The story of Harpeth High School assistant football coach Kevin Downs will be featured Sunday on ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”
The story of Harpeth High School assistant football coach Kevin Downs will be featured Sunday on ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”
“The Volunteer,” narrated by Marty Smith, will debut in the 10 a.m. edition of “SportsCenter” and will re-air in other editions of the program throughout the day.
The Ashland City Times reported Downs, a 2003 Harpeth graduate, was to be featured on the show when camera crews were in Kingston Springs in September.
According to a news release from ESPN, the “SC Featured” segment will tell the story of Downs, who nearly lost his life in a 2005 Humvee attack in Iraq. Now, 76 surgeries later, he’s a paid assistant football coach at Harpeth in Kingston Springs, where he once played.
Three years ago, he started volunteer coaching for the football team. This past season — his fourth — he was a certified TSSAA coach.
As viewers will learn, Downs, who received a Purple Heart in 2006, lost both legs, some fingers, an ear and the use of an arm in the attack.
But he drives a car. He operates a tractor to mow the football field, and he helps paint lines on the field before games. He climbs to the top of the bleachers for games and keeps stats on an iPad. He works with the players.
“He spends his whole day doing all these things, and you just kind of sit there and are amazed because of how gruesome his injuries were,” Scott Harves, who produced the piece for the ESPN Features Unit, said in the release.
Harves came across Downs on the Internet while searching for feature ideas last August.
“I just thought there had to be more to the story,” he said. “The first time you see him, you just wonder how he does it, and how he got from the battlefield to where he is now. When I saw his picture and heard him talk, I was drawn to want to know more about it.”
“One of the things that stands out about our first conversation was the fact that he didn’t want to hold anything back in a story,” Harves said. “Knowing what he went through and seeing all the wounded warriors he had seen through his three years in and out of the hospital, he always thought that if someone could see what he’s done with his life, maybe he can motivate them to do something with theirs.”