Cowboys’ Jones leaves piece of heart back home with New Britain’s youth
NEW BRITAIN — Football is Byron Jones’ business. It has taken him far from these streets he once traveled on his bike, made him millions of dollars, made him a well-known name.
He carries bits, pieces and people from New Britain with him when he is covering Odell Beckham Jr., or chasing down Saquon Barkley, and never forgets them.
“I was playing football since I was 7 here,” Jones says, as he walks past Al Beatty Field and into the Police Athletic League’s modest gym. “Just to give back to the community and show the kids that you can come from anywhere, and go anywhere, you’ve just got to put in some hard work. For the kids, it’s important to see a product of New Britain, Connecticut, going somewhere far in life.”
Jones’ father, Donald, a state trooper, his mother, Garnette, and his older brothers Winston, Aaron and Nathan, lived walking distance from the field, on Slater Road. From here, Byron went to play football at St. Paul- Bristol, and then to UConn and the NFL as the Cowboys’ first-round draft pick in 2015. Last season, he moved from safety back to his more natural cornerback position, and he made the Pro Bowl.
“You’d never imagine a Pro Bowl player would text you back as fast as Byron does,” says Lt. Matt Marino of the New Britain PD, who coaches in the PAL and handles details of Jones’ youth camp.
Jones reached out to Marino with the idea of starting a camp in November 2017 — note, the middle of the NFL season — and with local support the first one, seven months later, brought out 250 kids, age 7 to 15. It’s not run by an outside firm, which might use a name, charge a fee, write the script. This is Byron Jones’ camp, looped in on every text; every detail run by him. It’s free, and once it was announced on social media this year, it took only 12 hours for the capacity of 250 to fill again.
“His first words were, ‘Next year we’re going to have to open it up to more kids,’” Marino says. “’We’re going to have to figure out how to do that.’ He wants to get the older kids involved because his message of how to stay on the straight and narrow, keep your head in the books, do well in school, essentially set yourself up for the rest of your life, he’s