Mikey and I were flipping through the channels last night looking for something to watch. Mikey has his favorite shows and he is usually insistent about what we watch but last night we saw a program we wouldn’t normally watch. While I was going through the channels, I stopped on ESPN. A program called E:60 was on which seems to be similar to 60 Minutes but sports oriented. This particular program was about a young man named Brian Kajiyama.

Brian Kajiyama was born in Hawaii with cerebral palsy. He is in a wheelchair and can only use one hand. He can not speak but instead uses a speech synthesizer which he types on with his one working hand. When he was a boy, Brian dreamed of playing football for the University of Hawaii, a dream he knew would never be fulfilled. But that didn’t stop Brian from attending the University of Hawaii. While he was a graduate student, Brian became friends with a few of the players on the football team and they invited him to come out and watch them practice.

In 2005 Jeff Reinebold, the new defensive coach for the Warriors, noticed Brian watching the team’s practices and introduced himself. Jeff and Brian became friends and Jeff invited Brian to help prepare scouting reports on the Warriors’ opponents. Brian did his job so well that in 2007, Brian was named a graduate assistant football coach for the team by the head coach, June Jones. Brian was living a dream, being accepted as part of the team by the players and being called coach by those players. With his help the Warriors were the only undefeated team in Division I in the 2007 regular season.

See if you can watch the program without tears.

Heart of a Warrior - Part 1:

Heart of a Warrior - Part 2: