Missed Opportunities

FAILING OUR ATHLETES > PART 1
Missed opportunities
Boston's student-athletes face a sports program in distress

By Bob Hohler, Globe Staff | June 21, 2009

They feel like the forgotten ones: Football teams training on hazardous turf, soccer teams practicing on fields without goals, track teams running in school hallways for lack of access to training facilities.

They are players who share uniforms because there are too few to go around, players who yearn for more qualified coaches on the sidelines and a few fans in the empty stands, players who never make it to the field because of academic woes and the scourge of deadly street violence.

In a golden age of professional sports in Boston, they are portraits of a bleak reality for student-athletes in the city’s public schools.

Consider the baseball players at Burke High School in Dorchester who were forced this spring to practice in an alley strewn with broken glass three days before their season opener because their field - a mile-plus walk from school through one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods - had yet to be prepared. Outfielder Augusto Ceron spoke for many of his fellow athletes when he said of city leaders, “They treat us like second-class citizens. It’s like nobody cares.’’

City leaders point to a few splendid new fields and facilities and offer promises of better days. But as students like Ceron know all too well, Boston’s high school athletic program languishes in chronic distress. A system that could inspire greater achievement on the field and in the classroom while providing a vital alternative to the hazards of the streets is failing because of inadequacies in funding, facilities, equipment, coaching, oversight, and vision, according to a nine-month review by the Globe.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino has trumpeted “the true value of sport’’ for Boston’s youth and frequently appears at neigh borhood sports events. But by many measures, the educational system the mayor oversees has severely shortchanged children in the schools who long for a chance to play, to compete, to succeed.

The first measure of failure is financial. City leaders allocated just under $4 million this year for athletics, less than one-half percent of the total budget of $833 million. That’s far less than the statewide average of 3 to 4 percent, according to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association. The national average is 1 to 3 percent, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Boston dedicates a smaller percentage of its school budget to athletics than neighboring cities such as Cambridge and Somerville and similarly sized urban centers, including San Francisco and Atlanta. Boston’s athletic budget has not increased in more than six years.

“The inequality is stark,’’ said Stanley Pollack, executive director of the Boston-based Center for Teen Empowerment. “There is a real dearth of athletic opportunities in the city schools, and it contributes to a persistent achievement gap and much higher dropout rates.’’

The second measure is opportunity. Only about 3,000 students participate in Boston’s struggling sports system, as countless others are effectively deprived of the opportunity to play because the programs are not available to them. While 68 percent of students statewide play interscholastic sports, a mere 28 percent participate in the Boston Public Schools, according to an MIAA survey last year.

Scarcer opportunities
It’s not that many Boston students don’t want to play. It’s because, for a host of reasons, they can’t. At Charlestown High School, for instance, girls have the option of playing only five sports all year - volleyball, basketball, softball, and indoor and outdoor track - and they turn out in small numbers to participate. By comparison, girls in neighboring Everett enjoy many more sports options, including field hockey, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, and swimming, and they participate at much higher levels.

In Boston, many sports are delivered in a two-tier system that disenfranchises the 14,000 students who cannot gain entry to the city’s three exam schools: Boston Latin, Latin Academy, and O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. Only Boston Latin students can compete in sailing and crew. Only students at the two Latin schools can participate in girls’ ice hockey and girls’ varsity soccer.

And though the city claims to offer every athlete access to interscholastic tennis, golf, and cross-country through co-op programs at exam schools, only one of the 14,000 students outside the exam schools - a female tennis player - opted to participate.

Of the 18,000 public high school students in Boston, none have access to the fast-growing sport of lacrosse. Nor can they compete in field hockey or gymnastics, which are offered in neighboring communities.

The situation is even bleaker at Boston’s 22 middle schools. The only interscholastic sports available to those children are basketball and spring track.

Other Globe findings underscore the scope of the problem:

* The city employs only one athletic director to oversee 18 high schools that field teams, and he is chronically overwhelmed. The vast majority of other athletic directors in the state oversee a single high school.


* Boston has just one part-time athletic trainer under contract for all of its schools, which results, coaches say, in some players competing with undiagnosed or inadequately treated injuries.


* The city faces a shortage of qualified coaches, even though its coaching stipends rank among the highest in the state. Boston’s contract with its teachers union also makes it hard to root out lackluster or incompetent coaches because it renders the athletic director powerless to hire and fire coaches.


* The coaching shortage also deprives some student-athletes of proper instruction and increases their risk of injury. Coed track teams with 50 or more athletes, for instance, are led by a single coach, making it impossible for the coach to monitor players competing in track’s multiple disciplines.


* The athletic department’s limited equipment budget has stagnated for years, while the cost of necessities such as football helmets has ballooned. Boston, for example, spends $1,700 a year to equip each high school football team, compared with $4,800 in Lincoln-Sudbury.


* Widespread academic ineligibility contributed to low participation levels in many sports. Five teams with too few players for various reasons were shut down during their seasons, and more than 30 other games were forfeited for reasons ranging from ineligible players to transportation snafus.


* With Boston largely considered a wasteland by college recruiters, only two of the city’s 3,500 graduating seniors - a distance runner at Charlestown and a boys basketball player at English - received full Division 1 college athletic scholarships, though English catcher Nelfi Zapata was the first Massachusetts high school player selected in this year’s Major League Baseball draft, in the 19th round by the New York Mets.


* By comparison, more than 20 students in the smaller Atlanta school district received full athletic scholarships this year.


* Boston is an under-recruited league at every level,’’ said Juan Figueroa, O’Bryant’s boys basketball coach. “The perception, unfortunately, is that kids in Boston can’t qualify academically.’’


* Other than the Charlestown boys winning a Division 2 indoor track title, the Boston schools were so overmatched by suburban opponents that 39 of the city’s 52 teams that qualified for postseason tournaments failed to win a game. (Boston’s baseball and softball teams were outscored in the playoffs, 158-25.)

Pleas for assistance
In a city where school spirit, neighborhood pride in athletics, and a sense of personal security among students have plummeted, it’s no wonder that most of Boston’s best athletes have abandoned the public schools for private and parochial schools, and that others have enrolled in suburban schools through the Metco program, according to many coaches, parents, and advocates.

“I know people want to be optimistic,’’ said Latin football coach John McDonough, “but if you look at the situation and think about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, I want to say, ‘It’s half-empty. Fill the damn thing, would you?’ ’’

A city whose high school teams once were envied by suburban rivals now fosters a system that inspires little more than pity.

“My heart goes out to those folks,’’ said Nancy O’Neil, the athletic director at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, which competes against Latin in the Dual County League. “There’s no question that across Massachusetts you have the haves and the have-nots, and the Boston schools clearly fall into the category of the have-nots. It’s such a tragedy.’’

Menino said he is committed to improving the city’s high school athletic system.

“Can we do better? We sure can,’’ the mayor said. “It’s a work in progress. We’re making some gains, but the issue is resources. We need to find a way to do more in these difficult financial times.’’

Boston School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson said she is strongly committed to building an athletic system that provides excellence, access, and equity for every student.

“We’re not there yet, but we’re working toward that goal,’’ she said. “Because of the challenges we have with our budget, we have not expanded as rapidly as we would like, but we do consider sports part of our effort to reduce the dropout rate, and we understand how important athletics are in helping students learn about teamwork and sportsmanship.’’

Johnson said she has dedicated a $20,000 donation from Red Sox pitcher Manny Delcarmen, who graduated from West Roxbury High in 2000, to help pay a new administrator to upgrade athletics in middle schools. She said Boston Public Schools athletic director Ken Still is working with Boston University to provide more athletic trainers. The city also has funded six artificial turf fields for Boston schools and built a new gym as part of a $49.5 million project at Burke.

But with a proposed 2.5 percent cut in Boston’s school budget, the prospects of upgrading athletics appear grim. Unlike most communities in the state, Boston does not charge students a user fee to play sports. The fee to play football at Hamilton-Wenham, for example, was $969.

Meanwhile, the state of Boston school athletics is such that maintaining the status quo is viewed as unthinkable by numerous coaches, students, and advocates.

“Things are bad enough already,’’ said Dennis Wilson, the boys basketball coach at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School. “We need to get the word to the bigwig politicians that they need to add to the sports budget. We need more equipment, more resources, more opportunities for students to participate.’’

In Hyde Park, the football team dodges manhole covers on its practice field. In West Roxbury, the football team practices on a field so rutted that players regularly injure ankles. The Brighton team works out on an uneven field so littered with dog feces and goose droppings that players call it “the toilet bowl.’’

In South Boston, football coach Sean Guthrie turned away nearly 20 players because he lacked enough equipment. A shortage of uniforms forced members of Charlestown’s champion track team to swap sweat-soaked jerseys during meets. Guthrie and other coaches scavenged for equipment and reached into their pockets for thousands of dollars to outfit their teams.

Stranded on the sidelines were scores of students who hanker to compete in lacrosse, field hockey, tennis, golf, cross-country, and gymnastics but have little or no chance to pursue them in the Boston schools.

“You need to offer these activities if you want keep kids engaged in the classroom,’’ said Matt Knapp, who persuaded administrators to let him launch a wrestling program last winter at Burke. “A lot of kids are quitting the Boston schools because the schools offer nothing to them.’’

Alternative to crime
The need for a vibrant high school athletic system has never been greater, according to administrators, coaches, and advocates who said experience has shown that students who participate in sports are more likely to stay out of trouble and achieve better grades.

“When I step on the field, it’s the one place where I don’t think about all the craziness,’’ said Alex Munoz, a Dorchester High baseball player. For him, the “craziness’’ is this: a lender threatening to foreclose on his mother’s home, a personal dilemma involving his girlfriend, the shooting deaths of several friends, the escalating gang violence in his Roxbury neighborhood.

Many student-athletes in Boston this year were victims of crimes, from assault and armed robbery to murder. Others were perpetrators.

“The way things are going, probation and parole officers are the new guidance counselors,’’ said Guthrie, who teaches math at South Boston’s Monument High.

Numerous students said that, but for sports, they might well have succumbed to the lure of the streets. Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce, who helped secure wrestling mats for the Burke team and volunteered as an assistant coach for the Charlestown boys basketball team, said high school sports are crucial in the fight against crime, particularly gang violence.

“There’s nothing easy about playing sports in the city schools,’’ Joyce said. “There’s a lot these kids have to endure, but we’ve found that sports can help them gain the confidence and self-esteem they need to say no to picking up a gun.’’

Boston’s struggle to sustain competitive athletic programs is also made more difficult by the city’s surge of immigrant students who have never been exposed to numerous sports, most notably football and hockey. Coaches in those sports routinely struggle to recruit enough athletes to field teams.

The challenge is particularly acute at Burke, which has a large number of Cape Verdean immigrants; Hyde Park, which enrolls an abundance of newcomers from Haiti; and Madison Park, where English is a second language for 51 percent of the students. Coaches often rely on bilingual players to translate their instructions.

“The nationalities of our players go from A to Z,’’ said Madison Park football coach Roosevelt Robinson. “When I ask everybody who is American to stand up, nobody does.’’

Shortcomings in the system are less extreme at the exam schools, particularly Latin, which enjoys most of the privileges of its suburban counterparts thanks to generous financial support from alumni. But coaches and students in the non-exam schools consider the disparity between Latin’s programs and theirs a form of de facto discrimination.

“The city treats the big three exam schools like real schools,’’ Robinson said. “They get special privileges. It’s a shame the rest of the schools aren’t treated that way.’’

Latin’s McDonough could do little more than express sympathy.

“I know what some of my peers have to deal with to make ends meet,’’ he said. “It’s extremely difficult for them. I wish it could be better. Unfortunately, it’s not right now.’’

Bob Hohler can be reached at hohler@globe.com.