Anyone remember the donor who gave all that lacrosse equipment to Patterson High School last June? Anyone? I didn't think so. Even I couldn't remember - and I was really paying attention at the time. Had to look it up.
Turns out, the benefactor was AT&T.
The communications giant was corporate sponsor of the 2007 NCAA lacrosse championships, held at M&T Bank Stadium over the Memorial Day weekend. The company collected used equipment from fans, as well as new equipment from exhibitions and demonstrations at the tournament, then gave it to Patterson High.
Why Patterson?
Because the school's lacrosse program was so poor the players had taken to removing from a memorial wall in their locker room equipment that once belonged to their senior captain, Christopher Clarke.
Clarke was killed after practice one March evening, an innocent bystander in a street shooting near his home in Northeast Baltimore.
His teammates and coach took the gloves, blue helmet, lacrosse stick and blue-and-white No. 24 jersey out of Clarke's locker and fastened them to a bulletin board.
But, equipment being meager and most players unable to afford their own - only six of them had ever touched a lacrosse stick before - the team in time had to take pieces of the memorial to continue playing games.
We reported this in The Sun in May 2007 and, later that month, someone at ESPN remembered the story during a conversation about the equipment collected at the NCAA tournament. That's what led AT&T to make the donation, worth an estimated $5,000, to Patterson's team three weeks later.
There was a brief "media event" June 25, with AT&T officials, Patterson Principal Laura D'Anna, lacrosse coach Jonathan Kehl and three of Clarke's teammates. The Sun covered it and reported the AT&T donation. That's not something we always do but, in this case, we were following our own story.
The point is, media coverage of the donation was not a condition of AT&T making it.
A year later, we have another story about a gift to the kids at Patterson High, and it's not quite as pretty.
Castle Toyota/Scion promised $8,400 worth of scholarships to four Patterson seniors on their way to community college next fall. But the car dealership withdrew the offer after the principal, D'Anna, decided there would be no media coverage of the school's senior awards assembly, where the scholarships were to be presented. As The Sun reported this week, the May 23 assembly took the tone of a memorial service after the school's longtime JROTC instructor died of a heart attack a few days earlier.
