For athletes from an economically impoverished city in eastern Massachusetts, UMass is the gold to go for.
Lawrence, Massachusetts,
is a city that can claim as home-
boys both Robert Frost and Leonard Bernstein. Nestled in the hilly
river country near the New Hampshire border, long the hub of wor-
sted-textile manufacturing in region, Lawrence once promised the American
dream to generations of Irish, Polish, Lebanese, and French Canadian immigrants
willing to pay their dues in the booming mills.
But after World War II, as the mills were forsaken for cheap overseas labor, Lawrence started down a road traveled all too often by New England factory towns. Today its claim is not to fame but to notoriety: number one on the East Coast in car theft and arson; vying for first place in teen motherhood; second in Massachusetts to have its high school accreditation yanked. Eighty percent of the city's schoolchildren are Latino, and the vast majority come from single-parent homes. Of a typical class of 1,000 high school freshmen, not 300 will graduate. Idlers with junk-food complexions, a surfeit of time and a dearth of prospects loiter on streets crisscrossed by malodorous canals, lined with busted cars, dingy tenements, check cashing joints, and package stores. This is "West Side Story" gone way beyond tragedy.
In the southeast corner of this urban desolation stands an unassuming, ochre colored brick building with smudged glass doors. Walk through these doors and the feeling of siege lifts. The hallways echo with the slap of sneakers, shouts in Spanish and English, the clatter of cue-balls, the ka-thonggggg of multiple basketballs hitting backboard and rim. Boys, from the cute-puppy grade-school stage on up through teenage beanpole status, are everywhere. This is the Lawrence Boys Club, one of the few places in town where youngsters can find a game, a hot meal, and adults who'll talk straight about school, drugs, gangs or college. On this court of dreams, one looms largest: the hope of spending four years in a verdant place 100 miles west called UMass Amherst.
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I first met Steve Kelly in fourth grade. He would make us set goals for ourselves. Everyone I grew up with was poor. He'd tell kids from broken homes, kids into crime and drugs, that they could achieve something. These were kids faced with the pressure of being drug dealers every day. Steve would say, 'work hard, study hard, do the right thing.' Someone else is saying, 'You want $1,000 and a car?' What do you think they're going to pick? He doesn't reach every kid. One of the best basketball players the Boys Club ever saw is in jail right now, dying of drug abuse. |
One day in mid-March of this year, four visitors walked onto the sidelines of the basketball court and stood watching the warmups for after-school practice. The four big men in their suits and ties were in striking contrast to the skinny boys in their gym shorts and sneakers. But as boys themselves, all four men had played on this court, and all now return regularly: Timothy Bryant '89, who went from from Boys Club point-guard to Minuteman quarterback to Portland lawyer; Dan Rivera '96, for whom, like many youngsters here, the club provided a surrogate father, and who went on to become a student representative to the Board of Trustees at UMass; Paul Theberge '63, who's made a fortune selling cattle hides to shoe manufacturers but who for the last six years has come weekly to tutor a pair of youngsters whose promise he spotted as seventh-graders; and Michael Morris '63, the outgoing president of the UMass Alumni Association, who first realized the potential of this club as a pipeline to UMass.
The boys noticed the men and jogged off the court to say their hellos. The main man is Morris, who knows each by name; with a squeeze to the shoulder or handshake he inquired after this one's brother, that one's math grade. At once imperious and personable, Morris is a oneman force of nature whose zeal for the club pulls others into his wake. It's the memory of a much different Lawrence, one "where you knew what to expect from your family, your school, your country," that motivates him, Morris says. As a boy growing up in the city's affluent Tower Hill district, he would stop by the club to shoot baskets on the way home from school. Moving on to UMass, and then to law school, he left Lawrence, where his father had worked in the mills, to establish a practice among the immaculate lawns and tony boutiques of Andover, across the river.
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Rigoberto Nunez '96, Community and Educational Coordinator, Brightwood Development Corporation, Springfield |
High school came around, and it was the thing to do go to the Boys Club. I stunk. I couldn't catch the ball or anything. I had been an Honors student as a freshman, but then I put academics aside and my grades went way down. I wasn't dumb, but I was a procrastinator. I had a big talk with Steve after my freshman year, whether I should continue playing or even go to school anymore. Steve was there for everything I needed. He never said, 'Hey, Rigo, you only come to me when you're down.' He'd be there with open arms waiting for me. |
But Morris' heart never left Lawrence, and six years ago he invited Boys Club coach Steve Kelly to UMass' traditional end of the-season basketball banquet. Kelly mentioned a young Lawrence basketball player who sounded so promising that Morris insisted on meeting him the next morning. As any Minuteman fan knows, Rigoberto Nunez, a native of the Dominican Republic who'd come to the United States when he was in the eighth grade and whose initial application to UMass had been turned down, went on to become one of the most unforgettable personalities of the team.
It was then that Morris began to envision UMass as the endpoint of an educational continuum that could start with a boy's earliest involvement with the Boys Club. The club's leagues and teams were open to boys from fourth grade through high school. Why not bring them out to Amherst twice a year to actually see a college campus, meet the coaches, sit in the classrooms? Because as Tim Bryant says, it's not just the financial or even the scholastic barriers that keep youngsters like these from reaching for higher education, it's the absence of the dream itself. (Bryant has a vivid memory of visiting a courtroom as part of a high school civics class and watching a classmate arraigned for petty crime.)
Morris vowed that, if what these boys saw at home was an unemployed single parent with a fourth grade education, at the club they would be bombarded with the message that UMass was a possibility: "that this college campus is within your grasp, that it's not a pie-in-the-sky, never-to-be-achieved dream that it's absolutely something that can and will happen."
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Dan Rivera '96, Economic and Job Development Coordinator, Catholic Charities of Lawrence; board member, UMass Alumni Association |
Going to UMass literally meant the world to me. I wept from ten minutes before the graduation ceremony until half an hour afterwards. One in thirteen Latino students makes it to college, and I and my fellow graduates were those ones. My mother was a country girl who at best got a fifth grade education, in Spanish. My brother had fallen by the wayside, he's been a drug addict all his life. So when I graduated from UMass, my relatives were happy but they don't really understand. They say, 'Congratulations, whatever that means.' "The Boys Club taught me how to live in the world, but UMass was the endpiece. For a lot of us students who were 'the working poor,' it was the gateway to a better life." |
Morris' vision happened to coincide with one that had been taking root at the Boys Club for some time. If Mike Morris is the brains behind the UMass Lawrence connection, its soul is Coach Steve Kelly, the man Bryant calls "probably the most selfless human being I've ever met." Not only has Kelly been the club's main basketball coach for twenty-nine of his fifty years; he also spends much of his day in the boys' schools, checking on their academic progress and keeping in touch with their teachers and principals. He oversees the 1-2-3 program, which promotes reading for elementary age children. If a boy gets in trouble with the law, as many do, it is Kelly and his assistant, Billy Robinson, who show up at the jailhouse. (Robinson has missed one day at the club-the day his father died-since he was eleven years old). And it is Kelly who, like an affable patriarch, sets the moral tone of the place. Caps, for instance, which often signify gang membership, are forbidden in the building. There are boys who belong to these streetwise fraternities, but all such allegiances are off within the club's brick walls.
But being a father figure to 3,000 boys a year wasn't enough for Kelly, who realized that no matter how good the Boys Club programs, his charges would eventually need more. "Fifteen years ago we noticed that no kids were going to college," Kelly says, his boyish face beaming beneath a mop of pewtery hair. "We decided to make a concerted effort to turn that around. So we took a target group of fifth graders and just about brainwashed them. 'You are going to college. It's not a matter of if, but when.'" As a means to that end, he began wooing private secondary schools, touting the promise of his kids to the likes of Brooks, Phillips Andover, Northfield-Mount Hermon, and the prestigious Central Catholic, far and away the best high school in Lawrence. The point was to get the boys out of the squalor of the city, if not geographically at least mentally, so they could see for themselves that there was, in Dan Rivera's words, "a world beyond Lawrence." Far from being inner city charity cases, many of the twenty-five or thirty Boys Club boys accepted into these schools have held their own in the classroom as well as on the court. If they don't, says Kelly, "They know there are about twenty-nine other boys back at the club who will be happy to take their place."
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At the Club, form left: Nelson Ovalles, Coach Steve Kelly, Mario Reyes, Michael Morris '63, Jose Hernandez. Great news as we go to press: all three young men have been accepted by UMass, and Nelson and Mario will attend. |
Of that first group of twenty-six boys, twenty-three acquired at least two years of higher education. And when Kelly's dream intersected with Michael Morris's, UMass became a key destination. Rigo Nunez, Dan Rivera, and this year's head cheerleader Johnny Roche and flag carrier Luis Rodriguez are among the Lawrence boys who've made their way to Amherst.
Next year Jose Hernandez may add his name to the list. Earnest and mild in speech, the holder of a 3.78 average at the private New Hampton School, Jose has applied with confidence to seven colleges, including UMass. Yet what he has been though in his nineteen years is difficult to grasp. His father was in the Army when last heard from. His mother assembles microchips for about $200 a week. The Boys Club has been his second home since grammar school. Last year, when Jose was working two jobs to pull in extra income for his family, his bike, his only means of transportation, was grabbed by young thieves. When he gave chase, he was felled by a single gunshot to the pelvis. For days he teetered on the cusp between life and death, his small intestine ripped apart.
With a constant vigil of Boys Club family around his bed, Jose pulled through. When he asked, Job-like, why such a thing had happened despite his decision to ''be good,'' the answer came from people like Rigo Nunez, who came from Amherst to say, ''Look, obviously God's got a plan for you because you're still here." Now, walking with the stiff hips of a retired athlete, Jose acknowledges that his basketball days are probably over. But as he carefully explains, "Playing ball isn't actually the point of this club." Ball is just the medium for the message, which is to stick to your dreams no matter what happens to throw you off track.
There was plenty to throw Hector Mancebo off track. At age fifteen, Hector woke up one morning to find his mother had moved to New York City. For months, the six-foot-three-inch athlete wavered between staying in school and joining a gang. He missed so much of the eighth grade he had to repeat it. But he was showered with support for taking the high road. After much internal struggle, and taking shelter in the home of Steve Kelly's sister, Hector made the decision to leave gang life for good. He now attends Proctor Academy and plans to become a lawyer, an ambition he claims to have inherited from Michael Morris.
"Now, when I hear people say, 'I don't have nothing, I can't do it,' it really bugs me,'' says Hector. ''Without this place, they're going to be on the street, hanging out with the wrong people and getting into trouble.''
Not every boy who goes through the club makes it. Disappointment has taught the men who live for this place that a percentage of every crop is sown on barren ground and will not flourish, no matter how closely tended. But the ones who do flourish compensate for the losses. They become family. Paul Theberge, who has a perfectly satisfying life of his own, is as giddy as the two high school seniors he's been tutoring, as they await their letters from UMass admissions. When Theberge's father died last year, the entire Lawrence High basketball team showed up at the wake.
As warmup ended and team practice began on that March afternoon, the men said their goodbyes and the boys returned to the court. The late afternoon sunlight poured through the high windows of the gym, but it was early in the game for the young men who dribble, shoot, shout, and pass in its rays. Two paths diverge in Lawrence. One is littered with broken dreams. The other, which used to be much less traveled, is becoming a little more worn. It is making all the difference.
by ali crolius
