The Elmore County football team was hit with hard news after hearing offensive line coach Charles Winchester Jr. was diagnosed with cancer.
Winchester has been an integral piece for the Panthers coaching staff, especially with head coaching experience under his belt. He exudes his leadership capabilities not just with the players on the field but across the campus as a whole.
“The impact he's had on our kids, since he got here, just caring for them, working for them, and just being there for the kids.” Elmore County coach Kyle Caldwell said. “As a former head coach himself, he's been around a lot of different programs and a lot of different teams and communities, and so having him here is just a blessing for us, really. He does a lot for these kids and for us coaches as well. And he serves them, he's a servant leader, and that's the kind of coaches that we want on our staff and on our campus.”
Winchester also played a major role in getting his son Tyler Winchester into the coach realm as well with both of them serving on Elmore County’s coaching staff this past season.
“I would go to him every day into coaches meetings,” Tyler said. “I’ve been around him on the field, the locker room. I grew up around him every day. He taught me everything I knew about being a leader, everything I know about coaching comes from him. He's got a lot of experience being a head coach and being in different coordinating positions, he's done it all. So everything I know has come right out of his book. He is a father figure to me, but also on the field, he's a leader, and that's something that he really has rubbed off on me.”
Recently, Winchester just completed an 11.5-hour operation to remove the lymph nodes on his neck, remove the cancer from his upper palette as well as reconstruct and replace his upper jaw, according to a Facebook post from Tyler.
As of right now, Winchester is in recovery from the extensive surgery. But one thing that will make the road to recovering that much easier is the impact the community has made. Margaret Weeks, of Tallassee, created a GoFundMe page in hope of alleviating some of the cost of surgery alongside the cost of chemotherapy.
Currently, the GoFundMe page has reached more than $2,000 after just a week of being up. It is a testament of what a community is capable of when they all come together for a common goal — this time being for Winchester.
“It's been amazing,” Tyler said. “The community and the people that reached out to us. The donations are very helpful with gas and doctor's bills and medications and all that good stuff; it's not cheap. But everybody that's reached out in the community we live in, it's been just unmatched and just unbelievable the amount of love.”
Although Winchester has gotten the necessary surgeries to begin his road to recovery, there are still a few hurdles to overcome. Following a few weeks of rehabilitation, Winchester will begin radiation and chemotherapy.
“There's still a long road for a full healthy recovery with different therapies he's gonna have to take for speech and swallow,” Tyler said. “It's gonna be a little different to get used to, but we tell everybody to keep us in our thoughts and prayers along the journey. There's definitely some light and hope for a healthy future.”