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Today I'm with Justin Moses and John Awad of the Florida Falcons, how you guys doin'?Doing
great how are you? Can you tell me how the Florida Falcons started, well first of all,
what are the Florida Falcons, and how'd you get them started? The Florida Falcons is a
Mens developmental football program for guys ages 18 to 40. I was a high school football
coach back in 2007, and I found out that there's millions of dollars that go unused each year
for kids that go to college. A lot of the high school programs around in the area, in
my opinion, don't use the kids properly. They're not getting off to college the way they should
be getting them off as a division one prospect. So I felt that was wrong so my wife and I
decided to start the program in 2007. For the last seven years we've sent 21 kids to
school in the athletic program, we sent them out overseas professionally. So that's how
the program got started, and that's basically the basics behind this.
So you're filling a need that the schools weren't doing. Correct.
Alright, cool. Can you talk to me a little bit John, about like where the future of the
Falcons? The Falcons organization, is hoping to get
more involvement throughout the north Florida area. We've gotten calls from people in Georgia
and Alabama. We are really a second chance football opportunity, we're not only just
about high school kids trying to get them into college,. We've actually got college
kids that wanna tryout for the AFL, the CFL or maybe even a pro contract with the NFL.
So we're a developmental league that's playing minor league NFL football. We're actually
playing NFL rules. We're actually playing with NFL footballs, and we're actually teaching
kids at the highest potential level, so when they go to college. they are better prepared
then when they came out of high school, or the college kids are better prepared to go
to their tryouts. So, we're trying to create opportunities to where, in the community,
we're giving back into the local community, because we are set up as a non-profit. We're
different then a lot of organizations where they're being paid. Our players are not getting
paid, they are volunteers and our coaches and our staff, and our whole organization
consist of volunteers. We're non-profit so anybody that makes donations to our program
gets a tax deduction. All the money that is raised is plowed back into the organization
for development purposes. So, this is not about making money like other NFL teams, or
other NFL programs. This is really about trying to be a resource, like a church, or any other
organization, or non-profit organization. Now, on that note, talk about some of the
organizations that you guys give money back to, because I understand you do some events
where you fundraise for charities, correct? Absolutely, every game that we play, we want
to have a theme behind it. We want to be able to give a portion of the proceeds back to
that theme so Justin, why don't you tell them about it...
We're working with the Saint Francis house in St. Augustine we're doing a canned food
drive, we're uh, every game we are asking some of our fans and players to give cans
of food to the Saint Francis house in St. Augustine, this past weekend we just did an
event for the Huey family. Last year one of our teammates had a good friend named Danny
Huey, she's been on channel 12 news a lot of local stations.
That's a competitor we don't like 'em, no I'm just teasing. She passed away a month
after the season, we're raising funds for her daughter and her to go to Disneyworld
and this past weekend we're still trying to raise funds to help put the little girl through
day care, so we're asking for donations to that as well. And the next home game on July
20th uh we've got rising stars, which Coach Awad is very involved in, we're doing an event
for them in Angelwood. So we have those events that we do as well.
And we have a special guest Tyson Alloway from the Jaguars is gonna be there, do our
coin toss, he's gonna be signing autographs and taking pictures. So you know we're trying
to make it a fun event for the fans, but at the same time have a theme behind it so our
players know we are community involved as well our fans know that we have a purpose
for our organization, not just about football.