Coy speaks about resilience 

Coy, a Davenport, Florida, native, enrolled at CSC in 2014 on a football scholarship. After graduating from high school, he did not feel equipped to face the academic challenges of college, but he preserved at CSC and achieved a 4.0 GPA his first semester. His sophomore year, he continued to flourish and discovered he qualified for the Project Strive TRiO program as a first generation and low-income student. 

“When I heard about the program, I said, ‘Sign me up.’  That’s when my life began to change. After that, I went to [TRIO Director] Jen Schaer many days when I felt like quitting,” Coy said. 

Schaer guided him to resources and provided encouragement for him to persist. 

Today, Coy has come full circle and feels like his background of overcoming obstacles helps the high school students he advises in Chadron and Alliance. 

“I enjoy what I do for them,” he said. 

During his presentation, Coy outlined several areas of his life where he faced adversity, including sports, education, and family struggles. 

Football had been a way of life since he was six years old, so when he suffered a knee injury in his senior year of high school, he continued his season, despite the injury, and played for 10 games. He eventually had surgery to repair the damage. He desperately wanted to earn a football scholarship and even though he had his sights set on Division I, former football assistant coach Craig Jersild convinced him to consider Chadron State College. 

A torn ACL at CSC presented a new set of issues because Coy couldn’t access the medical procedures he needed in Nebraska, so he had to fly back to Florida several times where the care was covered by Medicaid. He found that yoga helped with his recovery. 

“Football taught me there’s no ‘I’ in teamwork. Also, it really matters what you are doing when people aren’t watching, like time in the gym lifting weights,” Coy said. 

Coy said his mother was a high school dropout at 15 when she had his older brother. As a child of one parent without a high school diploma, Coy’s chances were less than half that he would finish high school and only 11 percent that he would earn a college degree. Since his parents couldn’t help him at home with schoolwork, he learned to meet new people and ask others for help. 

Family health problems and tumultuous relationships further complicated his youth in a community where he said drugs and guns were common. 

His family lived with his grandmother who suffered a stroke when Coy was nine years old. He noticed when the EMT arrived to assess her on her porch.  

“[The EMT] asked her to repeat the phrase ‘You can’t teach an old dog a new trick,’ and when she was unable to, a stroke was confirmed, and she was rushed to the hospital. I never saw her at home again,” he said. 

A year later, his parents divorced, introducing increased financial stress. 

“We would come home and not know if the lights or water were going to be turned off or if there was going to be food in the refrigerator,” Coy said. 

An anonymous benefactor paid his tuition to transfer from public school to a Christian academy. At age 16, he came home to find an eviction notice pinned to the door. He gathered his belongings in a tote and couch surfed for his final two years of high school with a family whose child also attended the academy. 

At 18, Coy went to visit his father and noticed he couldn’t lift his arm to shake hands. His father was also slurring his words. Remembering the symptoms of his grandmother’s stroke nine years earlier, Coy stepped into the role of assessing his father’s condition by asking him to repeat the same phrase the EMT asked his grandmother to repeat. When his father could not comply with his request, Coy drove his father to the nearest hospital. After being refused immediate help at the first hospital, Coy drove his father to another hospital where he received medical care. 

Three points Coy said he follows to help with resilience are self-care, healthy coping, and celebrating small successes. 

“I have a Bucket Of Small Successes, or BOSS, for my students. So, if they get an A on a test, they can drop that in the bucket and we can all celebrate it and they can build on it,” Coy said. 

Coy summed up the sources of his resilience as faith in God, strong relationships and community, and a positive mindset. He expressed gratitude for the opportunity to make his home with his wife, Taylor, whom he met at CSC and their two children 

“What happens to you can create happiness, but joy is what you choose,” said Coy. “I choose to anchor myself in values and purpose, my family. And I take the perspective that I am blessed, not oppressed.”