West Charlotte High School’s boys basketball team is playing for the state championship tomorrow at noon. The original plan was to get up early in the morning and make the three-hour bus ride to Raleigh.
That’s when Panthers owner David Tepper stepped in.
Via Langston Wertz of the Charlotte Observer, Tepper provided two charter buses and offered to pick up the tab for the team’s hotels for the night
“It’s just been overwhelming, with the alumni and now the owner of the Panthers helping us out,” West Charlotte coach Jacoby Davis said. “It’s just been a blessing. It caught me off guard. It’s not normal that an NFL team is paying for a high school basketball team like this. But it shows the community cares about what’s going on here.”
City councilman James “Smuggie” Mitchell helped broker the donation, working together with several alumni of the school to look for sponsors to help the school — one of the city’s economically poorest, with 74 percent of the students on free or reduced lunch — for the trip to the title game. One of the alumni who pitched it was attorney Walter Price, who works for the local firm which helped administer the sale of the Panthers to Tepper last year. Price told Mitchell he had found an anonymous donor.
“Walter called back,” Mitchell said, “and he said, ‘I’ve got you a sponsor, and keep it low key,’ and it was David Tepper. Walter had mentioned all this to Mr. Tepper and (Tepper said), ‘I want to be a part of this. How can I help?’”
Tepper has made a number of charitable gestures in his new town, showing signs of becoming a generous corporate citizen (while leveraging North Carolina and South Carolina against each other for public funding for his new practice facility).