Gator Bowl Sports Charities

Gator Bowl Charities is the philanthropy arm of Gator Bowl Sports and our way of giving back to the northeast Florida community! We strive to directly impact local youth and individuals throughout northeast Florida through unique experiences and opportunities with a focus on education, leadership and service. Through our programs we are able to provide local youth with insight into Sports business, scholarship opportunities, behind the scenes/once in a lifetime experiences at sporting events and more. Key programs include: send a child to the game which annually provides over 1,000 participants the opportunity to experience sporting events by providing a full game-day experience including game ticket, pre-game meal, transportation and more. The Gator Bowl Charities award of excellence scholarship annually awards four local senior student-athletes a one-time gift of $2,500 to be used at any accredited university or community college. Additionally, the henry tuten Gator Bowl pro-am golf scholarship was added to provide four local high school golfers a one-time $2,000 scholarship to be used at any university or community college. The 5000 role models of excellence program in partnership with duval county public schools allows us to adopt a local middle school (dupont middle school) to directly impact their school, students and teachers throughout the year. This is done in a variety of ways from teacher recognitions/meals, school clean-up projects, and interactions with the students to talk about Sports business. Throughout this partnership, we have also created the Gator Bowl Charities Sports career fair that allows us to invite 250+ local middle school students to learn about Sports as a career and how many opportunities are available to work in the Sports industry. The most valuable teacher (mvt) initiative began in 2021 and we continue to build on it each year. This year we gave sixteen local teachers $1,000 each to use in their classrooms. Each teacher self-nominated and was chosen at random; we then were able to go into the classrooms to surprise one teacher each week throughout college football season. This year we were also able to bring back the taxslayer Gator Bowl dream team after a couple year's off due to the pandemic. We signed twelve new local kids battling life threatening illnesses to the dream team in august, and throughout the year they had a variety of experiences including attending our member socials, a 'scouting trip' to gainesville to watch a Florida football game, a meet & greet with taxslayer Gator Bowl players, coaches and mascots from each team. Their experience concluded at the taxslayer Gator Bowl being recognized on-field. While we have hosted the little Gator Bowl (greater jacksonville pop warner city championships) for years. We focused on growing the event this year to include more games (impacting more players) and providing each winning team player with a championship ring, something they will cherish forever.