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Two members of the Strength Team, Warren Alford and Zeb Bishop, visited Madison Academy on Wednesday, Feb. 18 to talk to the children about bullying, the power of words, goals and dreams, while performing feats of strength. The Strength Team is a group of professional athletes, with varying backgrounds, including college and professional football, body builders and bull riding, who use feats of strength to capture the audience’s attention as they deliver powerful messages of anti-bullying, anti-drug, tobacco and alcohol use and making the right decision. Before starting the program, Alford had students come on stage to test the items they would be using in their program to ensure that the stunts were not rigged in any way. To start off the program with a bang, Bishop took a Louisville Slugger and broke it in half over his leg. According to Alford, it takes 400 pounds of pressure to break a Louisville Slugger. Alford performed the next stunt by taking a frying pan and bending and folding it until it was in the shape of a burrito. With the students excited from the performance, Alford took the microphone and began discussing his most embarrassing moment. When he was 15-years-old, Alford was bullied about his weight and those words were harmful to him. The power of the words the bully said affected Alford and he felt rejected and thought no one cared about him. His coach noticed that Alford was not himself and pulled him aside one day. The coach told him that he could take what happened and turn it into a stepping-stone or keep it as a stumbling block. The coach became Alford’s dream maker and helped Alford make what Alford describes as a quality decision to start working out. While letting Alford’s message sink in, Bishop took a rebar and bent it around his leg until it resembled a ribbon and Alford ripped a Florida license plate in half with his bare hands. Bishop then took the microphone and spoke to the students about dream takers – someone or something that can take a person’s dreams away from them if they do not stand their ground and fight for it. The dream taker could be a bully, drugs, tobacco or alcohol. The last stunt of the program was when Bishop took cans of Diet 7-Up, shook them up and squeezed them in his hand until they exploded all over the audience. The Strength Team left the students with a lot to think about, advising them to ponder how their words will affect the person they a talking to.