Beyond athletic success, the Miami Herald’s Athletic Awards honored extraordinary courage
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Star Power in South Florida
The Miami Herald has a rich tradition of honoring the best in South Florida high school sports.
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Hundreds of trophies and thousands of medallions were handed out in Miami-Dade and Broward over the six-plus decades of the Miami Herald’s Athletic Awards banquets.
But the event was always about more than just giving away some hardware.
What made those events special over the years were the memorable moments.
Without a doubt, one of the biggest highlights every year was the Herald’s Courage awards, which were later named in honor of former Miami Herald editors Leo Suarez and Walter Krietsch. The awards recognized courage by individuals in the high school community in the face of adversity.
Often, the telling of said stories on the stage brought many in attendance to tears.
STORIES OF COURAGE
▪ There were honorees who exemplified perseverance in the wake of tragedy.
It’s hard to argue there was a more meaningful one in recent years than when the Herald honored Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the 17 victims who died in the Valentine’s Day shooting at the school in 2018.
The victims included assistant football coach Aaron Feis, school athletic director and wrestling coach Chris Hixon, and cross-country coach Scott Beigel, who gave their lives protecting students as a 19-year-old gunman opened fire in the school’s hallways.
In all 14 students — Nicholas Dworet, Alyssa Alhadeff, Gina Montalto, Alex Schachter, Joaquin Oliver, Peter Wang, Carmen Schentrup, Helena Ramsay, Cara Loughran, Luke Hoyer, Jaime Guttenberg, Martin Duque Anguiano, Meadow Pollack and Alaina Petty — lost their lives. Many of them were athletes or involved in sports in some capacity.
“I say this all the time — as time goes on this has turned into an event,” Hixon’s wife, Debbie, told the Herald before she accepted the Wrestling Coach of the Year award on behalf of her late husband with their youngest son, Corey, 22, by her side. “If you ask people to name the 17 names of those who died I’m sure they couldn’t name them all. And that’s my biggest fear — that it’s just another event and it can’t be that. Even if all 17 who died weren’t athletes, it’s very nice [the Miami Herald honored their memory]. They were all important.”
HEROIC COURAGE
The award honored a moment of heroism when the Herald recognized members of the Hollywood Hills football team and then-coach Scott Barnwell in 2010.
Barnwell, senior Clarence Murphy and juniors Alvin Arnold, Jared Maldonado and Anthony Yerou helped rescue a family from a sinking car on their return home from a 7-on-7 football competition in Tampa.
The combined efforts of Barnwell, a former Miami-Dade police officer and place-kicker at the University of Miami, his players as well as several local passersby who stopped to assist, saved the lives of James Bryan and his granddaughter after their SUV was overturned in a ditch along U.S. 27. Maldonado also performed CPR on Bryan’s wife to help her resume breathing after being trapped underwater. Unfortunately, she passed away several days later.
EMOTIONAL MOMENTS
▪ During the 2012 ceremony, a quiet audience listened to the journey of Felix Varela High football player Carl Pierre-Louis, whose father was killed and his home destroyed during the earthquake that devastated his home country of Haiti two years earlier. Pierre-Louis went on to learn the game of football and earn a college scholarship, which helped him bring his mother to the United States.
▪ Former Miami High softball player Laura Brito, who lost both her parents within two months in 2003, was honored at that year’s ceremony at AmericanAirlines Arena.
Brito’s father, who worked as a security guard at the Village of Merrick Place, was shot and killed during a robbery. Her distraught mother then passed away seven weeks later from a heart attack. Brito moved in with her coach at the time, Barbara Garcia.
The local community, including several other high schools — and even the Miami Heat — rallied to support Brito once her story was published in the Miami Herald. With a heavy heart, Brito managed to finish her senior season and graduate from high school.
▪ Few could hold back the tears in 2016 when former South Dade principal Javier Perez, who lost both of his legs when he was hit by a drunk driver while attending his son’s baseball game at Tamiami Park, was honored.
Perez, who was still hospitalized at the time, was unable to attend the ceremony. But student-athletes and coaches from the high school stood on stage with their heads bowed — some fighting back tears — as then-South Dade baseball star Alek Manoah (now a starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays) spoke about their principal and accepted the award on his behalf.
With the help of prosthetic legs, Perez would leave the hospital in the ensuing weeks and walk again.
▪ One year, it wasn’t the Courage Award alone that drew an emotional reaction.
The Overall Coach of the Year Award went to then-Cooper City softball coach Bill Richard in 1994. Richard led the Cowboys to the state championship game in the first year of fast-pitch after winning it all in slow-pitch in 1992 and 1993.
But Richard was unable to attend because he was hospitalized for treatment of multiple myeloma, the bone-marrow cancer he had been fighting for some time and succumbed to soon after. Cooper City’s principal at the time, Sara Rogers, and two of the Cowboys’ All-Broward softball players, Shannon Sawyer and Kristen Sandler, accepted the honor on his behalf.
This story was originally published January 26, 2022 at 7:03 AM.
