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September 29, 2009 - Radio interview on NPR's the state of things. Listen here.
September 26, 2009 - Article in today's Herald-Sun:
Beloved teacher pens second book
By Matthew E. Milliken
DURHAM -- It doesn't take much work to find out what kind of reputation Stuart Albright has at Jordan High School.
"One of the coolest teachers at Jordan," said Devin McNeill, a senior and varsity football player there. "I actually voted for him for the homecoming teacher today. A lot of students nominated him to get it this year again. ... Everyone knows him as the cool, fun teacher, and they want to get his class."
"He is a great guy," said LaDwaun Harrison, a special education teacher and the head coach of Jordan's junior varsity football team, for which Albright is offensive coordinator. "He's extremely committed to whatever endeavor he goes about. He loves working with kids, helping kids. He easily goes the extra mile to help out kids."
"He's kind. He can be firm when he needs to be firm. He has the standards. But the sincerity is there," Jordan Principal Richard Webber said. "He wants them to do well, and he has a way of presenting that demeanor to the children."
Albright's reputation extends beyond the walls of his school. In 2006, he was named the district's teacher of the year. In 2007, he was one of 75 teachers, and the only one from North Carolina, honored with a Milken Educator Award. And he has spent part of this year promoting his second book, "Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race and High School Football." It's attracted positive coverage in newspapers around the state.
Despite the accolades, the 31-year-old seems just as happy evading the spotlight. "I really wish that some of the publicity would be more focused on [my fellow JV coaches] too -- how inspiring they've been in my life," Albright said.
No fooling. The trim coach -- he stands 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 155 pounds -- devotes two chapters in the new book to men, moments and memories from the Jordan JV squad.
"He's still grounded," Webber said. "He's still that same level-headed, compassionate young man who wants to be a teacher. ... He's not going to leave Jordan High School to do something else. He's very passionate about his teaching and about his writing, and so he's getting his children to buy into that passion as well."
Albright's ingrained modesty comes across when he discusses his life in football. "I love coaching so much more than I loved playing," the former high school wide receiver said. "Because as a player ... when you do something well, it's like, OK, I did that for myself and my own individual position. But as a coach, you feel like you're having an impact on the whole team, and I love that."
The Gastonia native has had an impact on Jordan in large part because he found a way to combine two of his great passions: writing and teaching.
After obtaining a bachelor's degree in English and creative writing from UNC Chapel Hill, Albright earned a master's degree in urban education from Harvard University. Following a one-year teaching stint in Boston, Albright became an English teacher and assistant JV coach at Jordan in 2002.
A few years later, he completed "Blessed Returns," a nonfiction account of the summer he spent as a 19-year-old college student working at a youth center in blighted Camden, N.J. Albright opted to self-publish the book in 2005 through a company he created called McKinnon Press, believing that would be more lucrative than having a regional publisher produce and distribute his writing.
As it happened, in 2005 Jordan switched to a block schedule. Albright had been hoping to teach creative writing, in part because of his background, and in part because he felt the school lacked creative outlets. He lobbied his students to sign up for a creative writing elective, telling them that if enough requested one it would be offered.
Thirty youngsters did, it was, and Albright's classroom has been packed with students ever since.
"Something about creative writing leads kids to bare their soul," Albright said. "And then when kids do that, kids around them begin to see a different side of them. ... They wind up realizing that some of the stereotypes that they thought existed about their classmates were completely wrong."
That creates an unusual classroom atmosphere, Albright said.
Even more unusual is the course anthology, which Albright realized could be produced through the company he originally created to self-publish his own first work. Every class's work is published; advanced students can write and print their own novels under Albright's tutelage.
"Having this book at the end is kind of like the legacy for that class," said Albright, who is in his second year teaching creative writing exclusively. "I think that that is really what started spreading the word for people -- you need to take this class because not only do you publish this book but it's like a family at school, a neat kind of a community within our school."
Up next for Albright is a project inspired by his students and their stories. It will be his first foray into fiction since college. And on the horizon, he said, is having children with his wife of four years, Jenni, a chronic disease prevention specialist who works for the state's public health division.
But don't look for Albright to change jobs any time soon, even if "Sidelines" is a hit.
"I love what I do," he said. "I think a lot of that comes through in my teaching, that I really am genuinely excited to be there every single day."
September 8, 2009 - Article in today's News and Observer:
A “Sidelines” View of North Carolina
BY TIM STEVENS , staff writer
Stuart Albright seemed surprised when I told him how mad I became while reading his book, "Sidelines."
"Really?" he said.
Yeah, it made me mad that I didn't write it.
"Sidelines, A North Carolina Story of Community, Race and High School Football" is a remarkable book.
Albright, a creative writing teacher and assistant football coach at Durham Jordan, took three summers to research and write it, traveling from New Bern to Cherokee to explore high school football and its impact on communities.
The book is uniquely ours.
Albright reinforces something novelist Nicholas Sparks said years ago about my home state.
North Carolina is a novelist's dream, Sparks said. Every town is different. We even talk with different accents.
New Bern was settled by Swiss and Germans, and the city got a major influx of African-Americans during the Civil War. The Scots were in Campbelltown, which is now Fayetteville. Many of the Southeast's people came from South Carolina and the Northeast's from Virginia.
North Carolina is becoming more homogenized, and many places are losing their sense of community, but in some places high school football still helps shape a community.
"High school football is merely a game," Albright writes. "At least that's what people on the outside might say. Football is certainly fun, and for that matter, our players perform at their peak when they love what they are doing.
"But athletics can evolve into something else entirely."
Albright examines the factors that make playing high school football a different experience at Southwest Onslow near Jacksonville than at Cherokee in the mountains. It is different at New Bern High or Gastonia Ashbrook. The culture goes far beyond wins and losses and reaches into the soul of the community.
Southwest Onslow coach Phil Padgett said tradition is a major part of his program's success.
"Tradition is what helps make high school football so special." said Padgett, who leads one of the nine programs featured in the book.
"One of the things that I love the most about coaching here is how much the kids care. On the first day of practice, we'll have 20 or 30 of our former players show up. They talk about how much it meant to them to wear the uniform and how much it should mean to the new guys."
It meant a lot to former player Jay Cherry, who drives at least 21/2 hours each week to attend Southwest Onslow games.
While he lives in Morrisville, Southwest Onslow, where he played football one season, is his home. He has missed the kickoff of about a dozen games in the past 23 years, including games he skipped so he could watch former Southwest players in college games.
"It's special there," Cherry said. "It is all about sports and friendship. Mainly, it is about Phil and the way he runs his program."
Dave Diamont's East Surry program in Pilot Mountain is featured, too.
"One of the things that hurt our schools is the loss of community," said Diamont, a former member of the General Assembly. "That's the big advantage the rural schools have. I don't have the 6-4, 270-pound Division I prospect, but I've got a bunch of kids that I'm going to see for the next 15 years raising their families."
"Sidelines" uses high school football to examine North Carolina, its people and its history. Or as Albright writes, "Community building starts with someone who is innovative and charismatic, someone who loves kids and believes in social justice. Coaches often fill this role."
August 13, 2009 - Article in today's New Bern Sun Journal:
Stories prove football can mold boys into men
August 13, 2009
Ken Gruebel
Special to the Sun Journal
Every once in a while, less frequently than this reviewer would hope, and I’m sure less often than many readers would hope, an exceptionally well-written and illuminating story comes our way. It could be a novel or perhaps it is nonfiction, and it will just hit the exact right tone and hit just the right nerves to make it a book you would, and do, tell your friends about.
Such a book, a novel, was “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.” That novel, done as a series of letters and telegrams, illuminated a time of history and a sequence of events of which I had little or no knowledge. Oh sure, I knew about World War II; in fact I was in it. However, I really had no idea of the occupation of the Isle of Guernsey and what the people of that island suffered under the cruel hands of the Nazis.
Now Stuart Albright, a teacher of English and a coach of high school football, has shone a bright light on something we may have thought we knew. However, if you are anything like this reviewer, you possibly had no real concept of the depths that are inherent in Friday night football.
I would like, from the beginning, to dispel any notion that this book is full of charts showing Xs and Os. Oh sure, every once in a while to make a point the author will outline a particular play in some detail, or even a series of plays. But most of all, and this is the most important thrust of the book, Albright brings us close to the men in North Carolina who are molding young boys into men in a day and age when there may be little real guidance to be had otherwise in school, and certainly found to be lacking in many homes.
These men are the high school football coaches and their assistants.
Along the way, Albright touches on the backgrounds of the various cities in our state that have had a serious effect on young men. Sometimes the history of a city or place has had a real effect on its students, the history of the place impinging on their almost every move and every thought.
As the author notes, across America some communities defy all categories. Cherokee here in North Carolina is a nation within a nation, a town of 8,500 residents reaping the benefits of a $140 million gambling industry. It sits along the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In contrast to other tribes that operate under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Cherokees in this location are incorporated. And yet, through high school football, many have gone on to higher education and much greater things than could have been imagined.
This is but one of the stories revealed in this book. The collapse of the textile business is yet another story, poor people without much structure in their lives except what football brought. The downscaling of tobacco is still another story that brought change to the South. And yes, another social change, and possibly the greatest change of all, was the end of segregation in the high schools.
Our own city of New Bern is also featured. Not only was the destructive fire of 1922 a disaster for the city, according to the author it shuffled entire populations around, making some sections of the city unfit to rebuild and forcing people to locate into another part of town.
As interesting as all of this is, the book is primarily a story of the coaches — men who were able to take a group of undisciplined boys and through care and training, and very often just listening, guide them toward positive concepts, positive values and goals that went far beyond the next touchdown or the next intercepted pass.
One quote from a North Carolina high school football coach should give us all a better sense of the sport and what football can do, and has done, for many young men.
“Football is the last great discipline kids have any more. We’ve gotten rid of the draft. Kids don’t work on farms anymore. They don’t learn about the rewards of working hard. Football gives you that. It takes discipline to get out there in the hundred degree heat and have some coach yelling at you, cussing at you, pushing you to get better. There’s just not much of that anymore, as far as kids becoming men. We have babied our society so much. If we take football away, what are we gonna do.”
What are we going to do indeed? How else are we going to give adolescent boys a sense of purpose, a sense of dedication, a sense of accomplishment?
One thing is certain. Hanging around street corners is not going to do it. I am of the opinion that anyone with boys in high school, or soon to be going there, would benefit by reading this book.
July 23, 2009 - Article in today's Asheville Citizen-Times:
Braves, Cougars part of new football book
Andrew Pearson • July 23, 2009
ASHEVILLE — Only a true masochist with ties to Asheville High would enjoy a book about its three straight losses in Western Regional championship football games.
Good news for the Cougars, those defeats (2002, '03 and '04) make up a very small portion of the history that Durham author Stuart Albright delves into.
Asheville and Cherokee are two of nine North Carolina football communities profiled in Albright's new book “Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race and High School Football.”
Albright, 30, who coaches and teaches at Durham Jordan High, came to Western North Carolina each of the past two summers to research the book. “Sidelines” will soon be available in local bookstores, but can already be purchased through Albright's Web site at www.stuartalbright.com.
Albright said he picked the Cougars for subject matter after seeing them lose to his high school alma mater (Gastonia Ashbrook) in a 2002 regional final (Ashbrook won, 22-19).
“The Ashbrook game was just the first of several heartbreaking losses for Coach (Danny) Wilkins in the coming years,” Albright writes in “Sidelines.”
“But he refused to let it define him. A coach's road to success is always unpredictable, he would say. Nothing worth fighting for is easy.”
Albright not only documents the last nine seasons under Wilkins, including the 2005 state championship campaign, but also goes back to integration at Asheville and the history of Stephens-Lee High.
“I remember talking to (Albright in 2007). He had a lot of good questions and it seemed like a good passion for high school football,” Wilkins said.
“At the time, I didn't really know where it might lead. But I'm glad (the book) is coming out. There's a lot of great history and tradition in this community and it's really a neat story.”
Cherokee coach Skooter McCoy's efforts to instill tribal traditions into his program are prominent parts of the chapter on the Braves, as well as longtime statistician/public address announcer Ray Kinsland.
“It's an honor to be a part of this project,” McCoy said. “When you think of all the programs in North Carolina that could have been picked, to include us is special.”
In addition to Asheville and Cherokee, “Sidelines” also looks at Durham, Fayetteville, Gastonia, Jacksonville, New Bern, Pilot Mountain and Winston-Salem.
Asheville High football coach Danny Wilkins and his Cougars are part of the book "Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race and High School Football," which takes a look at nine different high school football communities in North Carolina. (STEVE DIXON/SDIXON@CITIZEN-TIMES.com)
July 20, 2009 - Article in today's Jacksonville Daily News:
Column: Book sheds light on area football
Chris Miller
The Daily News
I remember it vividly.
As a new full-time hire at The Daily News, it was one of my first experiences covering a big-time game. I’m speaking of the 2003 NCHSAA 2-A East Regional football final between Southwest and East Bladen.
Things looked bleak for the host Stallions, trailing 17-6 late in the third quarter. And when the game looked just about over following an interception inside the red zone by East Bladen, perhaps a bit of divine intervention kicked in.
The player from the opposing team carried the ball into his own end zone and was tackled by Karshawn Brooks, resulting in a safety. Clearly a turning point, and something that paved the way for Southwest to win 23-17. The following week, coach Phil Padgett and the Stallions would win their second of three state championships.
"There are five or six plays I have always remembered, and that is one of them," Padgett told me, adding that it was Brooks who made that tackle.
But that regional final game in front of thousands of fans will be something I will remember forever. I’m sure Stuart Albright will, too, after reading the chapter on Jacksonville in his new book, ‘Sidelines,’ which focuses on the impact high school football has on communities such as ours.
Albright, born and raised in Gastonia and currently an English and Creative Writing teacher at Jordan High School in Durham, published the book this year. I will say that not only did the book bring back memories of that Southwest-East Bladen game, it also gave me a better understanding what football has meant to folks in area since before I was even born.
But the book doesn’t just recall some of the area’s best-played games, It also reflects on what those involved had to deal with to reach those contests.
For example, Albright highlights the emotion Padgett dealt with prior to the game with East Bladen after the passing of his father, Lenwood Padgett, a former Jacksonville High principal, but better well-known for his character.
The elder Padgett died that Tuesday of lung cancer, and as described in the book, Phil’s week "was a blur." I recall the struggles Phil went through that week, trying to balance emotion with trying to lead his team. The funeral was Friday, just hours prior to kickoff, and Phil was his typical self in asking his team "don’t win this one for me."
"I remember in that fourth quarter, I got the weirdest feeling on the football field," Padgett said. "I felt the wind switch for us, and I think somehow my father had something to do with that."
I also recall the job Padgett’s assistant coaches did to prepare the Stallions to battle a very talented East Bladen team.
All this, plus shout-outs to former Stallion greats, Kendric Burney (now at North Carolina) and Dekota Marshall (now at East Carolina), are included in the book.
However, Southwest and Padgett aren’t the only locals in the Albright’s chapter on football in Jacksonville. He writes about the tough times those associated with Georgetown High, the only black school, went through, especially the football team.
Tyrone Willingham, a former Jacksonville High player who went on to coach football at Notre Dame and later Washington, was a 13-year old watching the school burn in a fire. Though it was 1966 and the end of segregation in Onslow County schools, Willingham and fellow students and staff were affected by the collapse of the school.
It was only 11 years before the fire that the Georgetown football team won a state championship, something that certainly was embraced by the black community. Reading this part of the chapter gave me a better understanding of how things were back then.
I also appreciated the fact that Albright mentions Willingham a highly respected man in Jacksonville. I had always been under the impression Willingham was a standout at JHS since entering the prep level.
This wasn’t the case.
Willingham waited three years behind a white quarterback to become the starting signal caller. As a senior Willingham made up for lost time, becoming an all-conference quarterback and captain.
Later, Albright refers to Tyrone and his mother, Lillian, the first black woman on the county school board, as having "voices of change." And they were, having defeated adversity to become make such impacts.
Certainly something Padgett has and continues to do at Southwest as well.
Copies of the book can be purchased by visiting www.stuartalbright.com or by calling (919) 943-6501.
July 16, 2009 - Article in today's Gaston Gazette:
Ashbrook grad writes book about football, community, race relations
July 16, 2009
Richard Walker
GASTONIA – When Stuart Albright was growing up in Gastonia, he’d heard stories about how high school football built character, community pride and improved race relations.
As a player at Ashbrook High School in the mid-1990s, he found that out firsthand. Now, as a teacher and author, Albright has written about it in “Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race, and High School Football.”
Albright, 30, unveiled his most recent work during a book signing Wednesday at The Frame Gallery in Gastonia on West Second Avenue.
Among those in attendance were Albright’s Ashbrook football coach, Bill Eccles, for whom the book is dedicated.
“Playing football for coach Eccles was huge in my development as a person, a student and even now as a school teacher,” said Albright, a teacher and coach at Durham’s Jordan High School. “The confidence I got from football pushed me to college and eventually into teaching.”
Albright’s book details the role football has played in nine North Carolina cities – Asheville, Cherokee, Durham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, New Bern, Pilot Mountain, Winston-Salem and, of course, Gastonia.
“I wrote the Gastonia chapter first and certainly enjoyed doing so,” said Albright, a 1997 Ashbrook High graduate. “It’s always great to be in Gastonia. I lived here in the first 18 years of my life and it’s always going to be a place I hold near and dear to my heart.”
In his chapter on Gastonia, Albright dealt with his own football experiences playing at Ashbrook for Eccles. He tells stories about or from teammates like Jamie Burris, Nick Sherrill, Kevin Mullinax, Eric Mullinax and Jake Eccles.
And even though Albright spent his formative years in Gastonia, he said writing the book has given him an even broader perspective on his hometown.
“For me, growing up as a while male with a privileged background, I had no idea about some of the history involved,” said Albright, whose mother Nancy runs The Frame Gallery and father Alan is a Gastonia attorney. “I learned an awful lot about the different backgrounds of people who I grew up with.”
Much of Albright’s book has to do with how football helped ease integration in cities all across North Carolina. It’s because in each city, previously all-white schools like Gastonia’s Ashley and Hunter Huss high schools were integrated with previously all-black schools like Gastonia’s Highland High.
“When I started writing this, I really had planned on writing how football helped bring communities together,” Albright said. “The more I researched, the race element was more and more prominent. In every city I looked at, you had the bringing together of the races for the team effort that high school football is all about.”
How do you get “Sidelines?”
Albright’s book can be purchased at Gastonia’s The Frame Gallery and Medical Center Pharmacy. Albright, who can be reached at stuartalbright@yahoo.com, also is close to having the book available on amazon.com.
July 16, 2009 - Article in today's New Bern Sun Journal:
‘It was New Bern'
New book explains how football brings people together
July 15, 2009
Jess Huffman
Sun Journal
The flashing blue and red lights illuminated the New Bern sky as a school bus filled with raucous, rowdy high school students neared Craven County. Hours earlier, the underdog New Bern football team had slain goliath — Charlotte Independence — in the 4-AA state championship football game.
“I’m not even sure what time it was,” New Bern coach Bobby Curlings said. “The fire department and police met us at the county line and escorted us into town. There were people in the streets, jumping up and down, blowing horns and going crazy.”
One can’t paint a more colorful picture than the one Curlings experienced that night in December, 2007. It is locked within.
In a recently-released book, “Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race, and High School Football,” author Stuart Albright uses football to explore nine communities in the state. A chapter in the book tells the story of New Bern’s victory over Independence and delves into the underlying issues within the city.
Albright, an assistant football coach at Durham Jordan High School, spent the spring of 2007 researching New Bern, interviewing people in the community and visiting local landmarks. He spent time with former J.T. Barber football player Ed Bell, who was the starting center and team captain on the 1956 state championship team, and toured the town with Sharon Bryant, the African American outreach coordinator at the Tryon Palace.
He learned of the history of racial divide in the years leading up to segregation.
“Blacks lived to the west of George Street in narrow shotgun houses built so close to each other that neighbors could often pass food from one window to the next. … To the east of the Tryon Palace, colonial homes steeped in Neo-Classical, Georgian, and Italian architecture created an insulated world for New Bern’s white elites,” Albright writes. “The only blacks who were welcome in this part of town were day laborers and maids.”
Albright delves into the relationship between the all-black J.T. Barber and the all-white Central High School in the 1950s. He describes Joe Caruso as an “imposing coach” who guided Central to a string of winnings seasons and J.T. Barber coach Simon Coates as a “300 pound bear of a man” and an institution in New Bern.
It’s no coincidence the New Bern football team currently plays at Caruso-Coates Stadium.
“If nothing else, it provides a venue for people of all backgrounds, of all settings, to sit in the stands together,” Albright said of high school football, “to feel like you have a common thing to cheer for.”
Nothing exemplifies the book’s sentiment more than that December night in 2007. The boys from New Bern returned home with a championship and the city celebrated.
“That one night, there was no separation,” Curlings said. “There was no divide. It was New Bern.”
Read all about it…
The book, “Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race, and High School Football,” includes a chapter on New Bern. The book is available at www.stuartalbright.com. Albright will be speaking at the New Bern Breakfast Rotary on July 23.
Jess Huffman can be reached at (252) 635-5669 or at jhuffman@freedomenc.com.
New Bern coach Bobby Curlings celebrates with players after winning the 2007 state championship in football. A book released Wednesday includes a chapter highlighting the Bears' run to the title.
July 12, 2009 - Article in today's Charlotte Observer about Sidelines:
Writer focuses on football coaches and community
By Leigh Pressley
Gastonia native Stuart Albright has accomplished a lot in his 30 years.
A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard, Albright teaches creative writing at Durham's Jordan High School. In 2005, he started McKinnon Press to publish his memoir of working at an inner-city youth center in Camden, N.J. Since then, he's published 11 novels and 17 anthologies of his students' work.
Durham Public Schools named Albright teacher of the year in 2006, and the next year, he earned the Milken Foundation National Educator Award. Now Albright has published a second nonfiction book called “Sidelines: A Story of Race, Community and High School Football.” Albright will sign books from 10a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday at The Frame Gallery, 211 W. Second Ave., Gastonia.
“Sidelines” focuses on the coaching philosophies and commitment to school, youth and community in nine towns across North Carolina.
“Football is a very powerful way to help kids feel like they're part of a larger community,” he said. “On any given Friday night, you could have 250 or so kids involved, between players, trainers, the band and cheerleaders. People in the community see the stadium lights and come out to be a part of it, too. There's innocence to high school football that hasn't been broken.”
A junior varsity coach at Jordan High, Albright began thinking about what longtime coaches do to motivate and inspire players and to create a sense of community within the school. Over three summers, he interviewed longtime coaches at Cherokee High in Cherokee, Asheville High in Asheville, Ashbrook High in Gastonia, Carver High School in Winston-Salem, East Surry High in Pilot Mountain, Jordan High in Durham, E.E. Smith High in Fayetteville, Southwest Onslow High in Jacksonville and New Bern High in New Bern.
“The coaches who are the most successful are those who've stayed in the community,” he said. “They've lived there and worked there a long time, and the kids and community feel an allegiance to them. They trust them and respect them, and being around them causes kids to be more involved in school.”
In nearly every case, Albright found that coaches passed up opportunities for more lucrative careers. That helped him realize the importance of staying with teaching, despite the low pay.
“They all stayed because that was their community and they didn't want to abandon it,” he said. “They all wanted to be an institution and to be remembered there.
At his alma mater, Albright interviewed Ashbrook coach and math teacher Bill Eccles. Albright played under Eccles before graduating in 1997 and dedicated the book to him.
“Coach Eccles really had a profound impact on me,” he said. “You rarely find coaches involved in subjects like math or English, like he and I are. It was really interesting to go back and watch him lead practice. He does a great job of motivating kids. He's very tough, but he balances that toughness by showing he loves kids. It was neat to watch that and see that even 10 years removed as a player, the excitement and desire were still there.”
Albright still has many ties to his hometown. His father, Alan, is a local attorney, and mom Nancy owns The Frame Gallery, where the book-signing will be. Albright is married to the former Jenni Summerville, a 1998 Ashbrook graduate. His publishing venture has seen steady growth and success, but he doesn't have plans to pursue a new career as an author. Teaching, he said, is one of the greatest ways to enact social change.
“Writing this book has certainly reinforced that this is the perfect job for me. I want to do something where I can make a real, genuine impact on other people's lives. Kids can tell a fake very quickly; it's amazing how fast they can sniff it out. It's important that kids realize you're genuine and that you are who you say you are.”
July 10, 2009 - Article in today's Gaston Gazette about Sidelines:
From the Sidelines: Author tells story of community, race and high school football
By Daphne Bissette
Stuart Albright, a Gastonia native and author, is holding a book signing Wednesday for his new release, “Sidelines: A North Carolina Story of Community, Race, and High School Football” on Wednesday at the Frame Gallery in Gastonia.
“Sidelines” — Albright’s second published book — uses high school football as a lens to examine issues of race, public education, and community living in America.
He tells the story of football programs in nine very different communities across the North Carolina, ranging from the Ashbrook Greenwaves in Gastonia to the tribal Eu-stugwoe team in Cherokee,, focusing on the coaches and community leaders who keep the programs going and the social issues that often come into play.
Football programs in Asheville, Winston-Salem, Durham, Fayetteville, New Bern, Jacksonville and Pilot Mountain are also feature.
Albright grew up in Gastonia and earned his bachelor of arts in English and creative writing from UNC Chapel Hill and his M.Ed. from Harvard University.
His first book, “Blessed Returns” is based on the summer he spent working with troubled youth at a community center in Camden, NJ. It chronicles the summer of 1999 when Albright, still a college student, was dealing with personal loss while helping youngsters try to change their lives.
In 2008 he was a recipient of the Milken National Educator Award, billed by Teacher magazine as “the Oscars of teaching.” He lives with his wife in Durham, where he teaches English and coaches football at a local public high school. He is the son of Nancy and Alan Albright.
WANT TO GO?
What: Book signing with Stuart Albright for his recent release “Sidelines.”
When: Wednesday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
Where: The Frame Gallery, 211 W. Second Ave., Gastonia
Details: 704-865-8856 or stuartalbright.com