This Club Is All-Inclusive

James Littlejohn was 10 when he figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I wanted to run a Boys and Girls Club,” he says, 37 years later. “I was 10 years old and I thought, ‘What would be better than spending every day in a place with a gym, a pool table and all these cool people?”’

He is the director of the Boys and Girls Club of Capistrano Valley in San Juan Capistrano. Every day more than 500 kids come into the sparkling new building off Avenida Positiva.

They come speaking Spanish and English, they come to play soccer or use the computers, play basketball or study in the homework room, take a lesson in tennis or geography.

Every day they make Littlejohn smile and every day they hang on the arms, waist, knees and legs of Hans Larouche, the club’s athletic director.

By 3 p.m., the building is filled with noise and backpacks and balls bouncing and books being opened.

It is a misconception, Littlejohn says, that San Juan Capistrano is nothing but a wealthy South Orange County community near the beach. There are plenty of families in need.

One day, Larouche remembers, a mother coming in with a double stroller and with four other children following. She told Larouche and Littlejohn she had eight children, young ones. Her twin 6-year-old boys were rambunctious. Could the club help?

“The twins are already great little basketball players,” Larouche says. “It makes you feel good to help a mom and make life a little better.”

If the clubs aren’t all about sports, Littlejohn and Larouche understand where sports can take kids, any kids, all kids, bookworms and little athletes alike.

Littlejohn was raised in Alameda, in a family of nine. “We had the love of both our parents,” he says, “but we were a welfare family. My parents weren’t always home when I came home from school. When I was about 7 years old, my sisters took me to the Boys Club in Alameda. It was just the Boys Club then and I think they were jealous. They could play basketball better than me.

“I became a football player, a basketball player, a baseball player there. I had great role models, men and women who wanted us kids to grow up right. The place made such an impression on me.”

He played football in high school and at Linfield College in Oregon. The school just finished its 46th consecutive winning season. It is a national record and one Littlejohn is proud to be part of.

Larouche, 40, and his family moved from Haiti to Montreal when Larouche was 3. He is a good tennis player. His mother was friends with Ronald Agenor’s mother. Agenor was Haiti’s only ATP representative for a time in the early 1990s.

What both men bring with them to the Boys and Girls Club in San Juan Capistrano is their love of both sports and children.

Littlejohn believes that all children benefit from getting involved in sports.

“It doesn’t have to be about winning or being a great athlete,” he says. “But I do think kids learn about themselves and how to get along with kids who might be different than they are by playing on teams.”

Larouche says that his goal is to make sports fun, not cutthroat.

He organizes an indoor soccer game in one part of the gym, a quasi-handball game in another part. Boys and girls play together and the sounds are laughter, giggles and backslapping. Everybody plays. Everybody gets a high-five.

“I want to get the kids who always want to be in the gym to go to the homework room,” Littlejohn says, “but I also want to get the little bookworms into the gym too. We want to get all the kids to experience everything.”

Littlejohn and Larouche are college-educated athletes with a sense of mission. They have come to San Juan Capistrano to make a difference. What they want to teach is what they have learned--that anybody from anywhere can be what he wants, do what she wants.

The Boys and Girls Club of Capistrano Valley is nonprofit. It costs $25 per child per year to belong, but no child is turned away. There are scholarships for those who need them. The club must raise its own money.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.

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