Georgia Tech Football Players Cheer On Ailing Fan

Sara Keene couldn’t believe Georgia Tech’s starting free safety wanted to speak to her.

“I was like, ‘The Djay Jones?’ I needed a moment to get it all together,” Keene said. “It was really surreal. I had to think about it for a minute. It was like, ‘Do you have the right person?’ ”

Jones knew he had the right person. He just had to figure out what to say.

The call took courage, even for a guy who plays defensive back each week in front of tens of thousands of people, with every game bringing the risk that a blown tackle or a missed coverage could let those people down. Now, on the other end of the phone, there was just one person, a woman he had never met, a woman he wanted to help.

Jones knew Keene was a Georgia Tech classmate and connected by some complex combination of kinship and friendship to a woman whose uncle works with Jones’ mother. He also knew Keene had cancer.

He called to reach out, to show support, to tell her somebody out there cared.

“It was awkward,” he admitted, “but once you hear the excitement in her voice, it’s like you knew her for your whole life.”

That first October call led to more calls and text messages. Jones and his teammates talked about arranging a bus trip to visit Keene at Emory University Hospital, but cancer wards aren’t designed for large groups of extra-large visitors, so the Yellow Jackets found another way to help.

Football players and the Alpha Delta Pi sorority staged the Cookout for Keene on Nov. 12 on the lawn near the Tech Tower. Jones arranged for autographed footballs and other souvenirs to be given away in a raffle. Quarterback Taylor Bennett helped cook hot dogs and hamburgers. Running back Tashard Choice signed autographs and posed for photos. Eighty or 90 football players showed up, said Alpha Delta Pi’s Caitlin Hanson, the event planner.

That’s where Keene and Jones finally met. He gave her a big hug, and they talked, and they got their picture taken, she in her pink hat and yellow sweater, with a filtration mask hanging around her neck, he in a white Georgia Tech football strength program shirt, both smiling so naturally you’d bet your bottom dollar they weren’t saying “cheese.”

They didn’t have to feign happiness.

“I was so blown away,” Keene said.

The cookout drew about 660 students and raised more than $4,000 for the Shirlock Foundation, which provides financial assistance to families of college students who have leukemia. It is named after Jonathan Shirlock, a Tech student who died of leukemia in 2006. Jones wears orange rubber Shirlock Foundation wristbands on both wrists, along with two Tech football wristbands.

Tech fan from Bulldogs family

Keene, a 21-year-old fourth-year materials science and engineering major, has been a football fan as long as she can remember. Her father and grandfather graduated from Georgia, so she was a Bulldog, too. What elementary school girl could resist a quarterback named Mike Bobo? She was on hand in Jacksonville in 1997 when Bobo and the Bulldogs ended a seven-game losing streak to Florida.

But she switched sides when she came to Tech. During baseball season, she worked at a Russ Chandler Stadium souvenir stand with no view of the field, so she brought her computer and followed the Yellow Jackets pitch by pitch on the Internet. During football season, she went to every home game last season and traveled with boyfriend Ben Hollerbach to road games at Virginia Tech, Clemson and Georgia.

That’s what made the calls from Jones so important to her. She had been pulling for athletes all her life. Now, when she needed support, an athlete and his teammates were pulling for her.

“We’re student-athletes, but at the same time we’re classmates,” said Jones, who has been able to meet Keene just once but makes sure to stay in touch by phone and text message. “It’s for the greater good. At the end of the day, we’re not just all about football and school here. We’re family.”

The Yellow Jackets gave Keene an autographed football, and coach Chan Gailey gave her an autographed miniature football helmet. Both items sit on the mantel of her home in Fayetteville. The thing she values most, though, is the chance she has had to get to know Jones and his teammates.

“You see these guys play every week, and you’re in awe of them,” Keene said. “They’re kind of like superheroes. I wondered what they were like in general as people.”

Keene isn’t exactly ordinary. Her personality draws people to her, Hollerbach said, and she has the drive and intensity to go after whatever she wants. That got her elected last semester as secretary of the Panhellenic Council, the governing body of Tech’s sororities. It was a natural role for someone with so much school spirit.

While her boyfriend analyzes blitz packages, blocking schemes and the quarterback’s sight lines, Keene revels in the football atmosphere. She attends games to express her support for Tech and its athletes and to make the most of her big-time college experience.

She had always admired the players from a distance, never thinking she would get the chance to meet them. Of course, she never expected to get cancer, either.

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