Teaching Youths That a Goal Isn’t Just a Line

Tupou Vaipulu was an “at-risk” kid playing a pickup football game behind his school three years ago when an oversize man walked up and signed him up.

“He said he had this group going, and he asked if I wanted to check it out,” said Vaipulu, now a 16-year-old junior at John Glenn High School in Norwalk. “I was surprised when he told me he had played for the Chargers.”

So it was that Vaipulu joined Goals For Life, a program in which retired National Football League players counsel Los Angeles-area students viewed by their teachers as in danger of being lost to gangs or other problems. Three years later, his grade-point average has jumped to 3.5. He is considering a career in health care, working toward a dream of attending UCLA and, of course, has joined the football team.

While couch potatoes took in the beer commercials on the pregame shows Sunday, Vaipulu joined hundreds of other students at Goals for Life’s annual Super Bowl party in Norwalk, where half a dozen former professional athletes sat at tables on the blacktop behind Hargitt Middle School to sign autographs, raffle off prizes, hand out food and just chat.

Students lined up by the scores to file past them before taking a seat to watch the game on a big-screen TV inside the school.

“It’s all about telling them that they have a future,” said Reggie Berry, the former San Diego Charger who founded the program in 1989 and later found Vaipulu in the beat-up grass behind his school. “We don’t tell them they’re going to be professional athletes. We tell them . . . to be leaders, not followers.”

School districts contract with the program, run by Berry from a hospital office in Norwalk, to send athletes to its campuses several times a week for 24 weeks. Under each $5,000 contract, the players meet with teachers, look over students’ report cards and attendance records, and chat privately with small groups of students. There are field trips to places such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the USC campus. And on Super Sunday, there are signed T-shirts and pizza.

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Players such as former Atlanta Falcon Joe Williams, former Philadelphia Eagle Timmy Brown and others sat around to talk shop--why Barry Sanders is really better than Emmitt Smith, why the Buffalo Bills aren’t what they used to be, etc. Some were complaining of hand cramps half an hour before the Super Bowl started, but this group didn’t charge a nickel for their autographs.

“We take the same strategy we’ve used as professional athletes--to set goals,” said Williams, who joined the program four years ago after reading about it in an NFL newsletter. “It wakes a lot of ‘em up. They don’t realize they’re free falling.”

In class, he said, he warns students to avoid gangs as well as run-ins with the police who may be “just waiting for you to make a mistake.”

Berry was inside the school auditorium Sunday, setting up folding chairs for the crowd, when a youngster in a baseball cap and a Barry Sanders jersey zipped by.

“What is discipline?” Berry asked.

The boy responded as if to a drill sergeant: “Do what has to be done. When it has be done. As well as it can be done.”

The youth, Glen Lanphear, has been in the program for three years, but admitted that he still gets into trouble sometimes. But he said he’s better off because of the experience.

“It shows you how to change,” he said.

Outside, Williams gave his Pittsburgh “Terrible Towel” to a student who, like him, rooted for the Steelers.

“You can’t change the world,” he said. “But if you can keep a lot of them from falling through the cracks, that says something.”