Dylan Miles Graves Scholarship Fund
This letter is to say a few things about my son Dylan Miles Graves who died on May 22, 2006; and how LTYA influenced his life and my own.
Dylan had a beautiful smile and a beautiful heart, and he was lucky to be both smart and athletic. He loved soccer and baseball, and dogs and his family. He was always dependable, and if he was your friend he was a true and loyal friend. Dylan had a good sense of humor, and he was thoughtful, patient, respectful, and kind to other people as well as to pets. He worked part-time in high school to help pay for his truck insurance and worked long hours while attending college to help pay his way. I think his experience working hard to improve at soccer and baseball at LTYA provided him additional opportunities to develop these good attributes. I remember my friend and one of his favorite baseball coaches, Will Galloway, recounting how Dylan and some other members of his baseball team took up for a teammate who had only recently starting playing baseball when some kids from another team were giving the boy a hard time like kids will do. Your "team" can be a good place to learn some finer points about loyalty.
Dylan played sports with LTYA since we moved to Lake Travis area in 1992 a month after he turned age 5, starting with fall soccer. I think that first season was on a team with the Hickey boys, and coaches Brian and Mary Hickey. LTYA was just starting to build fields at the Highway 71 Field of Dreams then, so the kids played soccer and baseball at various locations while we completed multiple baseball and soccer fields at the Highway 71 complex over the next few years. Dylan played fall soccer and spring baseball every year afterwards, including select soccer, until he was about 14 and he began concentrating solely on baseball. Then he started playing on select baseball teams around Austin because LTYA didn't have one at the time. He later played baseball at LT high school, playing on the varsity team as a junior and again as a senior in 2005.
Dylan loved playing baseball and soccer with his friends; and he loved competing in sports, especially at the select level it seemed. He worked so hard at it. I think that was because he really wanted to perform at a high level and compete with the best athletes around. He loved the rough play that was common in select soccer. I remember he was thrilled with baseball when he was about 12, and his coach Spike Owens taught him how to turn a play at shortstop more quickly than he had ever done before. He must have practiced that move 10,000 times over the next few years. He would wear me out hitting him grounders at the high school field.
I think one reason sports were important to Dylan during that time was that he had a difficult time in school in his early elementary years because he had a problem reading. We finally got him into Sylvan learning center and they helped him overcome that within just a few months, but it took him years to fully recover and excel in academics. So his greatest successes in elementary school were on the soccer and baseball field, where he could sometimes pitch so well that he could control the baseball game and sometimes as a sweeper he could defend against offensive attacks in soccer games so the other team could never get a good shot at the goal. I think these early successes helped give him the confidence he needed to later excel in high school, and helped lead to the great freshman college experience he had at Jr. College in College Station where he made excellent grades and was planning to transfer to Texas A&M School of Engineering.
I think allowing kids an opportunity to have successes in sports can have that kind of carryover to academic success, and can keep kids motivated to make their grades. I think it is equally important for kids to be able to make friends on the athletic field that can carry over to school. Additionally, LTYA provides an excellent opportunity for parents and families to build a sense of community; something that can be difficult to do in an urban environment.
LTYA can provide those opportunities for all kids and families in LTISD. It is for those reasons I am grateful that LTYA is willing to establish a well-funded scholarship program; and I would be so proud to see Dylan's name associated with such a program. I know he would likewise be proud, and he would be pleased that every kid can have the opportunity to have the experiences he had for years with LTYA that were lifetime experiences for him as well as for me.