Youth basketball trophies piling up in St. Paul
Story by Elizabeth Reid
Walk 10 steps into the Payne Ave. Salvation Army in St. Paul, and you can’t miss it: two glass cases bursting with basketball trophies that are practically as big as the youth who hustled for them.
To Salvation Army youth basketball players, these trophies are more than eye candy. They’re symbols of grit and growth, on and off the court – essential traits for kids growing up in St. Paul’s volatile Payne-Phalen neighborhood.
The Payne Ave. Salvation Army has five basketball teams, and every one of them is incredible. Three are girls’ teams for grades five, seven and eight, with two boys’ teams for grades four and six. In the past three years, these teams have placed first or second in approximately 25 tournaments, including several statewide championships.
The youngest boys’ and girls’ teams are so good that they regularly compete against teams one grade ahead of them. Last month, both teams celebrated victories at the City of Saint Paul League winter season championships. The fifth-grade girls won first place playing at the sixth-grade level, and the fourth-grade boys took second at the fifth-grade level.
Preston Parker, a special education paraprofessional, coaches the fifth- and seventh-grade girls’ teams. This year, his fifth-graders learned that failure can be used as motivation. In playing against sixth-graders, they faced losses at the beginning of the season. But “that was only making them work harder,” he said.
Teaching virtues
Parker (pictured) and fellow coaches preach work ethic, self-control and self-esteem – virtues that many of the players might not learn elsewhere. Some of them come from broken homes. All battle the peer pressures of slacking in school, drugs, alcohol, and sexual promiscuity.
“There’s a lot of stuff going on around here,” Parker said of the Payne-Phalen neighborhood.
Basketball, and the promise of trophies, keep players in the gym and off the streets. “It’s what they set out to get – it’s like their mission,” Parker said of the trophies, adding that several parents have built shelves inside their homes to display their child’s trophies, plaques and ribbons.
Players are taught to apply that same work ethic to another area of their lives: school. The coaches’ policy is that schoolwork comes first (pictured below). “You get suspended from school, you get suspended from the team,” Parker tells his girls. Not surprisingly, most of them are A and B students.
Marney Lofgren, an administrative assistant at the Payne Ave. Salvation Army, has a daughter on one of the teams. Lofgren has witnessed, firsthand, how basketball can be a powerful tool for teaching self-control. The sport gives youth struggling with negative emotions a positive outlet, and provides an incentive to control those feelings. “When you’re playing basketball, you can’t show that emotion,” Lofgren observed, adding that on-court outbursts can result in fouls.
Similarly, Parker is pleased with how well the kids are applying self-control to their personal lives. “Don’t let others influence you to do what you know is wrong,” he tells them.
Winning trophies also boosts confidence and self-esteem. For those coming from broken homes, self-esteem is huge. “They don’t know how to have good self-esteem,” Lofgren has sometimes observed. “They don’t have anyone showing them how.”
At the Payne Ave. Salvation Army, the basketball games, awards, and life lessons continue. As the trophy stash grows, the futures of the youth receiving them brighten.
“They’re excited,” Lofgren said. “It’s their award. Their accomplishment. They know that all their hard work pays off.”