Built for Auburn. Built to Last. 

In Alabama, middle school lets out at 3:15.

By 3:30, Jordan is off the bus and back in the parking lot near his apartment complex. He is twelve years old, a seventh grader, and for the next three hours nobody in the world knows exactly where he is.

His mom is at work until 6. His older brother is around — with the same group of guys he has been running with since he got out last spring. They are seventeen, eighteen. They have nowhere to be and nothing to prove except to each other. They notice Jordan. They always notice the younger ones.

Jordan does not think of himself as a kid making bad decisions. He thinks of himself as a kid with nothing to do.

That distinction will not matter much when it counts.

By 4:15 he is deeper into something than he planned to be. Not because he is a bad kid. Because he is a twelve-year-old boy with unstructured hours, the wrong company, and no place that was built specifically to pull him in a different direction.

There are hundreds of Jordans in Auburn right now. Getting off buses. Drifting toward parking lots. Waiting — without knowing they are waiting — for something or someone to give those hours meaning.

Some of them will be fine. Some of them will not.

The difference — more often than anyone wants to admit — is not character. It is not family. It is not talent.

It is whether there is a place to go.

Aubrey Reese knows exactly what Jordan's afternoon looks like.

Because he lived it.

He grew up in Ridgecrest — Auburn's public housing community, Apartment 87 — navigating the same hours, the same parking lots, the same gravitational pull toward the wrong direction that finds every kid who has nowhere purposeful to be. What saved him was not luck. It was structure. It was a grandfather who showed up every single day with three expectations and refused to lower them: be disciplined, be accountable, keep your commitments. And it was basketball — a coach, a gym, a door that was open when he needed it most.

That door changed everything.

Aubrey went on to star at Auburn High, earn a scholarship to Murray State, and play professionally overseas. He saw the world. He made it out. And when he came home in 2017 he did not come back to be celebrated.

He came back because he understood something that most people who escape difficult circumstances eventually discover: that leaving is not the same as solving.

He started training kids through AR Elite Basketball. Good kids. Talented kids. Kids who reminded him of himself. And it did not take long before the questions came — the ones no basketball coach is supposed to answer but that only someone who has stood in that same parking lot can answer honestly. How do I apply to college? What do I do with money I've never had before? Who do I talk to when things at home get hard?

In 2022 Aubrey founded The D.A.C. Way to answer those questions — not one kid at a time, but institutionally. Permanently. With a building, a staff, a program, and a promise that the next generation of Auburn's young people will not have to rely on luck to find what he found.

The D.A.C. Way is building that place. Two full courts. Batting cages. A strength room with DISCIPLINE. ACCOUNTABILITY. COMMITMENT. on the wall. A tutoring room upstairs. A recovery suite. A golf simulator lounge.                                                        A campus designed from the ground up around one question:                                                 

what does a young person in Auburn actually need to thrive?

It does not exist yet.

Jordan gets off the bus today at 3:15.

He has nowhere to go.

Aubrey came back to change that. Now he needs the people who love Auburn to help him finish what he started.

That is why you are reading this.