“I really respect and admire our 5 a.m. crew,” says Jarrod Covington, district executive director of the Prisma Health Family YMCA. “All of our staff are important, but if the 5 a.m. openers aren’t here on time, the doors don’t open.”
When Covington came to Greenville County in May of 2021, he found a receptive community with a well-established YMCA.
“So I did a lot of listening,” Covington says, “I came in saying, ‘Hey, I’m the new guy. Tell me about this great community. Tell me what you think of the Y. How has it impacted or how could it impact your life?'”
Each YMCA association is locally managed and oriented toward meeting local needs. After speaking with community members, Covington and his team had an idea to support kids in Southern Greenville County.
“We serve hundreds of kids everyday at Y summer camp. We asked volunteers if they’d mind reading to our kindergarten and first-grade group,” Covington says.
It was a simple solution to engage volunteering, encourage reading and improve literacy. It was also a lot of fun. Each adult volunteer wore superhero capes and some even wore costumes.
“We had a retired teacher dressed as a mouse,” Covington says. “We had police officers and firefighters. We had Kiwanis Club members and two city mayors. They’d greet the kids at the door, then go inside and read to them.”
The Hometown Superhero Readers program will return in the summer of 2023, but Covington wants to “plus that.” He and his team are currently raising funds to give the kids more books. Covington and his team have recently kicked-off LIVESTRONG at the YMCA, a program for cancer patients and survivors, as well as a new esports program for kids and pickleball.
Covington’s co-workers think of him as the “plus-that guy.”
“Sometimes I have team members who ask if we, you know, can we just celebrate what we did first,” Covington says. “And I own that feedback. But my mind is already on improvement. How can we do this better next time? What can we do differently? How can we do more?”
Improvement comes in many forms. Sometimes small changes garner “huge results,” as Covington calls it. Other times, change is larger. Either way, change is seldom easy.
“There’s always going to be change,” Covington says. “We can choose to see change as a challenge or as an opportunity. A board member said to me once, ‘Let’s choose to see it as an opportunity.’”
Covington and his team deal with those opportunities by listening, planning and sticking to the YMCA’s core values of “caring, honesty, respect and responsibility.”
“I wish I could say the Y knows all, that we have all the answers, all the things people need, but I can’t,” Covington says. “What I can promise is that we stick to our mission to provide ‘programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for all.'”
Covington stands at the second-floor rail overlooking the gym and indicates the many activity rooms and doorways. There’s the backpack program, the mobile Y, food assistance program and more. There are daily, weekly and monthly schedules of activities. There’s the gym, open at 5 a.m. There’s pickleball at midday. After school, there’s karate, dance and Youth Beast Mode class (high-intensity training programmed to challenge your strength and endurance, hence the “beast” in the name).
A lot goes on at the Y.
“Right now, a lot of families are moving into the Greenville area,” Covington says. “And I can attest as someone who recently moved here, those people are wondering, ‘Where do I go? How do I meet people? How do I create a friend group?’ The Y is the perfect conduit into any community. It really is a place for all, a place where you belong. It opens doors in so many ways.”
Jarrod CovingtonMeet Jarrod Covington
- For more than 25 years, Covington has worked in multiple YMCA associations across the Southeast including Sumter; Winston Salem, North Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee; and Lexington, Kentucky.
- He’s served as a member YMCA USA Diversity Inclusion and Global Engagement Leadership Council and has trained leaders in DEI best practices at YMCAs across the country for eight years.
- He was recently selected as a member of Leadership Golden Strip’s Class No. 3
- Covington is a native of Sumter and a Winthrop University graduate, making the job at Prisma Health Family YMCA a homecoming of sorts.
