By Dr. William D. Gibson, President & CEO, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Greater Triad
I’ve written before about the idea that belief, once you give it to someone, doesn’t stay put. It moves. It gets passed from a staff member to a kid, from that kid to a younger one, from a parent who decides to trust us with their child’s future, all the way out to a community that decides to invest in something it can’t yet fully see. I called that idea Inspire to Believe, because I think it’s the actual engine behind everything we’re building at BGCTriad, not just a phrase on a banner.
This past weekend, I watched that idea happen in real time, in front of a crowd of people, on a professional basketball court.
We had a night at a Greensboro Groove game that I don’t think our kids—or our staff—will forget anytime soon. But the more I’ve sat with it since Saturday, the more I’ve realized the story isn’t really about basketball at all. It’s about what happens to a kid the moment they get to see, up close, that a bigger world than the one they know is actually reachable.
Exposure Is Its Own Kind of Belief
Here’s something I believe deeply, and it’s a big part of why we do the work we do: a kid can’t dream about a life they’ve never been shown exists. You can tell a young person all day long that they can be anything they want to be, and we do tell them that, often. But there’s a difference between hearing it and standing in it. There’s a difference between being told the world is big and actually feeling the space of the arena when the lights come down, and a crowd of people go quiet, waiting to hear you sing.
Briana Williams, singing the National Anthem, with Club kids as flag-bearers.
That’s exactly what happened to one of our teens Saturday night. Briana Williams, a rising 9th-grader from our Congdon Hub Teen Center, sang the national anthem in front of fans at the Novant Health Fieldhouse. She’d never stood in a spotlight like that before. I know most of the kids watching her hadn’t. And I’d guess most of them walked out of that gym with a slightly bigger idea of what they’re capable of than they walked in with; not because anyone lectured them about dreaming big, but because they watched someone who looks like them do something they didn’t know was possible for a kid.
That’s the whole idea behind Inspire to Believe in practice. Belief isn’t abstract. It’s transferred, kid to kid, moment to moment, and it moves fastest when it’s demonstrated instead of just spoken.
Our flag bearers were next, and I keep coming back to that image—a wall of our kids, shoulder to shoulder, holding a flag large enough to almost stretch corner to corner across an entire NBA-sized court. Our cheer teams performed under real lights, in front of a real crowd, for the first time in most of their lives. And then came the moment that will stay with me longest: our Southside Club and our Forest Hills Club playing each other at halftime, on the same floor the Groove players had just played on the first two quarters. These are kids who play each other regularly, in gyms across High Point, in games nobody outside their neighborhood ever sees. Saturday, they played with their names announced over a real PA system, in front of a crowd that had no idea who they were an hour earlier and cheered for them anyway.
Not Every Kid Becomes a Pro. That’s Not the Point.
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters. Not one of those kids needs to grow up and play professional basketball for Saturday night to have mattered. That was never the goal, and it’s not the goal of the BGCTriad Athletics League either. What matters is that a kid who has never had a reason to imagine themselves on a stage that big now has one. What matters is that dreaming big stops being an abstract idea an adult tells you to do, and becomes a memory you can point to and say: I stood there once. I did that once. If I did that, what else is possible?
That’s what exposure does that encouragement alone can’t. It’s why the BGCTriad Athletics League isn’t just about building better basketball players or better cheerleaders. It’s about putting kids in rooms, on courts, and under lights they’d otherwise never have a reason to be in, and letting that experience do some of the work that words can’t.
Groove players hear from Coach Washington during a timeout.
None of it happens without a community willing to open those doors. The Greensboro Groove didn’t just let us borrow their arena for a night. They are building a genuine partnership with us; one where a portion of every ticket sold went directly to support our Clubs, and where their fans showed up cheering for our kids with the same energy they’ll bring all season for the team itself. That’s belief moving exactly the way I think it’s supposed to—from a staff member, to a kid, to a crowd of strangers who decided, for one night, that our kids’ dreams were worth cheering for too.
As Future Ready Triad grows into Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and beyond, this is the kind of night I want to become normal instead of rare; kids from every corner of this region getting a real, unforgettable reason to believe something bigger is possible for them. Not because we told them so, but because we showed them.
If you were in that gym Saturday, thank you for showing up the way you did. If you weren’t, I hope these photos give you a small piece of what it felt like. And if you’re wondering how you can help create the next one—as a partner, a sponsor, or simply someone cheering from the stands—I’d love for you to be part of it.
Rise. Belong. Become. Saturday night, our kids didn’t just hear that. They lived it.
