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Steelers kicker Kris Brown coaches kids to 'never, never give up'
Wednesday, November 07, 2001 By L.A. Johnson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Kris Brown's kicks may have swung wide Sunday, but his message of perseverance in the face of adversity made it through the uprights yesterday at Seneca Valley Middle School.
As Brown stood before a capacity crowd in the school auditorium, he likened the din there to the roar at Heinz Field before a Steelers game. The 1,300 students welcomed the recently vanquished hero with more cheers than jeers, thunderous applause, and the thwack, thwack, thwack of Terrible Towels in full whip and whirl.
Brown, 24, missed three field goals and had a fourth deflected in Sunday's 13-10 loss to the Baltimore Ravens.
"What happened Sunday?" asked a student right off the bat in a question-and-answer session before the big assembly. "Was the wind bad?"
"Hey, it was a bad day," said Brown, who is in his third season with the Steelers. "The hard part for me was letting my teammates down. It cost us the game."
Brown's visit to the Harmony, Butler County, school was the grand prize a group of 140 pupils earned last school year as part of Junior Achievement's Kickin' for Kids program. Through the program, students pick a particular Steelers game and collect money pledges for each point the place-kicker scores in that game. The Seneca Valley group raised close to $1,000 to earn the assembly for their school. Scheduling conflicts prevented the assembly from taking place in the spring. The money goes toward the school's Junior Achievement programs.
And, as luck would have it, the lesson of Sunday's defeat fed into Brown's message to the youngsters.
He told them everyone faces trials and tribulations at some point in life, and it's how a person responds to and overcomes those challenges that matters most.
"Are you going to be a person who just feels sorry for themselves and says, 'That's just the way it is,' or are you going to work harder and overcome it?" said Brown, a Dallas native who attended the University of Nebraska on a football scholarship.
"My degree is the most important thing I've done," said Brown, an academic all-American as well as a member of two football national championship teams at Nebraska.
He stressed the importance of getting an education to lay a solid foundation for the future. Brown said his secondary education degree will come in handy when he no longer plays football. He also urged the students to set good examples for others, set goals to achieve their dreams, work extremely hard in whatever they choose to do and, in the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, never, never, never give up."
The smaller group of students who met with Brown before the big assembly also got to line up for autographs. Armed with everything from Steelers caps to commemorative picture books to Post-It-size pieces of notebook paper and T-shirts, each approached the long table and slid paper, poster, Terrible Towel, game program or football toward Brown.
"Would you sign the center?" asked one gangly and giggly blonde girl as she shoved a sheet of typing paper across the table at Brown. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," he said.
Off to the side, another girl in a blue and white "Athletic Dept." T-shirt admired the autograph she'd just gotten.
"I think it's really, really cool to get a football player here," said seventh-grader Jessica Charlier, 12, of Zelienople.
Her friend, who was "too afraid" to actually get Brown's autograph, agreed.
"We don't really get assemblies much," said seventh-grader Hollie Oehmler, 12, of Cranberry. "If we do, it's just the guidance counselor."
"He tried his best. ... He's here and he's not totally humiliated because he lost," said seventh-grader Matt Winkelvoss, 13, of Cranberry. "He came here because he wanted to talk to us. It's cool."
Molly Kuttesch, 12, admitted that as she watched Sunday's game, she wondered what was wrong with Brown. She now views him in a more positive light and said she will take to heart his message of perseverance and hard work.
"It was really cool, especially after what happened at the game," the seventh-grader from Cranberry said of Brown's speech. "It took a lot of courage."
And Brown's going to take his own advice.
"The most important thing for me now is to forget about Sunday and move on," he told the students. "We're going to go up to Cleveland and beat Cleveland."
The crowd went wild.
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