Jack Doyle and several Indianapolis Colts teammates offer an evening to remember for 15 homeless kids staying for now at the Dayspring Center shelter.
INDIANAPOLIS – First time I see Wesley, he's chewing on his fingernails. Second time, too. And the third. Most of the kids are excited, more like thrilled, to be here at Dave & Buster's in Castleton, where Indianapolis Colts tight end Jack Doyle and his wife, Casie, are throwing a birthday party for 15 kids from the Dayspring Center homeless shelter.
Not Wesley. He's nervous — but noble. He came here in slacks and a red Oxford, buttoned to his chin, moving slowly and erect. He's showing his younger brother and sister, Raymond and Kaitlyn, how to be dignified. If he had one, he'd be the man of his house. He's 11.
Standing in a dining room in the back of Dave & Buster's, near the food and cake and towers of water and pink lemonade, is Jack Doyle: Hometown kid, went to Cathedral, wanted nothing more than to play for the Colts. And here he is, throwing this party for a van full of kids, even if he's the shyest person in the room. Well, no, that would be Wesley over there, chewing on his nails. Jack sees Wesley and smiles. Jack sees all these kids, makes eye contact and says hello, and wants to know if they're ready to play some games and eat some food and have some fun. Fourteen kids are squealing.
Wesley is biting his nails.
Next time I see him, Wesley is sitting behind the wheel of a sports car, an arcade game called Cruis'n Blast. Jack Doyle is sitting next to him, hand on the wheel, because WATCH OUT FOR THAT LIGHT POST! Wesley's watching out for the light post. And he's looking at the Colts tight end.
You know that coin-push game nobody ever wins? The one where all those coins are hanging on the edge, over the edge, just waiting for one more coin to nudge them off? Nobody wins that game, not ever, because it's rigged. Until a little girl from Dayspring wins it and has so many coins, she doesn't know what to do with them. She runs to the nearest table, grabs a napkin — Excuse me! — and wraps up her loot.
Now she's running over to Jack Doyle, who has just made the announcement that it's time to eat. Doyle is leading 15 quite happy children out of the arcade and toward the back dining room when the girl tugs at his arm and shows him what's inside the napkin. And you should see Jack. His eyes are bulging. He's never seen so many coins in his life.
Well, the girl's a star, so I need her name.
Ah, I'm saying. Like the food.
Now she's frowning at me. What is that … are you rolling your eyes?
"Two i's," she says, touching the word on my notepad for emphasis, and now I've got it: Kookii.
The food is waiting in huge trays: pizza, cheeseburger sliders, french fries and macaroni-and-cheese. Kookii sits down with a plate full of fries, nothing else.
What's up with that? You a vegetarian?
No, Alie-Cox tells them, but I've seen him.
There are kids and Colts spread all over this room, Doyle and Alie-Cox and another tight end, Erik Swoope, and two quarterbacks: Jacoby Brissett and Phillip Walker. And there are two kids sitting quietly to themselves, at the end of a table, like two coins about to be pushed off.
Right about now is when a sixth Colts player shows up. It's Kenny Moore II, the self-made cornerback from Valdosta State. He missed the Colts' last game with a concussion, but he's not missing this. He sizes up the dining room and grabs a chair next to those two kids at the end of the table, Jatylin, 7, and Sierra, 5. The Colts cornerback leans into them and starts chatting them up.
Now Moore is turning around in his chair, finding Jack Doyle, and calling his name. Doyle gives him a look. What's up?
The Dayspring Center can house up to 14 families at any given time, and it's full at almost every given time. Those 14 families tend to include anywhere from 40 to 50 children. Families share a common room, a kitchen and bathrooms, but each family gets a room with a lock. The biggest families, six or more people, get the biggest room: roughly 15 feet by 20 feet.
This is what Lori Casson is telling me. She's the Dayspring executive director, and she says most of the kids at her shelter now are babies and toddlers, that these are all 15 of the kids between ages 5-14. Casson says she's been working with the Colts and the Doyle family for months to set this up. Kids at Dayspring go to schools all over central Indiana, but most attend IPS schools, and IPS is on fall break.
What did it look like around the shelter, I'm asking Casson, as this day — this party at Dave & Buster's with real, live Indianapolis Colts — approached?
It's loud in the arcade, where all action has stopped except for the Colts and their 15 little party guests. Other people are here, adults with their own kids, but once they understand what is happening — Hey, isn't that Jack Doyle? — they stop playing and start watching. What they see is magic, professional athletes with an excess of free time and money choosing to spend both of it here.
Phillip Walker is playing with a tiny kid named Semaj, 6, who's too busy dancing with his skee ball to actually roll the thing toward the target. Jacoby Brissett is cheering on Kookii's older sister, Joshay, who has announced several times that she turns 9 on Monday and now is trying to clamp one of those big claw-like contraptions onto a stuffed animal behind the window — "Get it, birthday girl," Jacoby says — and almost, almost, almost … there. The rest of the party, Joshay struts around Dave & Buster's with a purple dolphin as big as she is.
On a set of three basketball goals nearby, Erik Swoope and Mo Alie-Cox and that tiny little kid, Semaj, are competing. Swoope and Alie-Cox are ringers, former college basketball players at Miami (Swoope) and VCU (Alie-Cox), and Semaj can't even get the ball to the rim! So he climbs up onto the game itself and stands at eye level and starts making shots.
"Shooting like Oladipo!" Alie-Cox says, and Semaj beams. He may be 6, but he knows who Indiana Pacers star Victor Oladipo is.
A crowd is watching and Jack Doyle walks over and now Wesley — remember, the one with the fingernails? — is announcing that he beat the biggest guy, the one everyone's calling Mo, on the smaller Pop-A-Shot game in the corner. Alie-Cox is nodding ruefully. It's true, he says, he beat me three times. But then Alie-Cox tells the rest of the story with a huge grin: They were playing best-of-7. And Alie-Cox won four.
Wesley, completely over his earlier anxiety, his fears put to rest by all these oversized men with oversized hearts, is yelling in mock anger — gahhhhh! — and Alie-Cox is telling me that this party for Dayspring kids is exactly what he's been needing. He got his master's in criminal justice at VCU and always planned to do something for the community, "give back" as he says, but professional sports came first. Someday, though. He did give back at VCU, holding basketball camps at a local juvenile facility.
"I think we all just wanted to be here today to support Jack, and support kids," Alie-Cox says.
Doyle is the party's benefactor and host, but he doesn't want to take credit. He says this particular choice, a birthday party for the kids at Dayspring, was his wife's idea. He and Casie have a kid, Ronan, who just turned 2.
Effort matters, and Dayspring tries so hard to give these kids their childhood. For example, Dayspring has an annual fall camp during the IPS break: games, crafts, that sort of thing. Camp director Nasha Driver is the one who rounded up her campers earlier Monday and drove them to Dave & Buster's, and she's telling me how excited they were, how they kept wanting to know when, when, when. I'm asking her what it looked like, all these children, all that excitement.
"It was loud," she says, and I'm thinking I've heard that before.
Toward the end of the night, the kids are back in the dining room. They're filling up on pizza and macaroni-and-cheese and pink lemonade, and some of the kids are telling me their story.
Wesley — "like Snipes," he says — is saying his mom was renting a house when the landlord sold it, the new landlord raised the rent, and they had to leave. He says his mom is a greeter at St. Vincent. She's saving for a car and another home.
Jameriah, 8, is telling me this will be the second time she's had her name in the paper. The first time was with her dance team. I'm asking which dance team around here, and she says, no, it was in Peoria, Ill. "It got messy in Peoria and we had to leave," she says, and soon enough they were in the shelter.
Kookii is sitting next to us, and she's been talkative, so I'm asking her for more details about a day in the life at Dayspring: What, for example, did she do today before coming to Dave & Buster's?
No TV in your room?
There's a playground outside. You play there?
I'm wondering why Kookii has grown so quiet, and then I see it: A gigantic hamburger — no cheese; she's allergic — on a plate in front of her. She hasn't started to eat it yet. She's prolonging the moment, making it last. I'm asking her: Where did that huge burger come from? Nothing but cheeseburger sliders in here! Who brought it? Kookii stands on her chair and looks around the room, waving her arm like a wand, but she comes up empty. She sits back down.
"I don't know who brought it," she says.
Sounds like everything else tonight. Sounds like magic.