McEntire concert aiming to raise $200,000

Country music star Reba McEntire can never adequately thank her mentor, Red Steagall, for influencing the course of her life. Who can?

But on Saturday, March 21, McEntire will attempt to demonstrate that appreciation when she performs with Steagall at the Sears Centre Arena in Hoffman Estates to help pay the mounting medical costs of another mentor - someone who guided hundreds of young people through Maine West High School in Des Plaines over a 31-year career.

McEntire and her band, along with Steagall, will perform at 7 p.m. Tickets, ranging in price from $62 to $202, go on sale through Ticketmaster at 10 a.m., Monday, March 2.

All proceeds from the concert will benefit a new foundation formed to help pay the medical bills of current and former Illinois teachers, coaches and students who have spinal cord injuries like Maine West High School Coaches' Hall of Fame member Richard Carlini, 78, of Barrington.

Carlini became a paraplegic literally overnight last October when a congenital condition called arterio venous malformation caused him to suffer a stroke within his spine.

Carlini is about to be discharged from an area rehabilitation facility because his Medicare coverage has run out. Ongoing care for the former coach and high school athletic director is expected to cost between $40,000 and $50,000 per year as long as his paralysis persists.

But Carlini's army of former wrestlers is determined to help the man who mentored them all those years ago. A core group started The Teachers, Coaches and Students Foundation.

"We knew the cost to try to get our coach back on his feet again and care for his future needs was not going to be cheap," said Bryan Real of West Dundee, a former lightweight wrestler and 1975 graduate of Maine West. "A bake sale or a car wash was not going to do it. Raising money had to be big and fast because he simply wasn't getting any better.

"I knew that we needed to fill a stadium, so I spent weeks on the Internet, e-mailing entertainers and promoters, looking for help."

A producer in Oklahoma City offered to contact McEntire.

"Reba was interested and she waived many of her fees and requirements," Real said. "But she also stipulated that she wanted to perform with her mentor, Red, since the concert was being held to help our mentor, Coach Carlini."

Before he knew it, Real was signing a contract with the Sears Centre and McEntire, thanks to a line of credit from Banco Popular and lots of help from fellow Carlini wrestlers around the country and from his co-workers at United Food Group in Elgin, particularly Robert Long of Lake in the Hills, who had never even met Carlini.

"We are hoping to raise a little over $200,000 from this concert," Real said. "I even have customers from China and Taiwan flying in for it!"

"Coach taught us so many lessons, and when he worked for the Des Plaines Park District during his summers, he even got a lot of us summer jobs," said Phil Lambrechts of Lake Zurich, another wrestler from Maine West's class of 1975.

"He was almost a father figure to me and instilled a lot of values in me and the other young men he coached that I later tried to instill in the men under my command in the military," said former Army Col. Erv Geisler of Barrington Hills, a 1964 Maine West graduate who coached under Carlini for 10 years.

For more information about the foundation, go to teacherscoachesandstudentsfoundation.com.