Chicago teens find 'preppy' sports offer different kind of athletic deliverance

Chicago youth take part in the rowing program at Chicago Training Center in Chicago on Tuesday, July 2, 2013. (Scott Strazzante, Chicago Tribune)

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is the last place you'd expect to find anyone practicing a signature sport of the Ivy League, yet on a gray July evening, here they were: two dozen city kids in racing boats sculling past graffiti-bombed factories and fields of rubble.

Among the oarsmen was Jocelyn Duran, 14, a quiet and diminutive girl from Little Village whose life, thanks to her involvement with the sport, is about to change dramatically.

She has received a full scholarship to attend Northfield Mount Hermon, a $50,000-a-year boarding school nestled in the hills of western Massachusetts. Rowing helped her to win over the admissions office, but her coach hopes the sport will carry her even further.

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"Rowing operates in this really interesting place that maybe other sports don't," said Montana Butsch of the Chicago Training Center, a nonprofit group that uses the sport to try to improve the prospects of working-class teens. "There are no professional (teams), but there is access to high-level education and (social and business) networks, really interesting people and experiences. That's stuff you can parlay into the rest of your life."

Football, basketball and boxing have long been portrayed as tickets out of low-income neighborhoods, giving young people dreams of college scholarships or pro careers. But in recent years, other sports have begun to offer a different vision of athletic deliverance.

They are sports such as lacrosse, squash and sailing, pastimes generally associated with the wealthy and privileged. Boosters say they offer an old-fashioned kind of social uplift by creating the habits, friendships and educational opportunities that can help teens connect with successful people.

"They have the opportunity to build social capital, and that's a really critical thing," said David Kay of METROsquash, a program that trains Chicago Public Schools students in the hallmark sport of Wall Street. "That really breaks down barriers, being able to play with a colleague or friend. It's really a great tool for building relationships. It will provide introductions for them throughout their lives."

METROsquash, which formed in 2005, combines athletic instruction with academic tutoring. The combination has helped some students gain admission to well-regarded charter schools and prestigious out-of-state boarding schools, Kay said.

A newer program, Outreach With Lacrosse & Schools, aims to have a similar impact. Sam Angelotta, who teaches at St. Malachy School on the Near West Side, uses the sport to connect children with lacrosse players at leading universities such as Northwestern and Notre Dame.

"The main goal is to get them to start thinking about being a student-athlete versus just an athlete," Angelotta said. "That exposure to a college campus gives them a reason to want to achieve in the classroom, to want to go to college."

There's no overt academic angle with the junior sailing classes offered by the Judd Goldman Adaptive Sailing Program, but Peter Goldman, the group's president, said it gives at-risk young people "a more worldly outlook ? more exposure to what's going on."

They sail small watercraft in city lagoons with the goal of graduating to big boats on Lake Michigan; some go on to become sailing instructors for the Chicago Park District. Time spent on the water can also pay off later with social or business connections, Goldman said.

But when it comes to business success, there's no sport like rowing ? or at least, that was the finding announced last summer by the management consulting firm Bain & Co.

Bain partner Patrick Manning, a silver medalist in rowing at the 1992 Olympics, looked at Olympic medalists from the United States and the United Kingdom and found that 8 percent of rowers went on to become investment bankers, law firm partners, corporate board members and the like. No other sport came close.

Manning noted that rowers tend to come from affluent families and have high levels of education, but added that the demands of the sport are similar to those of business: Those who do well defer gratification, work hard and forsake individual glory for the sake of the team.

Butsch came to a similar conclusion after rowing his way through Loyola Academy, University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University. He said he founded the Chicago Training Center in 2007 to offer those lessons to children from underprivileged backgrounds.

"Rowing teaches you how to foster friendships, deal with teamwork at a high level, learn to prioritize and set goals and achieve them," he said. "That's transferable to anything else in life ? schoolwork, family life, friendships, all of that."

Almost all of the program's 50-some athletes, who do not pay to participate, come from Chicago's South and West sides. Some practice close to year-round, with indoor workouts at the Gage Park field house and water sessions along the canal; they're training for the Chicago Sprints, a regatta in the Lincoln Park Lagoon next weekend.

The center recently hired an adviser to help the children boost their classroom skills, but some have already seen rowing help them academically: Butsch said he helped two girls strengthen their transcripts with a fifth year of high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

His goal is to see some of his athletes make it to the Ivy League, and Brian Bahena, 17, a rising senior at UNO Garcia High School in Archer Heights, might be the first. He has rowed for three years, and with Butsch's encouragement, plans to apply to Columbia and Brown.

Source: http://feeds.chicagotribune.com/~r/chicagotribune/news/local/~3/HxKOgIjQF0o/story01.htm

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