By Laura Marsan
On a hot June evening on the track of Betsy Head Park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Coach Chris Legree spotted a 15-year-old boy running toward him without a cotton undershirt beneath his purple football jersey. “You need cotton to absorb the sweat,” Legree said, his voice rising above the elevated 3 train that passed just yards from the field. But as the young man neared Legree, his forehead lined and tense, the coach knew something more serious was wrong.
The boy was only 5 feet 2 inches, but a coiled spring of lean, long muscle. He stood close to Legree, nearly a foot taller and twice his size, on the sidelines, as the rest of his team in the youth football program, the Mo Better Jaguars, ran laps on the track. He told Legree that he was struggling with a decision. Only a week ago, two scouts from Fort Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge had noticed him at a Mo Better Jaguars practice and offered him spot as a starter on their football team. But, he said to Legree, “What if they don’t teach Mo Better technique?”
Legree, 54, cast his eyes down to think, then asked the young man what his mother thought. The young man’s mother wanted him to accept the offer from Fort Hamilton. Located in the middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, which is 3.2 percent black, the college preparatory school has 19 male varsity teams, including golf, bowling and handball. During football season, a state-of-the-art scoreboard is lit, a marching band performs, and a cheer-leading squad waves blue and white pom-poms from the sidelines. Betsy Head Park in Brownsville, which is 85.6 percent black, was built over 100 years ago, according to the New York Department of Parks and Recreation, and has none of these things. The playing field is a desert of dust.
Legree paused. “I see you in boarding school,” he said to the young man, speaking of the many schools in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts that former players of the Jaguars have left Brownsville to attend. “Bring your grades up,” he said, “A 79 average is not going to cut it”. The boy nodded soberly then joined his team running laps. “I am not worried about his ability to play football, he has a gift,” said Legree.
What Legree does worry about is the quality of education the young man will receive as a star player on a well-funded New York City public school team with a drive to win versus that of a boarding school that emphasizes academics and preparation for college above all things, including sports. He tells the team during practice, “Use football,” — to get into a better school, to learn how to work with people you may not like. But he warns, “Don’t let football use you.”
In 2008, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual survey of graduation rates was analyzed by Inside Higher Ed, a commercially-sponsored website on higher education news and opinion. Their analysis showed that 20 percent of full-time black male scholarship recipients were athletes, compared with three percent of full-time males students at these same institutions. At least in public NCAA member institutions, this finding suggests that student body diversity is achieved by admitting black athletes, not black scholars. And it perpetuates the notion that the preferred course of success for black males is through sports, not study.
With a population of about 85,161, according to the U. S. Census, Brownsville is served by 35 schools, nine of which offer secondary education, but none with an official organized high school football team. Legree fully understood the lure and glory of the coaches’ offer to the boy, but shook his head when he thought of what the boy’s mother said. “See, this is what I am struggling with, some of these parents want instant gratification,” he said. “But I am thinking about seven or eight years into the future.”
He wants DonQuale Williams’ future to be this young man’s future. Williams, 15, has played with the Jaguars since he was eight years old. Last year, after being awarded a full tuition scholarship from the Boys’ Club of New York City, he left his family in Brownsville to attend the Cardigan School, a college-preparatory school in Canaan, N.H. Williams grew to love Cardigan, after getting over the homesickness, and thought the jackets and ties to dinner each evening were cool. He seemed largely unconcerned with a possible professional football career, but instead spoke of a future in sports medicine or psychology. On this morning, he was more focused on how the Jaguars he hadn’t seen in a few months were playing and craned his neck to see who might be a rookie.
Greg Jackson, director of the Brownsville Recreation Center and former NBA player for the Knicks, says that organized sports are limited in the area. “But Chris Legree and Ervin Roberson were born and raised in Brownsville,” he explained. “They are committed. They can see the benefit of raising a family here.”
While all crime, as in the rest of the city, is ticking up after a 17-year low, Brownsville has one of New York’s highest rates of violent crimes, especially those committed with a firearm. In 2010, murder rates rose 37.5 percent above rates in 2009. Most corners are equipped with New York Police Department cameras. But the Jaguars, which president of the program, Ervin Roberson calls, “life-saving,” keeps adolescents occupied and off the streets between 3 and 11 p.m., which crime researchers have identified as the highest risk hours for adolescent delinquency.
Founded in 1996 by Roberson, an interior designer, and his close friend Legree, an electrical engineer, the Jaguars’ program, which includes five teams, is made up of a network of 14 un-paid coaches all black males in their 50s, among them a bus driver, a detective, and a social worker. Legree was born and raised in the Brownsville Houses, low-income public housing projects, and Roberson down the street from the field.
The 150 players range in ages from five years old to 15. While coaches do not collect players’ stats, they do collect report cards. When averages dip below 70, players move from the field to “sideline coordinator,” said John Calhoun, 41, the father of a Mighty Might, the program’s division for five- and six-year-olds.
“Every year, funding gets tougher,” said Roberson in a phone interview. “We make it work with spit and scotch-tape,” he said.
According to Roberson, about 60 percent of parents are unable to pay the $200 registration fee. When this happens the coaches cobble together the difference, for an annual budget between $150,000 and $200,000. “We don’t cut anyone,” said Roberson.
The Jaguars do not get public funding. “We would love it,” said Legree, “But we cannot wait for it.”
But does sending the best students contribute to the ongoing “social exclusion” of the inner city? When the most academically skilled male students are sent to boarding schools, what impact does that have on the other students who aren’t gifted?
Some researchers argue that the best case scenario that Legree dreams of for his team, and he does dream, sometimes nightly, about their individual futures, alienates them from friends and family. In a frequently cited study in The Urban Review in 1986 by Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, cases such as Williams’ were cited as engendering “ambivalent attitudes toward success” among black students and burdening them with a new role: “acting white.”
As practice neared its second hour, Legree called a water break. While a dozen boys ran off the field, two of the older ones stayed behind to practice tossing a football back and forth. Legree noticed a distracted look in the boy about to receive the ball. Suddenly his big frame, agile and quick, pivoted took the ball between them. The dozen boys walking off the field stopped, their water jugs untouched, to watch the impromptu lesson. Legree threw the football back to the other boy with force. “Wow, that was fast,” said the boy who winced as he caught it.
“Don’t get distracted,” Legree said. This year in Brownsville, there have been 11 gun deaths. When the consequence of a distraction, of being out too late is death by a gunshot, the margin of error for his team is paper-thin. “First thing, I get my eyes on my target, I get in the hit position, and I throw with force. I don’t care if I am playing football with my mother, when you throw the ball, throw it with force. That’s the real world.”
Such admonitions earn Legree respect and loyalty. Several weeks after the Monday evening practice, the young man who had been asked to join Fort Hamilton High School’s football team told Legree that he had declined the offer.
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