Before this crazy ride started this season, we hadn’t won a playoff game since I was six months old. I went to the AFC Championship game in Kansas City. On my way back home, I found myself spontaneously bursting into laughter and half-expecting to wake up from a dream.
We aren’t dreaming. We won the AFC Championship. And, just like the Bengals, Ohio is on the up and up. We’ve seen an enormous amount of redevelopment and reinvestment. From Dayton’s Arcade, the Levitt Pavilion and the unprecedented interest in our historic neighborhoods, people are excited about Dayton again. We didn’t just invent flight — we reinvented grit.
Even if you don’t like football, you now have a ton of guys from Ohio representing our region on the biggest stage in all of sports. Burrow is from southeast Ohio. Hubbard grew up going to Bengals games. Huber is a ‘Nati guy who has endured 13 years of Bengals chaos and misery, just like the rest of us.
I see a lot of similarities between the Bengals and Dayton. Like the Bengals, Daytonians are scrappy. We continue to outperform the pundits’ wildest expectations. The same way people wrote off the Bengals, people tend to have written off Dayton. But when you invest in young people and the right pieces of your community puzzle, they are going to fight like hell to make you proud.
I work in education, supporting our region’s Business Advisory Council that consists of 23 school districts and about 80,000 kids. I see our region’s resilience every day. Our community’s educators and industry partners strive to better connect students to careers. Whether it’s helping students find a paid internship at a local company or taking a college-level class in computer science, we continue to fight for a better future. Like the Bengals, when you start to stack up wins, people start to look to the future with optimism.
If I could offer one piece of advice to our region’s families this spring, it’s to send your kids to camps. Search for a balance between recreation and sports camps and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) learning opportunities. Let’s channel the excitement and positivity around Ohio into a summer of developmental progress for our kids. Explore opportunities with partners like the Boys & Girls Club of Dayton, the YMCA and countless other organizations striving to provide a well-balanced diet of experiences for our community’s youth.
Finally, just as there’s never a bad time to jump back on the Bengals bandwagon, I urge you to consider volunteering to support our region’s youth through volunteering. It doesn’t matter if it’s an entrepreneurship camp or a basketball league, we need more volunteers to serve as mentors to youth in our community.
Who Dey!
Bryan Stewart serves as Workforce Director at the Montgomery County Educational Service Center in Dayton, Ohio. He also serves as a board member for Welcome Dayton and the Boys & Girls Club of Dayton.
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