Jason Joyce
Youth football player with Warne Strong patch on jersey.
The Southside Raiders are wearing a patch to remember longtime leader Wayne Strong.
Mist hangs in the air on a recent Saturday morning at Madison’s Penn Park as a couple dozen middle school boys in black football uniforms form a grid and begin to warm up. A few boys — captains — shout cues for the exercises and their teammates join them in crisply counting out the stretches.
These stretches are critical, not just to prepare for running, blocking and tackling, but also for getting in sync as a team. Players counting together, loudly, is a long football tradition, practiced on thousands of fields across the country, from peewee leagues to Division I college stadiums, every Saturday. The sport relies on 11 players executing together with disciplined awareness, and warmups can set a tone of unity.
For Madison’s Southside Raiders, that extends beyond the playing field for kids living in a part of the city traditionally home to low-income families of color. The program fields four teams with players in the fourth through eighth grades. The Raiders also run a cheerleading program and about 20 girls sporting brilliant black-and-white uniforms perform routines on the sideline during games.
“I was at a community event a couple weeks ago and somebody said, ‘I grew up 10 minutes from Penn Park, used to walk down there and watch the games every week. I couldn’t wait until it was my turn to play,’” says Devonte Windham, an assistant coach with the Raiders. “That sense of community has been going for over 50 years now. It’s multi-generational in relation to what it means to a community.”
Windham, an attorney with the Wisconsin State Public Defender office, says the Raiders community has been through a rough year with the death of several people affiliated with the program, among them Wayne Strong, its longtime co-director, who passed away in June. Players are wearing a special patch on their uniforms this season to remember him.
I was fortunate to spend a little time with Strong, a former police officer, on the Penn Park sideline, and in a newsroom when he was a school board candidate. He was friendly and soft-spoken, but direct. The same is true for Isadore Knox, a former Madison Common Council member and retired state and county government worker who ran the Raiders as a co-director with Strong for well over a decade and continues to serve on the board.
Leaders of youth football programs attend to a never-ending list of small details, from hiring referees to buying equipment to fielding calls from parents irritated about playing time. At Penn Park, Knox sets up the down markers and scoreboard, helps a player find a better-fitting helmet and distributes mouthguards. He also greets everyone with a fist bump, grin and kind remark. And he helps raise money so kids from south Madison can play a sport that is only becoming more expensive.
“You know, other programs are losing players, but we’ve been growing,” he tells me on one of his many trips up and down the sideline.
At the end of the game — an exciting, last-minute victory by the Raiders over an east-side team — the players huddle where they warmed up a couple hours earlier. Vibrating with pride and adrenaline, they jump up and down in unison, chanting “I got your back!”
“We preach a family mentality from the start,” says Windham. “We talk about holding your brother accountable and that goes for everybody. If I’m five minutes late, I’m going to run a lap as well. Part of that comes with having each other’s back. Be there for each other even when times are tough, build each other up.”
