Brent Brings New Vision, and Volleyball Brings Hope

In this small gym at Fremont High, in the middle of South Central Los Angeles, on a Friday night when so many of their friends are out at parties or movies or just riding around in someone’s car with music turned up loud, 15 girls are acquiring floor burns without complaint as they spike and dive, dink and serve and learn a little bit more about a sport they have come to love.

They are playing volleyball.

Nearly all these girls are of a Hispanic background. Two men, Willie Jiminez, who is Hispanic, and Ed DeGrasse, who is white, stand on either side of the net and set the ball for the girls, who are mostly sophomores and juniors at Fremont High. Standing in the corner is a 6-foot-9 African American man named Andre Brent. Brent has rushed over to the volleyball practice from his job as a Los Angeles city pool director. He is late because one of the girls on his swim team got kicked in the face.

“It’s gonna swell,” Brent says.

Brent is always rushing, though. He is a 39-year-old father of four daughters, a husband to Cynthia. And although he’s not exactly sure how this happened because he once dreamed of being an Air Force pilot, Brent is also a sort of sports godfather for lots of young women of the inner city.

He grew up a few blocks from Fremont High. It was just Brent and his mother, Lula Brayboy. Brent found sports early. Baseball, track and field, swimming and, oddly, little basketball. “I didn’t grow tall until late,” Brent says in a voice so low that it has messed up his new answering machine, his baritone being unable to register on the machine’s cassette. Brent picked up swimming when a man in the neighborhood introduced him to a city program to train lifeguards.

After finding that his vision wasn’t good enough to allow him to train as a pilot in the Air Force, Brent went off to Cal State Northridge where he majored in Afro- American studies and minored in education and where he had every intention of becoming a teacher. That is, he says, until the city of Los Angeles offered him a job in its recreation department. From there, in little steps, Brent has found himself in a position to offer to other teenagers the chance to have sports make life easier and safer.

“When I grew up, if you played sports the gangs left you alone,” Brent says. “I put a foot on the wrong side of the tracks a couple of times. But I learned that over there, on the wrong side, there was only headaches and heartaches.”

These Fremont girls are playing volleyball on a Friday night because of a national program called Starlings. Headquartered in San Diego, this is a program that raises and then distributes money around the country so that inner-city female athletes can form clubs and play volleyball all year long.

More and more, Brent says, it is mandatory for girls who want to earn college scholarships to play volleyball all year. This means playing for club teams. Joining club teams is expensive, though. “It costs anywhere from $800 to $1,500 a year just to join the club,” Brent says. “Then you have to pay a fee to try out for the team. You have to pay entry fees into tournaments. You have to pay travel fees. These kids in the inner city, they can’t do that.”

There are two Starling teams in Hollywood now as well as a Central L.A. team and this South Central team that is working so hard on a Friday night.

Sophomores Wendy Silva and Sylvia Bonilla and juniors Lupe Morales and Juana Hernandez speak enthusiastically of the sport and the Starlings program as the practice ends about 7:30 p.m. Brent is reminding everybody to wash their uniform shirt because he’s not sure if new ones will be available in time for a Sunday tournament in Torrance.

The girls say that if they could they would play volleyball 24-24, “all day, every day,” Silva says. Most of this group began playing in junior high where DeGrasse was the coach. “Now,” Morales says, “we do everything together. We take the same classes, we study together. We are friends and we are a team.”

As they entered high school, Bonilla says, these players began to understand that without the resources to play club volleyball all year long, “the college scholarships weren’t going to be there.” And the money to join clubs is not there for this group. Hernandez’s mother works in a fast-food restaurant and her father is unemployed. Silva’s father is without work right now as well. One father is a hotel chef, another mother cleans rooms for a hotel.

Last Sunday, for the first time, the South Central team played in a club tournament at Fullerton Junior College. “There were college coaches there,” Silva says. “And we won our division.”

Brent says that there had been girls from other area high schools on the South Central team. But then those other girls dropped out. “They were from Locke High School. That is a blue [gang color] area. This is a red area. The Locke girls just quit coming around.”

A big success, Brent says, will be when the first Starling gets a college scholarship. Silva says her team practices every night but Thursdays. “Friday is a big test day so on Thursday night we get together to study,” Silva says. “We’re mostly taking Advanced Placement courses so we’re ready if colleges call.”

So lessons are being learned. On the court and off.

And Brent smiles. His dream might have been to fly airplanes. His reality is giving kids who have a will some wings of their own.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.