close
close
awsum

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott talks about the impact of sports

Neon
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott talks about the impact of sports

Sport changes lives. It’s a message Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott promotes in his city when he speaks to an audience or stops by one of the recreation centers to play with kids.

But when you ask Scott to dig deeper into the role the sport played for him, a product of Park Heights on Baltimore’s northwest side, he thinks back to his high school days when sports gave him a chance to leave home.

When Scott, 40, was growing up, children in Baltimore lived in neighborhoods weighed down by violence and economic despair. He remembers witnessing death from a drug overdose and running away from gunshots as a child.

The city’s high school coaches found another way to avoid this. They formed a regional “super team,” as the mayor called it, that competed at the national level. AAU Junior Olympics.

Those days of giving everything he had with a baton in hand, then handing it out and trusting his teammates to figure out what to do with him taught Scott, of course, lessons he took with him during his dramatic rise as a politician. .But they also did something else.

“Participating in track and field saved our lives,” Scott said. USA TODAY Sports last spring.

Sports not only took Scott away from violence, but also led him to his coach at Baltimore’s Mervo High School named Freddie Hendricks, essentially a father figure, who helped him realize his full potential in the classroom.

Scott rose from a high SAT score as a sophomore to a small public honors college in rural Maryland to the Baltimore city council. The mayor of the city was elected youngest mayor In 2020, he reflects on the lessons and opportunities of his athletic career.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t run track at Mervo High School,” Scott says. “Sports is what makes me who I am. That’s where discipline comes from. That’s where I get the deep competitive spirit and understanding of how to work together and work with different types of people.”

A broader look at Scott, the Democrat who is running for a second term with GOP candidate Shannon Wright in Tuesday’s vote (he is expected to win re-election), gives us all a chance to consider how deep our athletic experiences are as well as our athletic experiences. Now we give our children what they can shape us for.

Here’s what Scott’s journey teaches us about the value of sport that can help us better understand our own sport.

Sport is not just a means to achieve an end. No matter where you come from or where you end up, they can be ‘transformative’.

Park Heights is nationally recognized annually as the host of the Preakness, the second leg of horse racing’s triple crown.

“Every other day, my neighborhood was being ignored,” Scott told viewers last May. Project Game SummitThe home city of his hometown.

But in the neighborhood where Scott’s home was located was the Towanda Recreation Center, where he started running at the age of six.

We all get the sports bug from a different place. You can’t put a price on the impact of that moment or where it will take you. This could be a podium like the one where Scott and Maryland Governor Wes Moore spoke. Project Gameor the national stage last spring, where the duo found themselves guiding voters post-election. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

Neither man really remembers his life without sports. We can say that their sports experiences not only brought them to those critical moments last spring, but also helped them endure them.

“Some of my earliest memories, some of my best, some of my worst, some of my most insightful memories are sports-related,” Moore said. Project GameIt aims to create sports-related access and opportunities for children, especially those who need them most.

Just like Moore once was. Raised by a single mother, the daughter of Cuban and Jamaican immigrants, she describes herself as “probably the most unlikely governor in America.”

Moore’s father died when he was 3 years old. Her mother took her and her two sisters to live with her grandparents in the Bronx, New York.

Basketball courts were a place where he could escape and where he felt safe.

“This is a place where you meet some of your lifelong friends,” he says. “It was a place where you learned all the good things you can learn from team sport: how to win the right way, how to lose, the importance of being able to trust people to your left and to your right and making sure everything is going well. You work so they can trust you, sport has always been a huge part of my life, my understanding and acceptance.” I think it plays a role.

“I believe sports can not only unify but also be transformative.”

Sometimes just the opportunity to play is enough to give kids the confidence to dream of what comes next.

Sport teaches you about yourself and can turn your ‘great rivals’ into your friends

Moore went on to play football at Johns Hopkins University. Scott only St. He wanted to be a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a decision largely influenced by his coach.

Mervo didn’t have a path of his own, but he did have his coach, Hendricks, and according to the mayor, he “forced” me into a well-known college placement program. University Affiliated.

Hendricks also took him away from the streets, where Scott said he lost friends and loved ones to gun violence. dealt with police harassment and was once handcuffed after being mistaken for a robbery suspect.

Like his staff, Scott carried the lessons as a 3,000-meter hurdler.

Coach Hendricks would tell Scott and his teammates that if the person you passed the baton to wasn’t up to your intensity, it didn’t matter what you did with that baton.

“You are only as good as your weakest leg,” he would say.

You can learn a lot about yourself the more you compete for your teammates as much as you can. against a rival.

Sometimes, as in politics, these may be your opponents from a previous rivalry. Scott found himself competing with “great rivals” from across the region that made up his district. AAU Junior Olympics set. He later found himself doing his best for them and learned discipline in the process.

“We implemented this,” he says. “Think about how we challenge each other and push each other to see how we can be the best version of ourselves. And that’s really what you learn from sports: you learn how to deal with adversity, you learn how to deal with pressure situations.. And I guess you’re learning how to be a leader, right? While exercising.”

Coach Steve: 70% of children quit sports by the age of 13. From where?

Sports introduces children to role models, unforgettable people and experiences. Sometimes parents just need to convince them to practice.

Unless you’re from Western New York, you’ve probably never heard of a basketball player named Willie “Hutch” Jones. The 6-foot-4 forward averaged 15.8 points per game for Vanderbilt in 1981-82. Two seasons in the NBAHis main impact was to empower children through sports.

According to the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame, of which Jones is a member, education and sports programs He has served more than 10,000 children in his hometown city.

“The great thing about their work is that young people learn the basics of both sports and life,” says Lucy Candelario, who runs Jones’ programs through the community center here (Belle Center) on the lower west side of Buffalo. “This is why sports programs are effective: Sports is life.”

Once children are placed in the center, the benefits in terms of personal development are extraordinary. Candelario says “Belle” has “alumni” who include several lawyers and members of the military, including a man who graduated from high school and basic training and recently returned to thank a counselor.

What complicates the process, Jones found, is that moms and dads rely so much on him to get them there.

“Parents are lazy and don’t want to do it,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “They prefer me to come pick them up in a bus or a van, their car is in the driveway and they’re sitting there on a couch. So the child no longer has this chance. If more parents bought into their children’s investments, our overall enrollment rate would likely be higher. Don’t wait for Aries. This is your child. You gave birth to that baby. You have to watch out for that baby everywhere. You cannot leave the baby on the porch or in the garden. They need to go out to be exposed.

A good reminder for those of us who have been in this situation. crazy race of travel and club sports: The real value of sports is free, like the programs Jones offers.

Candelario found that as long as a child has a stable adult who provides love and care, the child will reciprocate. She and Jones see their children growing up, or their children being raised by grandparents, in a cycle of neglect that they repeat as parents.

“Parents were incarcerated, kicked out, or whatever the case may be,” he says. “We are the parents of these children.”

Many of us already have this stability. Scott achieved this thanks to his sports and coach Hendricks. Back in Baltimore, he asks famous Baltimore athletes like Super Bowl-winning receiver Torrey Smith to speak to the city’s youth despite having an ever-changing childhood from temporary housing.

“They’re showing these young people how sports can help them,” Scott says. “Not everyone is going to go out and make a bunch of money. But they can use it to better themselves and their families.”

Coach Steve: Torrey Smith uses lessons learned from tough times to inspire young athletes

‘Winning is never the goal’: Sport stays with us no matter when our careers officially end

baltimore There was a 20 percent decrease in murders last yearThe fluctuation that started after detainee Freddie Gay died from injuries he received in police custody in 2015 has been put to an end. Gay’s death sparked looting and rioting.

After the uproar, Scott, then a city councilman, helped launch the project. Volo Children’s FoundationA free fitness access program expanding to eight cities across the United States.

Scott says he has helped open or renovate 11 new recreation centers in Baltimore, expanded middle school sports offerings and reintroduced summer midnight basketball to give kids a safe place to play.

One of them is his 9-year-old stepson, Ceron, who played in the Under Armor basketball development league earlier this year. UA HouseA modern facility, most of which has been built The company’s long-term investment in sports in Scott’s city.

“I’m the one who lets the coach decide what’s going to happen on the field and how it’s going to happen. And I don’t question anything, I’m just a really supportive and attentive parent,” Scott says with a laugh.

He says he calms his young son, Charm, by watching “Aunt Angel Reese,” a Baltimore-area native. WNBA star. He plays in a league himself, “to let all the young guys in their 20s know that the mayor is still faster than them and they can’t catch me.”

It’s all part of the message that sports continues to deliver about how it creates and shapes us, no matter how long our athletic careers last. When he accepted the Democratic nomination for mayor in May, he closed with a quote from the late Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland that could of course be applied to elections but also to sports.

“Winning is never the goal,” he said. “It’s getting the job done.”

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer at USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now the athletic parents of two high school students. His column is published weekly. Click here for past articles.

Have a question for Coach Steve that you would like answered in a column? Email him/her [email protected]

Related Posts