Excerpt From Buzz Bissinger's Article "Harlem Lax"

This story is sponsored by Dick's Sporting Goods. All photos by Eric Ogden.

Jordany Balthazar's walk from school to home is about eight blocks. It takes 15 minutes, maybe a little bit longer when snow and ice coat the mottled sidewalk and the wind blows off the Harlem River. But it really isn't very far for the 14-year-old. Except when the starting point is Frederick Douglass Academy at 148th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and the end point the Polo Grounds Towers. This is Harlem, not the gentrified Harlem you read about, but the Harlem of grime and grit rubbing up against the south Bronx.

"I've been scared many times," Jordany says as he makes his way home. "There are many things that can happen. Anytime you can be hurt."

Jordany walks up to 153rd Street. He crosses a little park where homeless sit on benches surreptitiously sipping from bottles wrapped in plastic bags. He walks with his head down, because that's how you walk in a neighborhood like this: duck low, resist eye contact and keep on going. He ignores the stares due to the curious thing jutting out of his backpack. He goes past McCombs Street to 154th. Then he goes down 154th over to Eighth Avenue.

"The hallway to the 'hood," he calls it. It is a perfect description, accentuated by the piles of garbage ringing the trees, wrappers and supermarket bags and cans. On Eighth Avenue he takes a right. Past the storefront signs of Uptown 99 Cent Plus and Uptown Wireless and Luck Stationary and the burnt-out Mama's Fried Chicken and the spires of tires at Perez Flat Fix. Across the street is Rucker Park, a playground legendary for its basketball and also the site of a shooting just several weeks earlier that left a teenager dead. Jordany knew him, not well, but he knew him.

He goes across the street into the Polo Grounds Towers, the only reminder of the legendary stadium of the same name a small drawing on a sign at the entrance. After the Polo Grounds were razed, four 30-story New York City Housing Authority apartment high-rises opened in 1968, currently 1,616 apartments and 4,207 residents shunted into 15.15 acres. They loom over the neighborhood like gigantic watchtowers, casting their own distinct shadow. They are not as dangerous as they used to be. But Jordany takes no chances. There is a little ramp leading into his apartment building. "People just throw things out the window," he says. So he avoids it. He takes the outer walk, past an open bag of garbage with rotting food accompanied by two paper plates and the crust of a pizza.

Jordany walks into the sodden entranceway, the dim lights only seemingly becoming dimmer by the second. He waits for what feels like forever for one of the elevators, because everyone waits forever. He goes to his apartment, which he shares with several siblings and of course his mom, a home health aide worker with a generous laugh and a work schedule that often causes her to work all night. The apartment is painted blue. It is crowded and colorful, an oasis from the building's hallway even more dark and drab than the entryway, a slick of water on the dark red floor, the smells of too many people compacted together.

Jordany wants to get out of the towers. He wants to take his family with him. Once upon a time it was just a dream, the kind of dream that kids in the 'hood often have at night while the sirens blast outside. But now it doesn't seem so faraway. He has gone through a radical change the past several years, the horizons of life, once so narrow and mostly confined to Harlem, opening like a wide-angle lens.

Jordany is heading into tenth grade at the Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania. It is a college preparatory school with Quaker roots, known for its academic excellence. Not so long ago he was a middle school kid at Frederick Douglass, a New York City public school that goes from sixth grade through high school. He didn't do his homework and didn't pay attention, liked hanging with the bad boys because the bad boys are often the most popular. But the summer before sixth grade, his mother insisted that he had to do something and didn't want him to do it in the projects. She signed him up for a day camp program based at Frederick Douglass. He continued with it through middle school when he went off to Westtown. He finished his freshman year with a 95 in algebra, a 91 in French and an 89 in physics.

The reason for that has to do with that thing he carries back and forth from Frederick Douglass Academy regardless of the stares:

A lacrosse stick.

A what?

In Harlem?

Jordany at first had no idea what it was or what to do with it. He knew nothing about the game of lacrosse or the program itself, a non-profit organization called Harlem Lacrosse and Leadership. But now he knows, just like dozens of others at Frederick Douglass know. All you have to do is ask him.

"If it wasn't for Harlem Lacrosse, I would have been on the streets," said Jordany. "I probably would have been in a gang."

Ever since I wrote the book Friday Night Lights twenty-five years ago, I have immersed myself in the culture of sports in schools. I have witnessed many programs and written about many more. I have been publicly outspoken about the winning-at-all cost mentality in which lip service is paid to academics and personal growth when it should be the other way around. I have become concerned about the professionalism of sports at younger and younger ages in which the lifelong lessons that sports uniquely provides-discipline, dedication, advancement through the competition and teamwork-take a back seat to the temporary won-lost record.

Then I spent a recent week in July observing the non-profit organization Harlem Lacrosse and Leadership in action. The concern I had about sports in schools, not the sports programs themselves but the misplaced emphasis, turned to excitement. To say I was blown away is an understatement.

For more on this story check out here.