Brad McCoy has a favorite story to tell about his son Colt. It’s one that makes him more proud of his oldest boy than any touchdown pass ever could. Three years ago, Brad received a phone call on a Sunday afternoon from a man who had taken his 7-year-old son to church in Austin, Texas, earlier that morning. The man and his boy had taken seats directly behind Colt on the morning after the University of Texas quarterback had been injured in a road loss to Kansas State. Despite a trip to the hospital that revealed a pinched nerve in Colt’s neck and a late return to Austin, Colt was still in church at 8 a.m. for worship.

In 2005 Francie Ekwerekwu was a three-sport star at Arlington High School in Texas. She was a homegrown talent with a passion for track and some All-District hardware that displayed her volleyball and basketball skills as well. It took much prayerful consideration, but the 5'11" honor student decided to accept a volleyball scholarship to the University of Oklahoma—the equivalent of a Montague turning Capulet.

Why? According to Ekwerekwu, the reason was simple.

The other day, I saw a billboard for one of the major fast-food chains that said “Eat what you crave” and showed a picture of a gigantic bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.That beautiful biscuit we were told to crave packed 560 calories, 38 grams of fat and 1360 mg of sodium. For the average person, that would be almost a day’s worth of salt and saturated fat in just one meal.

The circle on the Morehouse College football field spanned from the 10 yard-line to midfield. Locked arm-in-arm were football players, cheerleaders, coaches, administrators and volunteers from both sides of the rivalry.

Morehouse and Clark Atlanta. They’re two of Georgia’s 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities and, even more specifically, two of the four undergraduate colleges seated on a single 200-acre lot on the west end of downtown Atlanta.