By Jeffery Green | @Jeffery_Agreen

Sports Capital Journalism Program

TAMPA – When the Palisades Fire fires destroyed 40% of the Palisades Charter High School campus in early January and left more than 500 students without homes, Adam Levine, coach of the girls basketball team, immediately got to work trying to plan for the rest of the season and decide where they were going to play.

But the coach needed to take a step back for a moment. “Wait a second,” he recalled Friday morning. “People just lost their homes. Am I being insensitive?”

Levine thought it would be a good idea to reach out and see if his players even wanted to play. When parents reached back out, they were all ready to start playing again to help their community through a devastating time.

This fight to keep the season alive is exactly why both the boys and girls basketball teams have been honored with this year’s U.S. Basketball Writers Association Most Courageous Awards. Levine and Elizabeth Tierney, an All-City junior point guard, accepted the 2025 Pat Summitt Most Courageous Award here during the organization’s Women’s Awards Brunch at the NCAA Women’s Final Four. The award honors the late Pat Summitt, Hall-of-Fame coach at the University of Tennessee for 38 seasons.

In the 48 seasons that the USBWA has presented Most Courageous awards, this the first time a high school program has been honored. Levine said that he had coached the daughter of Candace Parker, who played for Summitt at the University of Tennessee. “I always hear her talk about the impacts [Summitt] had,” Levine said of Parker, who played for the Los Angeles Sparks of the WNBA. “I’ve been fortunate to see Pat Summitt speak in a coaching clinic. Just her battling and dealing with adversity and winning this award was very cool.”

But what makes the recognition meaningful was the fact that both the boys and girls teams were able to work together through it all. Before the fires, normally one team would play on the road and the other would play at home. They responded to the disaster by working together to find a place to play, often at the same place on the same night. “To do this with our boys program was very cool,” Levine said. “We became really close, helping each other out. Whether it was finding gyms, getting kids to our games, we both had these little state playoff runs. We played back to back.”

The girls team had a Western League record of 8-4, good for third place, and an overall record of 17-16. Through all the adversity, both teams reached the state semifinals, and the girls team was just two points away from a trip to the state finals in Sacramento.

A switch flipped in the second half of the season to make that run possible. They used the chemistry they gained from adversity as fuel to make a run the whole community got behind.

“We definitely were playing our best basketball because I think all of a sudden they were, you know, playing a little less for themselves and more for their teammates, their community, their school,” Levine said. “It was bigger than basketball.”

The runs both teams were able to go on were heavily fueled by the community. “We started noticing, all of a sudden there’s a lot of kids at our games,” Levine recalled. “Kids aren’t going to school, so it was like the one place where they got to like, socialize. And all of a sudden we see all these families and kids in our games and that was pretty cool, too. And you kind of realized, yeah, we’re playing for more than our school now. We’re playing for the community that has just been super impacted.”

Assistance came from beyond the Pacific Palisades. Other coaches have reached out to ask how they could help, whether it was using their facilities or helping to purchase new equipment and uniforms. The Los Angeles Clippers let the Dolphins use their facility to play their Senior Night game and gave them tickets to concerts.

Sports can be a great unifier and healer of people and communities. “Sports teach life lessons,” Levine said. “And we got a ton of life lessons this year.”

For those wanting to help the Palisades Charter High School, donations can be made to its fundraising page to help rebuild (https://givebutter.com/raisepali).