EDITORIAL: Remembering Waco High Coach Azure Love-Davis
Today’s funeral for Waco High School girls basketball coach Azure Love-Davis will obviously be a sad affair for athletes, friends and family, but her death is a great loss to all in our community.
This cherished coach was much more than just an inspiration to her athletes. She was a living way for them to follow. She represented spirituality and determination and endurance and smarts — all skills that girls need to be the leaders of tomorrow.
Love-Davis, 31, died unexpectedly Monday. She was taken from us far too soon. People like her we expect to live long and to impart wisdom for generations. Once they leave us, we realize we should have studied them more while they were among us.
Her girls knew her and waxed eloquently about her to the Trib’s Wendy Gragg.
“She always said, ‘Define the moment; don’t let the moment define you,’” Waco High junior guard Ashley Bean recalled.
“She was the rock of our team,” senior captain Jasmine Evans said.
We should all be so blessed to have youth speak so masterfully of us once we part.
Her actions mirrored her words. She was a highly successful coach who was named the Tribune-Herald ’s Reggie Davis Super Centex Coach of the Year in 2009. In her first season as head coach in 2007, she took a program that had been 6-29 and guided it to a 29-7 record and a berth in the Class 4A Region II quarterfinals. The next year the Lady Lions made a repeat appearance in the playoffs.
But she wasn’t just about basketball. She was full of zest and enjoyed a hearty joke. She checked grades and monitored students’ career plans. And while she mothered many, we shouldn’t forget she was also mother to a 5-year-old and an eighth-grader.
Waco High principal Clarence Simmons said: “She was the type of person that when you walked away, you were a better person for having known her.”
Our prayers go to her family, athletes and friends. Our community has lost a great soul but we’re all the better for her life.
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