Staff reports
The proliferation of travel and club sports has created more opportunities for student-athletes in the Lowcountry to get the training and skills necessary to earn scholarships to play college sports, but the time commitment and prohibitive cost prevent many talented and deserving student-athletes from taking advantage.
In an effort to help bridge the gap and bring high-level programming across multiple sports to more young athletes in Beaufort, Jasper, Hampton, and Colleton counties, two longtime youth sports advocates in the community have teamed up to form the One Lowco Foundation.
LowcoSports founder Justin Jarrett and H2 Basketball founder Rob Benson have formed the One Lowco Foundation, a 501c3 organization aimed at helping students in the “Lowco” develop their talents and leverage their skills for future success, whether in sports or in the sports media field.
“Rob and I actually butted heads at times early in our relationship, but the more we talked and compared notes about what we were seeing across the area, the closer we grew and the more crystallized our shared vision became,” Jarrett said. “We’ve both seen the disconnect between fun and fundamentals in youth sports coaching, which puts our high school coaches at a disadvantage when they can’t use standard terminology and have to back up and coach from the bottom up.”
Benson has already begun organizing regular basketball clinics at the Hardeeville Recreation Center, where middle school girls can attend two-hour training sessions with the coaching staff from the highly successful H2 Basketball program for just $20 per session. Plans are in place to use the same format to provide access to quality training in other sports, including volleyball, baseball, softball, and wrestling.
As participation in the clinics grows, One Lowco plans to scale up programming to meet demand, eventually resulting in local leagues and “limited travel teams” that can compete against one another from Savannah to Charleston, rather than incurring massive expenses by traveling to tournaments in Atlanta, Charlotte, and beyond.
“Ideally, we want to partner with community schools to better utilize their existing facilities to the benefit of their student-athletes, which will in turn strengthen their middle school and high school programs,” Benson said. “By taking the programming to them, we can remove many of the barriers that prevent marginalized students at Title I schools from reaching their full potential.”
Jarrett has been in the Lowcountry since 2005, when he was hired as a sports reporter at The Island Packet. After six years at The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette, the last as sports editor, Jarrett spent six years building the sports information and marketing department at USC Beaufort before launching LowcoSports to fill the gap of local sports reporting in the market.
In the meantime, he began coaching his children in recreational sports and served on the board for Bluffton Youth Sports, including a two-year term as president. He has since founded a Bluffton Waves travel baseball team and a newly-formed Bluffton Waves travel softball team, in addition to coaching wrestling at H.E. McCracken Middle School.
LowcoSports has become the primary source for local sports news in the region, as well as a training ground for students and community members interested in gaining hands-on experience and mentorship in the media field. Students who have interned with LowcoSports have gone on to study in related fields and work for their college athletics departments, in addition to beginning careers in the industry.
Through their partnership, LowcoSports and the One Lowco Foundation intend to give more students in the Lowcountry opportunities to learn on the job while creating journalistic-style content that celebrates the successes of our teams and athletes in the Lowco.
With their experience on the tournament circuit across multiple sports, Benson and Jarrett are also working to bring quality competition closer to home, providing better access to more athletes. Through affiliations with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), the organization plans to hold volleyball, baseball, and softball tournaments in the region beginning in 2025.
