SALT LAKE CITY — Donna Lowe-Stern didn’t know exactly what she would say. The day before, Sept. 26, her son Aaron Lowe had been killed. Now she was looking out at a room full of his mourning Utah football teammates. Coach Kyle Whittingham had asked her whether she would like to speak with the team, and she felt it was important for them to hear from her — for her to express what she thought Aaron’s message would have been.
“I would love y’all to stay focused and keep playing because that’s what Aaron would want,” Lowe-Stern told them.
Her message was short and powerful, but it would stick with the players and coaches for the rest of the season.
“She was so strong,” said running back Micah Bernard, a close friend of Lowe’s. “It’s her child. To see a woman strong like that and address us, it motivated us to do right by him. It was powerful just for even talking to us about it. Just to do that, it helped the whole team get through it.”
Football hadn’t been a priority up to that moment, but Lowe-Stern was calling on her son’s teammates to use the sport for a higher purpose.
In a players’ meeting days later, the team discussed what its next steps should be. It was in a bye week after beating Washington State to open Pac-12 play, and everything was on the table. Should the players take time off? Should they resume football?
“We all said we got to get right back into it,” Bernard said. “The world doesn’t stop, and we have to do this for our fallen brother. Her being there helped us decide what to do.”
Lowe’s death came roughly nine months after his close friend and Utah teammate Ty Jordan died after an accidental self-inflicted gunshot. Faced with yet another tragedy, the season could have easily been lost.
Instead, the opposite happened.
“It brought us together in a way that I don’t know what could have been more powerful,” Whittingham said. “It unified us and gave us all a cause. Not that you need that to have a good football team, but that really sparked us and…
Source : espn
