Warrior Stories

A NOTE FROM DAVID

FEATURED STORY

“I tell them that I did it. I am living proof that they can make it.”

Antwone Harris, Executive Director, Warriors Center Memphis

Every morning, Antwone Harris gets up early and makes his bed. It is a small thing, but Antwone knows that small things can matter.

Six years ago, getting out of bed at 5:30 every morning was one of the things he disliked most about Warriors Center. Residents were expected to get up, make their beds, attend chapel, work, study and follow a schedule. There was structure everywhere. Today, Antwone still gets up early and still makes his bed.

“It is a great way to get a win early in the day,” he says.

These days, however, Antwone is not getting ready for another day as a resident at Warriors Center Memphis. He is getting ready to run it.

Antwone Harris is now the Executive Director of the same Warriors Center where he arrived in July 2020 with ten days’ worth of clothes, a federal court order and a life that had become almost completely unmanageable. His journey from one side of the director’s desk to the other is a story of recovery, but it is also a story about something addiction had taken from him long before he arrived at Warriors Center: trust.

A Life Coming Apart

Antwone’s addiction began after injuries he suffered while working as a UPS driver led to prescription pain medication. When the prescriptions ended, he turned to street drugs. Then, in 2016, his father died.

His father had always been the person who could pull him back when his life began drifting off course. Without him, Antwone spiraled. Eventually, he began using heroin.

The losses came one after another. His marriage ended. His relationships with his daughter, his mother and the rest of his family fell apart. He lost cars and homes. Failed drug screens cost him his truck-driving job.

Eventually, he was living on the streets and selling drugs, although he says he usually used more than he sold. His days narrowed into a miserable routine: wake up, figure out how to keep from getting sick, find drugs, get high, pass out and start again the next morning.

His family still prayed for him, but they had stopped rescuing him.

Antwone knew where things were headed.

“I knew that I was going to die or spend the rest of my life in jail,” he says.

Antwone before coming to Warriors Center Memphis.

Eventually, jail became prison.

In 2020, after serving nine months in federal prison, Antwone was given an opportunity to enter treatment. He wanted rehab. What he did not want was a year-long program. Thirty or 60 days sounded more reasonable. His attorney and pretrial release counsel disagreed and insisted on long-term treatment.

His mother picked him up.

In July 2020, Antwone arrived at Warriors Center Memphis with ten days’ worth of clothes.

He had imagined something like the rehabs he had seen on television: group sessions, plenty of sleep and not much else. Instead, he found what he calls a “working ministry.” There were morning and evening chapels, work assignments, classes, book work, outreaches and accountability.

And those 5:30 mornings.

“I wanted to change,” Antwone says, “but I was afraid of what it was going to require of me.”

For months, he thought about leaving. He was court ordered to be there, and the prospect of returning to prison helped keep him from walking out, but he still wondered if there might be someplace easier.

At the same time, he kept watching other men graduate. They were men like him, men who had arrived with wreckage behind them and no certainty about what came next. If they could finish, Antwone began to think, maybe he could too.

“Don’t Cheat Your Mother”

Tino Skinner worked with Antwone in bootcamp and later served as his program director. He remembers Antwone as mild-mannered and respectful, the kind of resident whose answer was usually “yes and amen.”

He also remembers his work ethic.

Antwone worked at a meat-packing company while going through the program, a demanding job that few residents managed to stick with. Then he came back to Warriors Center and still had coursework and responsibilities waiting for him.

Antwone, center, during a Warriors Center work trip while he was a resident in the program.

Eventually, he got tired.

Antwone started looking for a shortcut. He asked whether he could receive an “honorary graduation,” something occasionally allowed for a long-term resident unable to finish the coursework.

Tino told him no.

Instead, he told Antwone to think about his mother.

Don’t cheat her out of the chance to sit there and watch her son graduate, Tino told him. Don’t cheat her out of watching you recite your verses and being there when everyone celebrates you for finishing.

Antwone had already given his mother plenty of reasons to worry about him. Tino was asking him to give her something else.

“That really stuck with me,” Antwone says.

Tino saw the difference.

“I saw when he bought into the concept of, ‘I can do this,'” he remembers. “He really took that to heart. He seemed to really buckle down after.”

Something else was changing, too.

Antwone had grown up going to church and knowing God. Addiction had pushed that relationship behind everything else in his life. At Warriors Center, he began reading the Bible again. He went to chapel. He studied.

There was no single dramatic moment when everything changed. The realization came gradually.

For years, Antwone had asked God to bring him out of the life he was living. Now he began to see that this place he sometimes wanted to leave, with its early mornings and rules and coursework and people who refused to let him take shortcuts, might be the answer.

“I began to realize that it was exactly what He was doing,” he says.

Trusted Again

Hershey Burnett was the Executive Director at Memphis while Antwone was a resident.

From the director’s chair, Hershey saw something Antwone did not yet see himself.

“He really didn’t believe that he could” complete the program, Hershey remembers. “But as I pushed him more, he began to get the confidence that he knew that he could make it.”

As Antwone progressed, Hershey began giving him responsibility. As a senior resident, he was assigned to lead teams working Warriors Center events. He had to make sure other men stayed at their posts, followed the rules and did what was expected of them.

For Hershey, it was a practical leadership decision.

For Antwone, it meant much more.

“Nobody had trusted me with anything in a long time,” he says, “and to have people trust me again meant the world to me.”

That trust also carried a weight Antwone had not expected. If he was responsible for other men, then how he behaved no longer affected only him. He says he wanted to justify the confidence Hershey had placed in him.

Eventually, graduation day arrived.

His mother was there. So was his aunt.

For Antwone, finishing the program meant more than receiving a certificate. It was the first time in a very long time that he had finished something he started. And the mother Tino had told him not to cheat out of that moment was there to see it.

Graduation did not end Antwone’s relationship with Warriors Center. It deepened it.

He began driving residents to work and appointments and serving as a program assistant in the evenings. More responsibility followed. He became Program Director, then Assistant Director under Hershey.

When Hershey was promoted to Regional Director, David Vincent came to Antwone with another question.

Was he ready to run the Memphis center?

David warned him that the job would be stressful and difficult. He also told Antwone that he had confidence in him.

Antwone said yes.

The man who had once needed a court order to keep him from walking away from Warriors Center was now its Executive Director.

Today, Antwone leads the same Warriors Center where he arrived as a resident in 2020.

For Hershey, watching that happen has been its own reward.

“It just reminds me how God continues to raise up new leaders among men,” he says. “Antwone does a fantastic job.”

Living Proof

Running the center has not been an easy ending to Antwone’s story.

In some ways, he says, it tests him more than being a resident did. The days are fast and stressful. In the beginning, there were times when he wondered whether he was the right person for the job.

He kept going.

There is a phrase Antwone learned during his own recovery that he now repeats to the men in his care:

“Don’t give up before the miracle happens.”

He has some evidence for it.

The life Antwone goes home to today bears little resemblance to the one he was living before Warriors Center. He has been married for three years. He and his wife have a home together. His mother and daughter are both back in his life.

His mother tells him she is proud of him now.

“She never could say that to me before,” Antwone says.

Not every story he witnessed along the way ended like his.

Antwone remains in touch with many of the residents and staff he knew during his time in the program, but there are others he cannot call. Some of the men he grew close to left Warriors Center, returned to drugs and died from overdoses.

“I think about those guys daily,” he says.

That knowledge follows him into every conversation with a new resident who is tired, frightened or looking for the easier road Antwone once wanted himself.

He does not tell them recovery is easy. He tells them it takes time. There may be stumbles. They have to be willing to change.

But when a man walks into Warriors Center Memphis convinced that he cannot do it, Antwone has an answer few Executive Directors could give.

“I tell them that I did it. I am living proof that they can make it.”

There is something else Antwone understands now that barely crossed his mind when he was the man sleeping in one of those beds.

Somebody had to make that bed available.

As a resident, Antwone says he gave little thought to the strangers who helped pay for his care. As Executive Director, he knows what it costs to keep a center running, and he knows how many of the men arriving at his door have nothing to contribute toward that cost.

Asked what he would tell someone who has money to give but wonders whether a donation to Warriors Center really makes a difference, Antwone does not reach for statistics.

He points to himself.

“I am a product of the Warriors Center,” he says. “I would just ask them to look at me, in how far I have come, and know that their donation could help so many other men achieve the things that I have achieved.”

Six years ago, Antwone Harris walked through the doors of Warriors Center Memphis carrying ten days’ worth of clothes. His family had stopped trusting him. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself. He certainly did not know that one day people would trust him with the center itself.

Today, his family trusts him again. His staff trusts him. And every day, men who arrive carrying their own versions of the life Antwone once lived trust him to help show them a way forward.

Tomorrow morning, Antwone will get up early.

He’ll make his bed.

Then he’ll go to work at the place where he learned that a life can be rebuilt one small act, one difficult decision and one earned measure of trust at a time.

Ask Antwone what Warriors Center means to him today, and he answers quickly.

“It means everything. It changed my life.”

Then he corrects himself.

“No, it saved my life.”

By the Numbers

Behind every story is the daily work of recovery, accountability, and rebuilding lives across all Warriors Center locations. Bootcamp is twenty-eight days. The full program takes most residents a year.