Riding the Storm Out: A Year if Inner City High School Football

A YEAR OF INNER CITY HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS-GHETTO STYLE  Cast against the grim background of racial disharmony in the disengaging and collapsing city of St. Louis, MO – an uplifting saga of the youthful exuberance of high school football and the noble struggle for survival of an inner city school.

EXCERPTS FROM RIDING THE STORM OUT

Leadership

Speaking with the older students of Roosevelt, whose tenure as Roughriders spans to the pre Mr. Houston days, a stark picture quickly emerges of a school that was overrun by out of control students; dominated by multiple neighborhood gangs who had taken control of the school hallways. Senior football player Quadricous Sanford in 2006 transferred to Roosevelt from South Panola High School in Batesville, MS, several months before Houston’s arrival. “Mississippi was bad,” Sanford says in a thick southern drawl, “but this place (Roosevelt) was wild. I come here and dudes are spitting on the floor right in the hallways, tearing up things and just being crazy. I say ‘why you do that, this is our school, why you tear it up.’ Mr. Houston comes in and all that changed. Here now we got discipline, not only in football, but also in school. Mr. Houston come in and just start(ed) kicking the gang members out. He tells us all the time ‘there is only one gang here now, the Roosevelt Gang, and everyone here is a member.’”

Houston states the condition he inherited in quantitative terms: “Our first point of emphasis when I came here was to hold people accountable for their behavior. We had 38 identifiable gangs at Roosevelt in 2006. Today (April, 2008) we can’t identify one known gang in our hallways. If some of our students are in gangs, they are keeping it quiet. They know if they throw signs or participate in any identifiable gang activity while in our building, they are gone. No second chances. No gray area. If you are in a gang, you will not go to school here, and if you in any way display your membership in our building, you are gone. The gang members, we had zero tolerance for them. That is non negotiable here at Roosevelt High School.” 

Hope

Hope is life. Without hope, we have no life. No one should ever be deprived of hope. For many of the young athletes on the Roosevelt High School football team, hope was all they had. The “Forgotten Boys,” as I came to refer to my football playing friends at RHS, were not dealt the strongest hand in the game of life. Privilege was not a term one would use to describe the family fortunes pinned to the chest of any of the Roosevelt players.

Despite the gloomy economical conditions of the everyday life of these young men, the hopes they espoused to me as they grew comfortable with my presence were, for the most part, well grounded in a strong optimism for the future. My fear is that, as time passes and these young men continued to suffer the societal kicks to the stomachs of their dreams, is that an accumulative reality will set in, their present hopes supplanted by the cynicism born of repeated failure. The odds of escaping the stark limitations of the inner city life they know, I fear, are not stacked in their favor. Yet still they dream.

Labor Activist Marshall Ganz said that young people have an almost biological destiny to dream. I found that Ganz’s wisdom rang true at Roosevelt High School. The optimism I found among its’ students was uplifting to the very core of mankind’s soul – the human spirit.

Pride

A hot discussion topic amongst  PHL football enthusiasts in both 2007 and 2008 centered around the debate as to who was the best running back in the PHL, Gateway Tech’s sophomore AJ Pearson or Roosevelt’s senior Antonio Carter. A college coach succinctly summed up Pearson’s style as such: “Watching him run is like watching clean water flow over rocks in a creek. His style is natural and effortless.” The star sophomore was already being called one of the top Class of 2011 recruits in the nation. A limitless future was predicted for the 6’2” multi talented running back. Pearson’s running style was effortless, at times appearing almost too easy. He was a top of the line Cadillac possessing a level of potential stardom most at Roosevelt could not relate to.

Carter, on the other hand, was a four wheel drive pickup; with a lot of mud under the chassis. Unlike Pearson, Carter was not a glider; he was a slasher. He didn’t flow; he attacked. While Pearson appeared to have hitched a ride onto a first class charter jet on his way to stardom, Carter took the city bus to work each day, lunch pail in hand - the people’s choice for best running back in the PHL. As Carter liked to point out about his more acclaimed rival, “the dude ain’t ever beat me on the field.”

Couple Carter’s God-given athletic talent with his humility and a courage level described by another coach as “more guts than a fish market” and Carter would seem to have a perfect football pedigree and a future well beyond the confines of Roosevelt High School and the Public High League. Only one problem area can be found on Carter’s football resume: he stands, with shoes on, only 5 feet 4 inches tall and weights a slight 140 lbs.  Carter’s RHS coaches emphasize his great team attitude. They tell college suitors that he would run through a brick wall if asked to. However, as college scouts are quick to point out, the hole in the brick wall the diminutive Carter would leave, would be a small one.

Brotherhood

So what lessons can be gleaned from the feel good story of Tyler Clubb, the white kid known affectionately by his black Roosevelt teammates as “White Chocolate?” To paraphrase his parents, it would be this: The beauty and educational value of athletics lies in the premise that everyone; regardless of racial, social, or economic differences; compete on an even playing field, void of social prejudice and discrimination. For Tyler, the football field at Roosevelt High School became his own personal proving ground, allowing him to earn not only the respect of his black teammates but, more importantly, his own self respect. The football driven self esteem he has nurtured - due to his participation at Roosevelt,

Tyler will tell you, is priceless. In due time, Clubb morphed from a scared 14 year old freshman into a self confident 18 year old team leader. He earned the respect of his teammates - and later their friendship - not because he is white, but because he showed a grit and drive that allowed him to endure. Along the way, he also willed himself into a pretty good football player.

Once Tyler was accepted as a teammate, the racial divide between his culture and that of his black teammates melted away- in essence, bridged by a camaraderie forged through endless hours of shared toil on the football field. Athletics teach youth a valuable lesson: respect is earned and lasting friendships are built, not on skin color, but as the end result of equals working together, striving toward a common goal.

Watching Clubb joke and banter in good natured fun with his black friends at a 2008 football practice, is a stark image in contrast to a much different scenario his father witnessed that summer evening four years prior: a timid and unsure 14 year old white boy, on his way to his first football practice at Roosevelt High School, walking gingerly through what his father perceived as a “threatening mob” of young black men in the Roosevelt High School parking lot. Over the next four years many of those same young men who comprised the perceived “threatening mob” would become like brothers to Clubb, teammates he would now “take a bullet for.”

Politics

For years, politicians throughout the state have used the SLPS to shamelessly court votes based upon irrational racial fears. Judges have used the urban students that form the constituency of the district like laboratory test mice, in a complex social experiment that created an idealistic master plan that promised educational bliss, but delivered results that have borne little academic success, while indirectly destroying block after block of city neighborhoods. At the same time, predominantly white suburban school districts, in the name of social benevolence, have taken the brightest and the best from the city schools, leaving those less blessed in academic and athletic prowess, to defend for themselves in a system that is as dismal a failure as any school district in the nation.

Heroes

By the Spring of 2008, the St. Louis Public Schools found itself floundering at an all time low water mark. The very survival of the district was suspect, many predicting within years, if not months, an impending doom and total systemic collapse. Into this educational abyss I walked - and found the exact opposite of what I had assumed. The reality I found was a dedication to the education and future of young people - on a front line, grass roots level - that should be awe inspiring to anyone who still believes in the populist dreams that are built upon the foundation of a free and public education.

Our public schools today are not burdened by a lack of modern day educational heroes; just a lack of knowing where to find them. They are out there. Within the St. Louis Public School System - an organization infested with political agendas that find little time or resources for the education of students - I found heroes. I found at Roosevelt High School teachers, coaches and administrators whose one simple daily goal was to make a positive impact on the lives of their students; one child at a time. Riding the Storm Out:  A Year of Intercity High School Football is their story.

Activism

Thom Kuhn, Charlie Tallman and the other volunteers of PHL, Inc., have buckets that are overflowing. Their unbridled, no strings attached philanthropy, has given the teenage football players of the St. Louis, MO Public High League a brief reprise from the daily grind of coming of age in a harsh and unforgiving city. In a culture where most inner city youth are forced to grow up much too fast, PHL, Inc. has provided a gift whose value is beyond measure: the chance to be forever young - suspended Peter Pan style - in a perpetual state of youthful exuberance and celebration. Due to the generosity of strangers, the athletes of the Public High League now play on athletic fields of grass so green it hurts your eyes, so soft you never want to leave. “Man,” says Roosevelt quarterback Arlando Bailey, “I just want to stay right here, right now, and play football forever.”