The Sabans give it back

The records in the Nick's Kids checkbook read like a tour of Tuscaloosa and Alabama as Terry Saban flips through them.

The UA SPIRIT Scholarship fund at the University. Eagle's Wings of Tuscaloosa. Birmingham Children's Hospital. The RISE School in Tuscaloosa. United Way of Alabama.

Donations can range from a thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, and all of the money comes from Nick's Kids. Alabama head football coach Nick Saban and his wife Terry established Nick's Kids as the fund they use to donate money to Alabama charities, hospitals and organizations.

"It's about taking care of each other," Terry said. "What you do comes back to you, and if you share, there's enough to share for everyone to benefit."

She said most of the charities they support are for children, but others help people who cannot take care of themselves, such as disaster victims and people with mental illnesses.

Helping children has always been important to the Saban family, Terry said, but especially to Nick, a trait she said he gets from his father. His father put together a volunteer football team called the Black Diamonds for the children of two West Virginia coal mining towns, even picking the kids up in an old school bus he bought so they could get to practice, she said.

"These children didn't have anything," Terry said. "They had no means to get to football practice. They had no equipment. They had no coach. They had nothing."

Named for Nick's dad, the Pop Warner field, where the Black Diamonds still play, is one of the few charities they continue to support outside of the state they are living in, Terry said.

The charity fund the couple started at Michigan State University by raising $100,000 for the Children's Miracle Network has tripled in size, with $320,000 donated in 2007 to 104 charities, almost all of which are in Alabama.

Out of all the money raised for Nick's Kids, 93 to 94 cents on the dollar goes to the charities and none of it goes toward administrative salaries, said Nick Ziccardi, who oversees the administrative side of Nick's Kids.

They have an annual golf tournament as their one major fundraisers, he said, and all the money Nick or Terry receive for speaking engagements goes into the fund also.

"There's a side that the public doesn't see of them," Ziccardi said. "They don't brag about it. They just do it behind the scenes."

While she is incredibly happy about what they have done so far, Terry said she wants to aim for half a million dollars in donations, a goal she thinks they can reach easily in Alabama with donations and supporters willing to share.

Where the money goes

Terry's biggest problem, Ziccardi said, is that she does not know how to say no when it comes to a donation she really cares about.

She hears about people in need from articles in the newspaper, letters she receives and stories that people tell her about a donation that could be very beneficial, she said.

Through Nick's Kids, Nick and Terry donated $5,000 to buy four Nintendo Wii gaming systems for the children and teenagers in the residential program at the Brewer-Porch Children's Center, which operates eight mental health service programs in Tuscaloosa for students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders.

Terry said she heard about the kids from a man who had done some work on the Sabans' property. His wife worked at the center, and she wanted to know if the Sabans could help the students buy some new games because their old ones were broken, Terry said.

"You walk in their game room, and there's nothing. They're all broken," she said.

Jimmy Thompson, director of Brewer-Porch, said they are still trying to buy the Wiis because the games are in short supply, but he said the gaming systems will be part of an important rewards system for the residential students at Brewer-Porch.

Many of the students, who range in ages from eight to 18, have severe emotional disorders and other disorders, and they are at the school sometimes as a last resort after being referred from all over the state, Thompson said.

"Play activities are therapeutic to help them socialize towards appropriate behavior," Thompson said.

As part of the rewards system, students earn points through good behavior to earn rewards such as playing games and having more freedom to go to the gymnasium rather than having to stay in their rooms, Thompson said.

He said they do not punish the kids for bad behavior; they simply take away the rewards the students earn for good behavior.

Having the Wii gaming systems and the games that go with it that the students will pick out adds to the reward system, Thompson said.

"The Sabans were very thoughtful and generous," Thompson said. "You can tell they're a team and that they work together and that they're concerned about the development of young people.

"I guess this is one way that they can show it, and Brewer-Porch is very appreciative."

An emergency room idea

Duane Vernon is not sure what would have happened at Edward W. Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Mich., if someone else had responded to Nick Saban's inquiries about getting involved with the community at Michigan State.

He is just glad that nobody else did.

Vernon, who serves on a few committees for the hospital, said he did not know what Nick wanted to do when he got a call in June 1999, letting Vernon know that Nick wanted to meet with him in his office.

In the meeting, Nick told Vernon he had tried to get involved with the Lansing community for four years, but no one had gotten back to him, Vernon said.

He knew Nick wanted to work with children, so he and the hospital director took him on a tour of the hospital's pediatric unit.

"I told [the director] before the tour, 'Whatever you do, don't ask him for money,'" Vernon said. "Then at the end, Nick said, 'What can I do to help the kids here?'"

Vernon said he watched the director bite his tongue to not ask for a donation, but instead of making a plan at that moment, Vernon thought about it over the weekend and then pitched the idea to Nick of starting a fundraiser to build a separate emergency room for kids.

And because it was for the kids, the name Nick's Kids stuck to the program.

"Nick is the kind of guy that he wants to do what he wants to do," Vernon said. "He wants to help in the community, and he wants to help kids."

After Nick left in December 1999 for the head coaching job at Louisiana State University, Vernon said the program continued renamed as Coaches for Kids. Michigan State football players and Big 10 officials started off-shoot groups known as Athletes for Kids and Officials for Kids.

More than eight years later, Vernon said what Nick started has mushroomed into three groups and $500 million donated and the pediatric emergency room that Vernon suggested Nick could support.

Today Sparrow Hospital is holding a ribbon cutting ceremony to officially dedicate its new, 10-story wing that includes a pediatric emergency room and other facilities for children.

It is the second emergency room for children in the state, with the best technology, Vernon said.

"He started this thing that has become a wonderful, wonderful thing for kids," Vernon said.

But he said he is not sure if they would be opening the building today if he had not gotten a phone call from Nick.

"That building might not have been built if it wasn't for what Nick started," Vernon said. "To think that it all started because Nick called me and said, 'Duane, I want to get involved.'"