Tommy’s Team

BY ASHOKA MUKPO

On a drizzly day in mid-April, about seven teenagers sit in a cluttered Washington Heights high school classroom, waiting to hear the recruitment pitch for a local football team. Slumping in their seats, they look distractedly out the window and fidget. Most of them look to be of Latin descent; a few have brought their mothers with them to the meeting. One of those mothers – by appearances not all that far removed from high school herself – sits next to a sturdy, well-built teenager and cradles a small child in her arms. They all stare expectantly at Tommy Walker, a tall, commanding African-American man standing at the front of the room, who has just begun to speak.

“The bottom line here, is we got a football team,” Tommy opens. Introducing himself as the head coach of the “Washington Heights Wildcats,” he speaks in a voice tinged with a slight southern drawl, somehow managing to blend a coach’s intensity with an easygoing familiarity and humor. His five assistant coaches and team managers lean on tables next to him, listening while they survey the potential recruits. Turnout is small but once Tommy gets into the swing of his pitch, the kids stop fidgeting. They are listening.

“You will not be playing against your friends from the block,” he says, “We go to Brooklyn and Queens.” The Wildcats are a part of the New York City Youth Football League, he explains, and they play games in remote parts of the city’s five boroughs against other teams in the league. One teen’s eyes widen at the prospect. He looks about fourteen years old, skinny for a prospective football player in his oversized black sweatshirt and scuffed Nike sneakers. “If your mom gets mad at you over your education or you act up, you gotta come see us. And we don’t play that,” Tommy tells them.

Two years ago, the Washington Heights Wildcats did not exist. In fact, football hardly existed at all in the neighborhood, which is known in the sports world for producing high-profile baseball stars like Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. High schools do not have football teams, and before Tommy when the game was played, it was usually in the form of disorganized, impromptu block battles held in parks or streets.

Washington Heights is located north of the expensive Columbia University-dominated Morningside Park area, bordering Harlem to its east and the South Bronx to its north. Long a destination for immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean, the neighborhood has large Dominican and Puerto Rican populations, with empanadas and fried plantains for sale in street corner carts. During the summer the streets are alive with colorful, loud Latin-themed festivals and the sound of bachata and salsa music blares from speakers inside shops.

Tommy first moved to Washington Heights with his girlfriend a few years after being discharged from the US Army, where he had been a drill sergeant, playing football in his spare time against soldiers from other units. Working the night shift as a security guard, he noticed the pick-up games in the park and started wondering if there were any organized teams in the neighborhood. There weren’t. He asked around and discovered that the kids who had an interest in the sport were commuting to Spanish Harlem to play on a team, a long bus and subway journey away.

In the 1980s, Washington Heights was a major nexus for drug trafficking and one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in New York City. With an staggeringly high murder rate, Washington Heights became a symbol of urban decay and uptown danger, even boasting an infamous housing project known as “Crack City.” Although the crime rate dipped dramatically in the late 1990s and 2000s, the neighborhood was hit hard by the economic downturn. Unemployment is higher than the New York City average, and publicly funded social programs have fallen under the axe as the city copes with a shrinking budget.

In April, City Hall slashed 15,000 spots in after-school programs in the neighborhood, and last summer there were protests after millions of dollars in funding for non-profit organizations in the neighborhood were cut. Dr. Lourdes Hernandes-Cordero, Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Youth Violence Prevention, says programs for children and teenagers there are “underfunded to the point of being pitiful,” despite their proven utility in keeping them away from gangs and illegal activities.

Without those programs, the burden shifts onto parents and neighbors to supervise children after they get out of school, no easy task for a community of mostly working-class families. Many kids spend their afternoons sitting on their stoop, unsupervised and easily drawn to the rougher edges of the neighborhood’s culture. Although the crime rate has dipped, Washington Heights can still be a tough neighborhood to grow up in, and in the school where Tommy is making his presentation there are armed NYPD officers stationed in the lobby.

In the classroom, “Slim,” a wiry, intense Dominican assistant coach in his 30s who describes himself as “outspoken,” addresses the parents in Spanish. Wearing a flat-brim Yankees hat, jeans, and a pair of sneakers, Slim speaks passionately about the neighborhood and his roots there, telling them that he wants their sons to connect with one another as brothers and stop being afraid of themselves. When he says that he can “see in your eyes” that the kids know what he’s talking about, an elderly woman nudges the teenager sitting next to her and asks, “What do you think about that?”

After the coaching staff makes its recruitment pitch, Tommy asks if the kids have any questions for them. One shyly asks about the cost, which Tommy explains is just under $400 for insurance and equipment, a fee that cannot be waived. “This is a non-profit organization,” he says, “Understand we do not have Uncle Sam giving us coupons and benefits.” The teen whose young mother is holding her baby starts to lift his hand and then quickly lowers it, but not before Slim notices him, says, “You look like you have a question,” and tells him to stand.

Rising to his feet, it becomes apparent that the teen is athletic, with a strong physique. Tommy asks him how old he is. When he answers, “Thirteen,” Tommy laughs loudly and paces while the other coaches look at each other, grinning. They make guesses about how much he weighs, arguing about what position he’d be best suited to play. For a moment, the strictness dissipates and the staff shows a friendly familiarity with each other. It is a lighthearted moment, after which Tommy tells the parents how to get in touch with him and ends the meeting.

“When I first heard that he wanted to start a team, I’m sayin’ to myself, ‘This guy ain’t serious,’” says Ray Mack, the heavyset, imposing defensive coordinator for the Wildcats. “I knew he was gonna have to find sponsors and do a bunch of footwork. I was like, listen when he gets it together, then call me.” Tommy proved Ray wrong, getting the permits and certifications necessary to register a team with the NYCYFL and even paying for equipment and fees out of his own pocket. Although the first tryouts were sparsely attended, word of mouth quickly spread and by opening day in the fall of 2010 there were 40 players on the team.

The consensus within the NYCYFL was that the Wildcats were going to struggle. The league includes teams that have 40-year histories of playing football in the city, while many of Tommy’s players had never even put on a uniform before. As Ray puts it, “Teams thought they were going to walk on the field and step on us. I said to myself, ‘I’m not trying to have that.’ We had to figure out how to beat them.” It was a slow start, though, and in the team’s first game they were crushed by the Brooklyn Skyhawks. “We got our asses handed to us on a silver platter in game one, but that was good for us,” Ray says.

As the season progressed, however, the Wildcats began taking games they weren’t supposed to win. When the Skyhawks came up on the schedule again, Tommy and his players shocked the league by eking out a narrow win. After that, Slim noticed that the team started to be a focal point in the kid’s lives. “It started to be like, ‘Wildcats this Wildcats that,’” he says, “Every Friday and Saturday the kids would have their jerseys on, whether we had a game or not. You know, small kids coming up, they get inspired by that. It’s been an adventure.” The team went on to achieve a .500 record, no small feat for a first-year expansion team, and enough to get them into the league playoffs.

“A lot of these kids never played organized football, so it was a big thing that they made the playoffs,” says Raphael, the team manager. Although they lost their playoff game to the Brooklyn Lynvets, both coaches and players were ecstatic with the season’s results. Don LaSala, the commissioner of the NYCYFL, says he was “surprised” by the team’s success. “The fact that they were a very competitive team in one of the tougher, older divisions in the league says an awful lot,” he said. For Tommy and the rest of the coaching staff, preparation for the 2011 season began the day after the loss. “After last year we really became excited about the team,” he says. “Us as a collective group, we’re waiting for the next season, you know?”

A week after the recruitment pitch at the school, Tommy and Ray hold an optional outdoor conditioning practice at their home field in Van Cortland Park in the South Bronx. It is one of the first real days of spring, and despite a brisk wind the sun is out, warming a field that has been buried in snow for much of the year’s particularly long, cold winter. There are athletes from an eclectic mixture of sports practicing and milling around under towering grey concrete bleachers. The sound of birds chirping is occasionally interrupted by the roar of overhead subway trains that stop nearby. Housing projects and tenement buildings ring the park, and runners circle the track while a baseball team warms up in a diamond adjacent to the football field. The two coaches are joking with a small group of players who have arrived early. Some are young, under thirteen, and do not look like their bodies are ready for contact football. Others are well over six feet tall and despite being teenagers, have the physical characteristics of grown men.

“Malik! What up, baby!” Tommy calls out to a young man who strolls up in sweatpants and a jersey, wide smile on his face. It is apparent that both Tommy and Ray know their players well, and there is an ease of communication between them that speaks of the bond they developed last season. They jokingly tell a young teen they call “Afro,” due to his huge, unkempt hair, to do pushups and then make fun of his sloppy technique. Some of the kids come across as shy; others are outspoken and appear to enjoy bantering with the two coaches.

One player, Teron Smith, a standout offensive lineman from last year’s team who who was invited to the league’s all-star, towers over both Tommy and Ray. They call him the “Great Wall of Teron,” and he appears to be about six and a half feet tall. At seventeen years old he is now past the NYCYFL’s age limit, but after his excellent year another team in the city recruited him. Today he is observing the practice, and he stands next to Tommy and chats with him while the younger kids stretch and get ready. Teron says he found out about the team through a friend, and that if he hadn’t been playing last year he would have been “messing around in the streets.”

As Tommy jostles and jokes with the players, Ray explains how different the neighborhood feels now compared to when he was growing up in the 1970s. “You had a choice,” he says, “either you hung out in the streets with the guys who were in the streets, or you went out and play sports with the guys who played sports. I chose football.” He wrinkles his nose when he talks about how “spoiled” some of the kids are now, and how television, texting, and video games keep many of them inside and not physically active. “My league growing up was the National Block League of America,” he says. “Your block versus my block. The way you set it up was by talking crap.”

Tommy blows the whistle and two lanky teenagers that look to be about fourteen take off running in a cone drill meant to teach them agility and footwork. Teron and Ray look on, shouting encouragement and cracking jokes. “Yeah Tommy, tell ‘em Tommy!” “Yo Boo, lay this nigga out yo!” When the baseball team practicing nearby launches a right-field shot into their practice, one of the players shakes their head and says, “I can’t stand baseball players. They be pissin’ me off.” Later, after an accidental collision between two players, Tommy asks one of them, “You bleedin’? You’ll be alright, that’s football, man,” blows the whistle, and tells the team to “take a break and think about life for a minute.”

After the break, Tommy gathers the players and says, “Listen. Nobody likes Washington Heights in the YFL. Why? Because they’re scared of us. We’re supposed to be baseball players. They don’t want us to come on the field they’ve been playing on for forty years, a bunch of baseball players, and beat them. We have a target. We will play football.” The team listens attentively to the speech. Tommy is their leader and they want to get better. They are working hard, but their smiles and the verbal barbs they jokingly throw at one another show that are having fun as well.

“So many programs have been cut out of the system,” says Raphael. “When I was growing up there were tons of programs. Now these kids got nothing to do.” As state-funded programs shrink in size and after-school programs cut more students from their rosters, individuals like Tommy and his staff must devote their own time, energy and money to providing activities for teenagers. The coaching staff of the Wildcats all have jobs and families; Tommy and Ray both work the night shift as security guards and are uncompensated for the time they devote to the team. “We don’t see a dime,” says Raphael, “and a lot of the time it comes out of our pockets.”

In Washington Heights, activities that keep kids occupied and away from unsupervised time spent idling around the neighborhood can literally change the course of their lives. Tommy and his staff understand that. As Slim puts it, “There are kids that are going through hard times out there. That’s what we’re here for. We know things as coaches that the kids won’t say to their parents.” Indeed, Tommy will often stroll around the neighborhood in the evening, inspecting the most populated corners for his players. If he sees one, he gives them an ultimatum: go home or ride the bench. When asked what drives him to do something like that, he says, ““Love of the game, and love of caring for these kids’ futures. Put one and one together and its simple. I got kids. One day one of these kids might be the President of the United States.”

As the sun starts to descend over Van Cortland Park and the wind picks up, the kids don their sweatshirts and windbreakers and rub their hands together to stay warm. One player, Joel Veloz, stands next to Teron and offers words of encouragement to the younger kids, who are now running around cones and fighting to be the first to fall on a football that Tommy rolls at them. A tall, stocky sixteen year old who was a tight end on last year’s team, Joel dreams of being an NFL player but says he would like to coach someday, like Tommy. He remembers being afraid of joining the team at first.

“It’s taken a lot of kids out of the streets,” he says, “Some of the kids that were on our team had tattoos and were in gangs. But Tommy taught us how to respect each other. We’re like a family now.” When asked whether he considers himself a leader now that there are so many younger kids practicing and trying to make the team, he thinks for a moment, smiles, and says, “The younger kids look up to us. I remember when I was young, I used to look to the older kids and be like, I wanna be like that guy. Now I realize that I am that older kid. I don’t want to be anybody but myself. Once you get to that point, there’s nobody to look up to but yourself.”