MOULTRIE — As the wife of a coach and the mother of three football-playing sons, Cathy Parker believes in the power the sport has to be a positive influence on youngsters.

And after being coaxed into watching an ESPN documentary last year on the plight of the high school program and its young players in Barrow, Alaska, Parker put her belief into action.

And her persistence paid off for a whole community more than 4,000 miles away from her home in Jacksonville, Fla.

Parker, a native of Valdosta, is married to former Lowndes High, Vanderbilt and NFL receiver Carl Parker.

The couple’s children attend Bartram Trail High School, where Carl Parker is an assistant coach on the football team.

Cathy Parker saw the ESPN documentary on the implementation of a football program for high school students in Barrow, Alaska, that was designed to help a community beset by a high dropout rate, drug abuse and an alarming suicide rate among teens.

What the Parkers noticed was that the Barrow Whalers football team played on field covered in dirt and gravel.

Grass does not grow in Barrow, where football field was a long pass from the Arctic Ocean.

Cathy Parker decided to raise money to install an artificial turf field in Barrow for the Whalers to play on.

“I just knew that was what we needed to give them,” Parker told BAFANTE (Bring A Friend At Noon To Eat) meeting at the Trinity Baptist Fellowship Hall last week.

“I knew God had called me to do this.”

And she did it, raising more than $500,000 and having the blue-and-gold ProGrass field installed under adverse conditions in time for the Whalers season-opening football game last Aug. 17.

It was a long and involved project in which raising money was only part of the equation.

Logistics threatened to derail the project, but Parker refused to give in to obstacles and she was on hand to witness the Whalers defeat the Seward Seahawks in the first game on the new field.

Parker said she knew she would not be able to raise enough money just in her community, and went about getting the word out.