To keep the memory alive of
a beloved Akins teacher, who passed away in a hiking accident in 2021, the Akins Varsity Football team is featuring a large set of wings on their helmets this season. The helmet design first made its appearance during the 2021 football season after Christina Garcia-Mata died during the summer break before school started.
Garcia-Mata, who began teaching at Akins in 2006, has made a significant impact on the Akins community through numerous contributions. In 2018, she was voted the 2017-2018 Akins Teach- er of the Year. She taught U.S history, AVID, SEL, and Teen Leadership. She was the campus AVID coordinator and the Green Tech Academy coordinator.
When the Akins community heard about Garcia-Mata’s death in a hiking accident in
the mountains surrounding her hometown of El Paso, many students and teachers worked
to honor her legacy as an Akins teacher. Head Football Coach Joey Saxe said the design for the helmet was inspired by a custom jersey Garcia-Mata would wear while supporting the team at their games. The jersey featured a large set of wings on the back. Now that many of the students who would have personally known Garcia-Mata have graduated, Saxe decided to bring back the wing design on the helmets to pass down her legacy to a new set of students who never got to know her when she was alive. “Everybody loves the wings; it’s also that reminder of flying high all the time, soaring through the stormiest of the skies, and it’s always wings up; it’s what we try to instill in our athletes,” Saxe said.One of the most meaningful messages she left behind was the 1LOVE” message, said psychology teacher Katie Delmore.“Garcia Mata was pure sunshine; she was loved,” she said.Delmore said when students walk down the hallway and see the 1LOVE campus norm posters, that’s the message that she has left with us.“I think that message we can carry with each other with our- selves and for each other every day,”she said.
EE: Could you explain the meaning or story behind this year’s helmet design?Coach Saxe: Yeah, so we went back to the gold helmet, it was just a constant reminder that wewanna strive for excellence, and then the standard is what we said it to be in everything, both aca- demics, athletics, and community. Facebook post by Gabriel Mata, who was Garcia-Mata husband.We wanna have high standards for each other. And so just every time we see the goal, that’s what that is. The wings were my first design at the head coach, and it went back to just paying tribute to a great teacher, a great friend of mine, Christina Garcia Mata, and she was a very long-time educator here at Akins High School. And we lost her a few years back, in a tragic, just flash flood incident, in our hometown. And so we wanted to just give a nod to her and her family because of how much she had meant to me, in my develop- ment as an educator, but also how much she had meant to go kids.
EE: What do you want new students at Akins to know about Garcia-Mata?“She was an academy coordinator. She’s helped write the SEL curriculum for the district with me and a couple of other teachers, and just really loved kids, but when she would go to the game and she had one of those just like infectious smiles. And so she was always cheering them on. She was always just, you know, high-fiving them in the hallways. She had a shirt made for the school, like a custom-made shirt that she got, which had the wings on it. And it kind of went down, she would always wear it to every game and just be cheering loudly in the stands. 
“She was just relentlessly loving to kids to help them understand, like, you are great, you are valued, you can be whatever you wanna be. You know, she helped so many first-generation college students through AVID, the opportunity to go to school, and how proud she was always proud of her students. She was also just so great at every interaction that you had with her. You just felt valued, and so like, she is truly missed. She just loved being an educator and loved helping kids.
