Legion Collegiate honors baseball coach Jalen Benjamin with scholarship for athletes

Legion Collegiate Academy will sponsor a scholarship in memory of former head baseball coach Jalen Benjamin.

Benjamin died in a car crash on Aug. 10 on his way to a baseball game.

He was 29.

The school announced the details for the Jalen Benjamin Memorial Scholarship during Tuesday night’s junior varsity/varsity volleyball doubleheader against Indian Land celebrated as “J-Rock Night.”

Benjamin was heading into his second year as head coach for the Lancers after serving as an assistant coach from 2019-2022. The Lancers went 14-9-2 last season.

School athletic director Mike Drummond was hired over the summer and didn’t get to know Benjamin for as long as other members of the Legion Collegiate community. However, Drummond said the time spent with Benjamin showed just how special the young head coach was.

“The thing that impressed me about coach Benjamin, he always had this big smile on his face,” Drummond said. “Whatever we were discussing, he had a big smile. We were kidding around one day talking about Little League baseball, and some of the things that they were doing and some of our experiences playing Little League baseball back in the day, so we had a big chuckle about that. But his energy, his smile, it spelled volumes in terms of working with the student-athletes here at Legion.”

The timing of J-Rock Night, which was Legion Collegiate’s first home contest of the school year, was intentional. Principal Julie Marshall said Benjamin “didn’t miss anything” at the school and was always around for games or other events.

The idea for a memorial scholarship came from Benjamin’s values.

Benjamin also taught Business Principles, an online class available at Legion Collegiate with a class pool of 100 to 125 students.

However, Marshall said that Benjamin had a unique gift of giving and connecting with students, which showed in his work. He had a slogan “Don’t waste your presence” that is printed on the sleeves of the baseball team shirts. It’s a message to live out your purpose in life and to give anything and everything your best shot.

Benjamin valued education above all else, and it felt appropriate to honor him with something that embodied that ideal.

“(Jalen’s) goal was to make sure that every single child he touched was able to continue their path in education,” Marshall said. “He never wanted a child to chase their dream and abandon education as we see so often in sports, especially baseball. When we started looking, it was almost immediate what we were going to do. Everybody was like, ‘we’re going to have this scholarship,’ and we’re going to continue that dream. That’s going to be his legacy.”

This is the third memorial scholarship Legion Collegiate has created in four years. The other two were also in memory of former coaches Anthony Hutchison (who died in 2021) and state champion Mark Cooke (who died last year).

Marshall said that the criteria for the Jalen Benjamin Memorial Scholarship will follow that of the other two, taking into account a student’s academic and athletic achievement to go along with an essay that is judged by an independent panel. First considerations will go to seniors who play baseball at Legion Collegiate, same with Hutchison’s scholarship favoring cross country and Cooke’s scholarship favoring softball.

The scholarships are awarded annually at the school’s year-end ceremony in May.

“In six years, we’ve lost three key people off of our staff,” Marshall said. “That’s why we couldn’t talk (with the media) at first, because it’s just so devastating to be a little tiny school for such a short time and to lose three significant people, this being the youngest of the three. The story is he was just (heading to a baseball game), and he had gone to see the kids play. I mean that’s just who he is.”

Marshall said that the Jalen Benjamin Memorial Scholarship fund has already raised over $3,000. To donate to the fund, visit www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=AETNU4F3VHH46

This story was originally published August 28, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Legion Collegiate honors baseball coach Jalen Benjamin with scholarship for athletes."