By Chad Miller
Paxton News Bureau

PARAGOULD — Greene County Tech football player Byron Fair’s hard work and dedication paid off Thursday morning when he accepted a football scholarship from William Penn University in Oskaloosa, Iowa, at the GCT fieldhouse.
GCT football coach Jeff Conaway said Fair, a linebacker-defensive lineman, is the first GCT football player to have been offered a scholarship before the college season started since 1991. He said Fair is “one of those players that makes coaching easy.”
“He’s a guy who is extremely committed to the team. He shows up for every practice and when he’s at practice, he’s giving you 100 percent,” Conaway said. “We’ve had other (players) who have walked on (to a college team) and earned scholarships. There have been five or six who have done that, but this is the first one since ’91 that has been awarded a scholarship before the season started.”
Although Conaway said Fair makes coaching easy, the road to Thursday’s signing has not been easy for Fair. Fair suffered a torn ACL during the summer before his ninth-grade season and has had problems with it since. He said he underwent two surgeries to repair his ACL within one year.
“(One of my doctors) said I should’ve had a knee brace to begin with because I’m double-jointed,” Fair said. “I can (bend my knee) negative three degrees on my own. So a knee brace is necessary to make sure I don’t go past parallel.”
Fair said doctors advised him to “take it easy” for six months after the first surgery. But he said he found being still to be very difficult.
Fair said when he re-injured his knee, his family sought a specialist for him. He said the specialist set time frames for when he can do certain things with his knee.
Fair said after working hard to come back from his injury, being offered a football scholarship made him feel that he had a achieved a goal.
“This was my goal from the very beginning,” Fair said. “The chance to play college football was my motivation to get better.”
Fair said it was a strange twist of fate that made him decide on William Penn. He said he had been preparing to walk on to the football team at Arkansas Tech, but a chance meeting between William Penn defensive coach Steve Miller and Arkansas Methodist Medical Center trainer Johnny Grooms, who had been working with Fair to rehabilitate his injured knee, changed Fair’s plan. Grooms said Miller asked if he knew any good defensive players who had not been signed yet and Fair immediately came to mind.
“I just happened to be lucky enough to be in a spot where I could talk to Coach Miller,” Grooms said. “Byron’s the one who got himself a scholarship. He’s done the work for the last three or four years. He’s been dedicated in (rehabilitating his knee). I’m proud for him.”
Grooms said he gathered information about William Penn’s program from Miller and thought Fair would be “a perfect fit.”
Fair said he wants to enter the medical field after college. He said had always wanted to go to college and playing football was the means to pay for it.
“I wanted to get a good education so I could get a good job,” Fair said.