns after an off-campus shooting in the community, unrelated to the school or its athletics, killed a youth. The teams resumed playing the next season amid hurt feelings, but their annual face-off was jeopardized this spring when Roosevelt's budget troubles eliminated the district's entire interscholastic sports program. Then members of the Seahawks' booster club began sending in donations, adding to the $15,000 that Roosevelt parents had managed to raise. A Seahawks captain, Peter Ottaviano, and a few teammates went to Roosevelt's turf to join their rivals in fund-raising car washes. And at the end of August, an anonymous businessman from Cold Spring Harbor sent an eye-popping $20,000, just in time for the school board to reinstate the football program before classes resumed. "Well, bless them," Ebene Gabaud, 17, a Rough Riders linebacker and captain, said this week. "Basically, without them, we wouldn't have a season."