Baby Shark and Clemson football: Clemson hosts reading event for first graders

Clemson players read to first graders Wednesday.

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Thu May 02 07:00:03 GMT-04:00 2024

CLEMSON – The music that is usually heard inside Clemson’s indoor practice facility usually has the familiar strains of rock or rap, but a different set of songs echoed throughout the building Wednesday as 250 elementary school students from across the state listened to Baby Shark and other children’s favorites as part of the Tigers Read! Initiative.

Now in its ninth year, the Tigers Read! Initiative is organized by Dabo’s All In Team Foundation, faculty from the Clemson University College of Education and Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company.

Students from across the state—as far away as Darlington County - lined up outside the gates to receive books and learn how to combat the “summer slide,” which is the decline in reading skills that many students experience during the summer months. Students posed for pictures with the Tiger, Clemson cheerleaders and band members, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and four Clemson football players.

The collaboration with Dabo’s All In Team Foundation and Scholastic has allowed the College of Education to distribute nearly 100,000 books to first-grade students across the state. Students received drawstring bags full of books, ate hot dogs from Skins’ Hot Dogs and enjoyed pound cake from Jeff Bennett, the Pound Cake Man.

C.C. Bates is the associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Education and the director of the Clemson University Early Literacy Center. She told TigerNet that the event is important in fostering a love of reading during the summer months when the children are not in school.

“The whole event kind of helps prep them for that kind of motivation,” Bates said. “They need to keep reading all through the summer for a lot of them.”

Clemson specialist Brodey Conn, punter Jack Smith, and defensive tackles DeMonte Capehart and Tré Williams took turns reading to the children, and Bates said the event is also a way to bring children to a college campus.

“We are recruiting future Tigers right now,” she said. “It is oftentimes the first time they've stepped on a college campus because we pull not just from the upstate but from Darlington and Newberry. We do want them to have this memorable experience on campus so that they think about Clemson when they graduate from high school and potentially become Tigers themselves.”

Head coach Dabo Swinney and his wife Kathleen have been an invaluable resource for the event.

“We've been doing this project for nine years. We started with probably ten kids from one Anderson school district And today we have 250 first graders that came,” Bates said. “We started in the West End Zone, and when this transitioned, they opened up the facility. We have distributed 100,000 books over the life of the project, 100,000 books that they have funded to go out to our South Carolina children. So they've (the Swinneys) made a significant investment in education and the education of the children in our state.

“That's one thing that we value so much as a faculty member and an associate dean, that this program is committed to academics and to the development of the players. It isn't just about winning the next game. It's about making sure that our student-athletes leave here with a solid education that if something doesn't work out in the NFL, they've got a degree to fall back on.”