Gamecock Goes a Long Way to Give Back

Some college students use summer vacation as a time to relax, or maybe get ahead with a couple of summer classes. South Carolina junior cross country and track and field student-athlete Emily Crounse spent a month of her summer vacation by leaving the comforts of home behind to teach underprivileged children in rural Vietnam as part of the Coach for College program. 

“Life changing. Amazing,” Crounse said in describing her trip. “If you asked me a year ago if I would ever go to southeast Asia, I would say ‘absolutely not.’ Now that I’ve done it, I don’t think I’m the same person I was a year ago.

“It made me realize how lucky we are and how blessed we are here to have all these rights and liberties and everything that we have, and to have food that I can get all the time from the refrigerator, and to have cold water, and being able to have air conditioning; everything that we take for granted here that I couldn’t get for a month. It makes me never have to complain about anything here ever again.”

Coach for College is a service learning program that brings together student-athletes from the United States and Vietnamese university students to teach disadvantaged children in Vietnam in areas of academics, sports, and life skills.

“I was in charge of teaching biology and coaching baseball. That was really fun,” Crounse said. “In the morning we had sixth graders, and we would do two lessons with biology and then switch and do two lessons of baseball. Then we’d so the same thing in the afternoon with the seventh graders. In the middle of the day, we would teach life skills. 

“We have to encourage them about things like teamwork, and what we learn as an NCAA athlete with other things such as time management, working together, and being able to do things with your classmates.”

Several South Carolina student-athletes have made the same trip in recent years, and Crounse found out about the program after her teammate, Bryce Simpson, made the trip last year.

“I wanted to be able to impact more people other than just myself and my team in Columbia,” Crounse said. “I’m from New York, so I wanted to be able to do more things outside of the east coast of the U.S. The best way to do that was to leave the country. I think we were pretty successful in impacting the people there.”

Translators helped offset any difficulties due to a language barrier, and Crounse said the children were very eager to interact and bond with the American student-athletes.

“At first they were a little apprehensive,” Crounse said. “Seeing a blond person walk in to southeast Asia, they were like ‘who is this?’ They’ve never seen people like us before. 

“After a few days, they warmed up to us really quickly. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere without a hug. They loved us!”

That bond continued to develop as Crounse learned more about the students as individuals.

“It was hard to say their Vietnamese names. No matter how many times we tried, we couldn’t get it,” Crounse said.  “So, they wanted us to give them American names just so they had a way to talk to us and connect with us as well. My favorite was ‘Jeff.’ He’s the little one with the blue hat. We went to his house, so we got to see how his family went through their lives, and what it’s like to live in rural Vietnam.”

Regardless of the conditions, Crounse said the experience was something she would never forget.

“It was pretty hard at the end of the trip to leave,” Crounse said. “We were all put on a bus when we left the school right before we had to head back to Saigon to catch our flights. It was so hard because we’re getting on this bus and all these kids are hanging off our arms, hanging off our legs, grabbing our bags, and not letting us get back on the bus. They were all crying, and half of us were crying.  It’s hard to know that you’re never going to see these kids again, most likely.”

Crounse doesn’t know how long the impression they made on the children will last, but she is sure that they did make an impact on the Vietnamese children, just as those children impacted them.

“They all ‘friended’ us on Facebook and they all gave themselves their American name as their Facebook name,” Crounse said. “They put in perspective how lucky we are here, and to see how thankful they were to someone they didn’t really know and only knew for a few weeks.”

Now that she’s back in Columbia, Crounse is happy to share her experiences with teammates and other student-athletes, in the hopes that they might volunteer to make a difference as well.

“I would recommend this to anybody,” Crounse said. “It’s such an eye-opening experience to see what we have here and what they don’t, and to not take for granted anything that we have here.”