With the Right Kind of Coach, Bad Kids Could Be Good

Few sounds are as evocative to me as the simple sound of a basketball against a gymnasium floor. Not the sound that’s drowned out by spectators watching a game; no, I mean the sound of one, or two, or several kids bouncing a ball and shooting hoops in an otherwise empty gym.

It’s a sound I’ll never tire of hearing, for it is associated in my memory with something so pure and timeless that the mere thought of it pleases and reassures. The reverberations of the bouncing ball against the gym walls are echoed notes as familiar as a favorite song. The message from that song lingers: that teaching and molding and changing the lives of young boys can happen in these gyms.

I went off in search of that sound this week. Finding it isn’t as easy as you might think. Santa Ana recreation officials told me, for example, that the city has only one rec center with a gymnasium.

I wound up at a Boys & Girls Club in Buena Park, talking in midafternoon to program director Ruben Alvarez Jr. I told him of my near-unshakable faith in the ability of coaches--the good ones--to affect boys’ lives.

I explained to Alvarez my romanticized notion--that of the dynamic between a coach and his players--and asked if today’s youth leaders felt that way. Is there still a sense that the troubled boys who cause so much chaos in society could be saved if we could just find them an authority figure who cares?

“I guess I’m optimistic and believe in the inherent goodness of human beings,” Alvarez said. But he quickly added that much of the battle today is getting kids away from bad influences and convincing them that there’s a meaningful alternative to such things as gang life. That’s not as easy as it may sound, he said, when they know they can sell drugs and “make twice as much as their parents are bringing in.”

So, how would he do it?

The first thing he would do, he said, is explain the rules. “One of the things I go over are the rules of the club, and one of the major things is the dress code. We want them to be presentable. We don’t want them with baggy pants and shirts. Hats come off in the building, out of respect. And then I tell them about the incredible opportunities that are in the Boys & Girls Club, such as travel, leadership skills, learning about computers, getting into sports and doing something positive for the community and themselves.”

Believe it or not, Alvarez said, that works. “It works as long as you talk to them as human beings, and you’re not jiving them and you’re sincere in what you represent. Kids are looking for direction and discipline. They really gravitate toward that and want to be part of the program.”

Growing up in Santa Ana, Alvarez, now 33, lived in the neighborhood of a Boys Club and fondly recalls hanging out there as helping him on the road to manhood. He repeated the familiar refrain that most of the other guys in the neighborhood are either dead or in jail.

The club tries to convince kids that doing something for someone else is more gratifying than doing something for yourself--another tough sell in an age of immediate gratification and what seems to be glamorization of the wayward life.

Difficult, but not impossible. “It’s proper leadership and (role) modeling,” Alvarez said.

But could you do it? Could you get to the troubled kids?

“You give me enough money and enough staff, yeah,” he said. “But the reality is that it’s so far gone as far as some of them having values . . . that you have to readjust their values system to what they should be.”

I shouldn’t be so elliptic about my interest in this subject. My reverence for the pure art of coaching stems from being a young boy and watching my father coach high school kids. I saw in later years how some of them credited Dad with being a significant influence in their lives.

It’s not an abstraction; it’s a very real thing that the good coaches can do for boys. They force them to think beyond themselves and to believe that hard work pays off.

It’s what fathers are supposed to do, but some do and some don’t. Some can’t and some won’t.

That’s where the Ruben Alvarezes of the world fit in. A pity, but there aren’t enough of them out there today to fill all the voids.

There’s a lot of boys out there convinced they don’t fit in anywhere but on the street corners; a lot of sad cases who don’t know just how nearby people like Ruben Alvarez are.

Were he, like Alvarez, a young man today, I think my late father would relish the task of seeing what he could do. He’d ask for the street kids who wanted to belong but hadn’t been shown the way. He’d ask for them, I think, because he’d have a rock-solid belief in the redemptive powers of coaching, confident that all he needed was a gym, and some time, to transform lives.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.