It wasn’t as if Steve and Teri Fitzgerald were getting low on mouths to feed and bodies to clothe and shelter that summer of 2013.
The former Chattanooga Christian School and Covenant College basketball standout and his wife were raising their six biological children on a small private high school basketball coach’s salary when they first had befriended Nigeria natives Abule Abadi and Alaowei Talent two years earlier.
But now Abadi and Talent were going to be forced to return to Nigeria for good if someone didn’t adopt them.
“Even though they weren’t living with us, they were already part of our family,” Fitzgerald recalled earlier this week from the family’s current home in Lakeland, Florida. “But because they were playing basketball for us, Florida high school athletic association rules prohibit players from living with their coaches. They’d still go places with us almost every weekend, though.
“So we prayed about it, talked to our kids about it and they were all for it. We just felt like God was leading us in the direction of adoption.”