Become an educated resource and
advocate for your child and student.

Educators and Parents

Taylor Hooton was a 16 year old, 6’2”, 180 pound kid who was a normal high school student. He was very popular and had many friends, he was an honor student who was making plans to go to college, he had involved parents, he was a Christian and attended church regularly, and he had a girlfriend. But he also was an athlete with a big secret - he was injecting himself with anabolic steroids. Taylor wanted to compete on the baseball team his senior year had been told by a coach that he “needed to get bigger” in order to reach his goal. So he decided to take a short cut. After all, fully half of the other guys on the team were already doing it.

Taylor knew little about anabolic steroids other than that they would make him bigger and stronger. He certainly knew nothing of their dangerous side effects. And, they did make him bigger – he put on almost 30 pounds of lean muscle in about 90 days. But, after using these drugs for several months, he descended into a deep depression and on a summer day in 2003, Taylor took his own life.

It would be bad enough, sad enough, if Taylor were alone. But Taylor’s story is tragically all too commonplace. The use of anabolic steroids and other appearance and performance enhancing drugs by our nation’s youth has reached near epidemic proportions. This behavior was initially driven by young peoples’ belief that these drugs will help them perform better on the athletic field, just like many of their role models. But the problem quickly morphed into something else – the kids, including our little girls, started to take these drugs to look better, to help them become “mirror athletes”.

Everyone was shocked - Taylor Hooton’s parents, friends, teachers, and neighbors - that this young man was using drugs. They had no idea that he was part of a brand new culture of drug abuse and that so many of his friends were regularly injecting themselves with hardcore anabolic steroids. Taylor’s parents decided to speak out in hopes of letting other parents know about what they perceived as a “local epidemic”. It must be a problem in the greater Dallas area, they presumed. Little did the Hootons know that they had walked into an information vacuum which extended way beyond the Dallas Metroplex. It was everywhere. Thus began the creation of the Taylor Hooton Foundation and its national effort to raise awareness and educate the public on the dangers of anabolic steroids and other appearance and performance enhancing drugs.

As parents, educators, and coaches, the Taylor Hooton Foundation encourages you to become educated about anabolic steroids and other appearance and performance enhancing drugs so you can be a resource and advocate for your child and student. Identifying at-risk kids is our adult responsibility which we must take very seriously. It really is a life and death issue.