Zion Bowlin says he can remember hopping on the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence bus as a child and going to the pool. Now a senior at Free State High School and captain of the football and baseball teams, Bowlin has been named the 2017 Youth of the Year by the Boys & Girls Club.

Zion Bowlin is no stranger to accolades. In his four years at Free State High School, he’s racked up quite a few.

On the baseball diamond, he was his team’s 2016 MVP and an All-State first team honoree. On the football field, he was an All-League pick (also first team) and the record holder for the longest rush in Free State’s history. He’s also, naturally, the captain of both teams.

Just last month, though, Bowlin added another prize to his collection that he says might just outshine all the rest. The Free State senior has been named the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence 2017 Youth of the Year winner.

“Being an athlete and getting All-State awards and All-League awards — I place it above those,” Bowlin says, reflecting on things a week after clinching the Youth of the Year title during a packed ceremony at Liberty Hall. “So it means a lot to me.”

He says this with a smile that exudes both quiet confidence and humility. And he means it, too. For longtime members like Bowlin, Youth of the Year is considered the highest honor a Boys & Girls Club kid can receive. The annual award recognizes those who best exemplify the organization’s values of leadership, service, academic excellence and healthy living.

Bowlin beat out four other candidates, including 2016 Kansas Youth of the Year winner Jazmyne McNair, to clinch the title. It was a culmination of five months’ work — writing essays, preparing speeches, community service projects, and, for all the candidates, learning to thrive outside one’s comfort zone. And Amy Hill, director of teen services at the Boys & Girls Club, served as Bowlin’s mentor throughout it all.

“Throughout this entire process, he’s just been amazing. I know he’s very humble, but just the hard work he has put into this — his work ethic is just stellar and something people should emulate,” says Hill, who remembers the Monday nights when Bowlin would drive straight from football practice to meet with Hill for the pair’s dedicated work sessions.

There were also, she says, the weekends when he would do the same. And the times he spent at the Boys & Girls Club’s teen center during his winter break, tweaking his speech. “He put in that extra time and dedication to get it the way he wanted to be,” Hill says.

Zion Bowlin, center, was voted the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence 2017 Youth of the Year, announced Thursday, Jan. 26, 2017 at Liberty Hall. Shown with Bowlin, a senior at Free State High School, are the other four candidates for the honor: Ruth Gathunguri, Treven Hall, Christian LaPointe and Jazmyne McNair. Bowlin will go on to represent Lawrence at the Kansas Youth of the Year event in Topeka on March 6.

That’s an athlete for you. Bowlin means it when he talks about Youth of the Year outranking all those sports awards.

Baseball will always be his first love — he’s been playing “since I could swing a bat,” the 17-year-old proudly recalls. But, just as sports have long been a constant in his life, so has the Boys & Girls Club, which Bowlin first joined as a kindergartner at Deerfield Elementary School.

At the Club’s Deerfield Elementary School site, he found a warm, welcoming refuge where “I was able to just come in and be a kid,” Bowlin says, “instead of worrying about Mom or Dad.”

At home, his single father, Craig Bowlin — his mother wasn’t around much back then, Zion Bowlin says — tried to shoulder the bulk of those worries. Raising a child on his own couldn’t have been easy for Craig, the younger Bowlin recognizes now, but even so, he strove to do the job right.

Every morning before school, Craig Bowlin would ask his son, “What does a leader look like?” Being a kid, the younger Bowlin would shoot back with a sarcastic reply, that “it’s a person who leads and doesn’t follow.”

He didn’t understand the question at the time. Years later, it’s now clear to Bowlin what a leader looks like.

“I realize it was him, because he was just always there for me,” Bowlin says of his dad. “That’s pretty much what a leader is — somebody who cares for somebody and doesn’t try to fit in with everybody else. They try to do their own thing, but in the right way.”

For Bowlin, that means steering clear of drugs and alcohol and surrounding himself with a small but tight-knit group of friends. He’s very selective about the people he lets into his life, and he’s loyal to those who have stood by him over the years.

That’s why he’s now giving back to the Boys & Girls Club as a volunteer. Bowlin enjoys playing games with the kids, he says, and simply being there for them. He knows some of the children may also have complicated lives waiting for them back home, like he did. And since Bowlin is the Youth of the Year winner, those kids look up to him, Hill said.

But Bowlin has more work to do. The statewide Youth of the Year competition, in which the prize is a $5,000 scholarship, is only a month away. From there, it’s regionals and then the national prize, with any luck.

Bowlin said he wants to become a nurse someday, to be able to care for people the way his grandmother’s nurses did throughout the long illness that ended her life last year. He hasn’t decided on a college yet. Bowlin’s also received some athletic offers from a few schools, and hopes to continue playing baseball, the sport he loves, while juggling academics.

“Hopefully it can help me with getting into college,” Bowlin says of his latest win. Beyond that, “I don’t know,” he admits.

“It’s just something that has been able to get me to give back to the other kids in the community who might’ve went through something like I went through. That’s really what it is,” he says. “Trying to help the younger kids, as well as myself.”