By Tiffany Lindeborn

For the past 34 years, Mr. Larry “Gator” Rivers has been coaching people of all ages. After his days as a Harlem Globetrotter, Gator decided to give back. He went from coaching elementary school children to an all white girls high school team. Today Gator holds basketball classes at the Jewish Educational Alliance Community Center in Savannah Georgia. Gator also works with other youth programs including S.H.A.D.O.W. The pictures from this post show Gator working with some of the S.H.A.D.O.W. teammates in an informal setting.

At the beginning of each class, the kids practice catching, throwing and handling the ball. As Gator walks down the line he works with each kid to make sure they understand the correct motions and succeed at the given task. The first time I witnessed Gator helping each kid I thought nothing of it. He was a coach teaching his kids how to play basketball. It wasn’t until I joined his class and personally experienced his one on one approach. After several failed attempts at this particular task, Gator worked with me until I got it and I felt a sense of accomplishment and was no longer afraid to fail in front of others.

I realized it wasn’t just about learning the game of basketball. Gator was teaching these kids how to handle themselves, both alone and within a group. He instills in them what it means to work as a team, to share the spotlight and not be greedy. His drills teach kids how to make decisions⎯the right decisions to succeed. In the final minutes of each class, Gator brings all the players into a team huddle. On this particular day, Gator asked everyone to give me a round of applause for coming out and playing basketball with them. The Players, coaches, siblings and parents all clapped their hands. Then we put our hands together and shouted, “A team that won’t be beat, can’t be beat. Can we do it? Yes we can!”

I was no longer the SCAD student gathering research, or the oldest player on the court. I was part of the team. Gator taught me a very valuable lesson that Sunday afternoon. I learned that you can watch and observe from the sidelines all you want, but you will never fully understand the impact he has on people until you stand on the court.

As a part of a graduate class in Graphic Design class called The Role of Design in Social Awareness, Tiffany is contributing in an effort to celebrate the assests of Waters Avenue. The class has identified 3 pillars—Gator being one, Jerome Meadows being another, and Sidney Johnson (who will be featured in the coming days) is the third.

They have also identified several demographic groups who have not been celebrated enough along Waters: the long-term elderly residents; the youth, and the business owners. Members of each of these sectors are presently being interviewed, videoed, and photographed, as well as being invited to engage in self-documentation proccesses that will be familiar to anyone who has read documents like IDEO’s Human Centered Design toolkit.