As we mentioned yesterday, the family of Ed Thomas received the Arthur Ashe award for courage at the 2010 ESPY Awards. As most of you probably know, Ed Thomas was the beloved Aplington-Parkersburg coach who sent four young men to the NFL (Jared DeVries, Brad Meester, Aaron Kampman, Casey Wiegmann) and helped the community of Parkersburg begin the recovery from the EF-5 tornado that devastated the town in 2008. A year later, Thomas would be shot and killed by Mark Becker, a former player with a history of mental problems.
The ESPYs honored the Thomas family for their remarkable response to the tragedies, and here's the video of son Aaron Thomas accepting the award:
For more on the response from the Thomas family and the A-P community as a whole, here's the E:60 feature on Aplington-Parkersburg from this past May:
We're keeping comments open, but we'll remind you that the Thomas family has set a remarkable example of good will and high character toward everybody involved in the community--including the Becker family and Mark Becker himself. It would be a disgrace to Ed Thomas' legacy to not hold yourself to those ideals in this thread.