MCCOMB, Ohio — A McComb High School legend returned to town to give back to the youth in his community.
Craig Aukerman, former McComb football star and current special teams coordinator for the Tennessee Titans, hosted the second Aukerman Family Foundation Youth Football Camp on Friday evening at Doc Miller Field.
The foundation, according to its website, is dedicated to positively impacting local youth by providing scholarships to college-bound students and sponsoring programs that strengthen family relationships through sports.
Kids from around the McComb community got the opportunity to learn the basic fundamentals of the three phases of football, while also working on agility and speed drills with other area football coaches.
However, for Aukerman, the most important lesson learned was not a skill.
“The first thing we want them to do is have fun,” Aukerman said. “Obviously it is a game I love; I cherish it. A lot of people ask me, ‘is teaching it a hard job?’, and I don’t even feel like it is a job for me.”
Aukerman and his wife, Summer, have always been wanting to give back to his hometown community and for Aukerman, this camp is special.
“I have done other camps in the Nashville area, but this is something my wife and I talked about for years beforehand,” Aukerman said. “When COVID hit, we kind of dug deep and figured out what we could. Last year we hosted our first one and had a great turnout, and this year we expect even more kids to be out here.”
Learning the game of football as a kid is important to Aukerman and he hopes to help inspire kids to want to become a star in their own right.
“My biggest thing is to just learn the game of football,” Aukerman said. “The more you can learn, the more you’ll fall in love with it. It’s something that from early on in the fourth grade for me, I just kept growing and loving the sport because of my dad or even my coaches in middle school, high school and even in college; I just grew to love the game even more.”