Trey Payne read the card calmly. He opened the paper bag and blurted out a line somewhere between laughter and fear: “I hope these aren’t sneakers, guys”.
They were. Two weeks earlier, someone had stolen his favorite basketball sneakers at Logan Fontenelle Middle School in Bellevue, Nebraska.
He is an 8th-grade teacher and the team’s coach, the kind who stays after school for any student. His students didn’t wait for anyone to fix things: they put money out of their own pockets and raised more than they needed.
When Payne opened the box and saw a brand-new pair of Nike Zoom KD12s, he took off his glasses and covered his face with his hands. He cried. The kids surrounded him in a group hug while someone recorded it all.
A mother told FOX 5 that he would do anything for his students and that, it turns out, they would do the same for him. Payne summed it up best: it wasn’t about a pair of sneakers, but about doing things to lift up those around you.