VOLUNTEER

Access Cup to drive $100,000

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BOBBY AMPEZZAN  5/19/14  Brent Stevenson and Bella Vines, 4, with Charlie Johnson, 4, and dad Chris Johnson on a green at the Chenal Country Club golf course in advance of the 12th ACCESS Cup June 9, 2014.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BOBBY AMPEZZAN 5/19/14 Brent Stevenson and Bella Vines, 4, with Charlie Johnson, 4, and dad Chris Johnson on a green at the Chenal Country Club golf course in advance of the 12th ACCESS Cup June 9, 2014.

In our popular culture, wives and golf sit opposed to each other. Tee times conflict with couples' time or else honey-do lists. The golf course is a bulwark for '50s era separation of the sexes. At its worst, the links are a husband's last refuge from a nettling wife; wives, meanwhile, encourage the outings just to be relieved of their men for a morning or an afternoon.

If that's true for Chris Johnson's wife, Annabel, and before him Brent Stevenson's wife, Cheri, those women have found a further good use for their husbands' pastime.

For about the last decade, first Brent Stevenson and now Chris Johnson have chaired the Access Cup, the $100,000 fundraiser for the school of the same name. Their wives have worked at the school for more than a decade. Access offers evaluation services, schooling, training and therapy for about 200 young people with language and learning disabilities.

Johnson has been on the cup committee for about 10 years, first serving under Stevenson. This is the 12th Access Cup. The first one made about $10,000. This year they're hoping to break $100,000 for the first time.

"Honestly, ... we've had a box that we've established over 12 years where the event -- we know what we are going after. The benefactors, and the groups on the committee, they do it multiple years. It's not anything they commit to; they choose to come back year after year after year. From that standpoint, we really aren't reinventing the wheel every year. We're starting at a core group of 10 to 12 teams, [and] a major and minor sponsor that really jump-start us every year."

The price is $350 a person. That's lunch at 11:30 a.m. June 9 and a shotgun start at 1 p.m. at Chenal Country Club, one of the area's more serene private courses. (In fact, Johnson and Stevenson say a dozen or more participants wouldn't play the course without this fundraising opportunity.)

The tournament began at Eagle Hills. Some time ago, Deltic Timber came on as a sponsor and with it came Chenal Country Club, "so everything we're bringing in, teams and sponsors, it's all bottom-line profit for the school."

There are refreshments thrown in all over the course (ice boxes of beer), some parting gifts (a Nike store voucher) and a reception. The title sponsors are Harriet and Warren Stephens and Stephens Inc.

Johnson's goal is not to increase participation, exactly. He and Stevenson are confident that the allure of the Access Cup is that it's good golf. There are no wait times at the holes and the course isn't crowded with foofaraw.

"This tournament's not necessarily to raise a lot of money, though it does raise money," Stevenson says. "It's to get the word out about Access in the community and to invite friends and guests to be a part of one of the better-run tournaments and enjoyable afternoons with friends and business associates."

In his line of work as a vice president at First Security Bank, Johnson says he participates in a lot of four-person scrambles. He places a premium on getting people through the tournament in four hours.

"These players have family, they have other obligations, you start pushing five- and six-hour events, [the event] starts losing a little bit of its luster," Johnson says.

Both men say that, aside from breaking the $100,000 ceiling this year, the long-term vision for the event isn't to expand the tournament or the number of players but to regularly bring in new ones -- potential new partners for Access.

"We kind of put a cap on the total number of teams," Johnson says, but "if we could affect one family or one corporate sponsor every year that's new to the event, I'd consider that a success."

Both men are convinced that the benefits Access provides are not exclusively for special-needs children and young adults.

"Bella [Vines, 4] and Charlie [Johnson, 4] are part of the integrated preschool program. You have children with no disability from 6 weeks old to 5 years old in the same class as those with disabilities, and with an actual curriculum -- it's not just drop your kids off and they watch a movie and then you pick them up," Stevenson says. "So they learn to appreciate each other. So that if there is a stigma, that is softened tremendously."

"Our therapy program, we have kids all across the city with dyslexia and learning disabilities who come in and do outpatient therapy at the school -- or therapists who go out into their schools and do therapy in their classrooms," Johnson says. "That's a need for families all across the city that this school provides."

When the golf tournament began, Access served students and clients through its therapy program and preschool and Academy classrooms. Since then, the Access Evaluation and Resource Center, where families from across the state and region seek diagnostic evaluations and testing and tutoring services, opened. This year, for the first time, some Access students have matriculated at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which has partnered with Arkansas Rehabilitation Services, to provide them with internships that culminated Friday in a graduation ceremony inside the Fred W. Smith Conference Center in the Jackson T. Stephens Spine and Neurosciences Institute on campus.

These are students that, at another time, without the benefit of care and training, wouldn't have found employment or independence. It took someone's idea, or more like, some people's ideas, to get them to the graduation dais, "and there's ideas even further," Stevenson says.

High Profile on 06/01/2014

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