Chatsworth’s Star Runner Leaves His Troubles Behind

OK, let’s start with the spelling of his name.

“Do you want me to spell that for you? My first name?”

No, I think we can figure it out. J-O-E.

“Nah, it’s J-O,” he says. “Actually, it’s Joseph, but I wanted to be different.”

And Jo Shumpert, the running back at Chatsworth High, is different, in many ways.

He says his father abandoned his family when Shumpert was 6 and, on the way out the door, blamed it on the kids.

Shumpert says his mother told him he wasn’t good enough to play Pop Warner football, and she wasn’t free and easy with the compliments, so he grew up defensive about any criticism, even constructive.

He lacked positive reinforcement at home and his life has been one devilish whirlwind. Affiliated with gangs at 8, selling marijuana, crack cocaine and heroine at 10, Shumpert was arrested at 12. He circulated through Sylmar, Central and Los Padrinos juvenile halls for six months before he finally found a home--the Rancho San Antonio Boys’ Home in Chatsworth--where he has lived since June 18, 1996.

It hasn’t been easy. He missed about half of last season for various disciplinary reasons, either at school or at home. But this year is different because Jo Shumpert is different.

“I realize that life is no joke, and you’re not promised anything,” Shumpert said this week, a few days before undefeated Chatsworth takes on unbeaten Granada Hills in a West Valley League opener. “The only thing you’re promised is death, so you have to work for what you want. I don’t plan on being poor. I want to be rich. I plan on being in class all the time and do what I have to do to get there, to reach my life goals.”

Those goals include college, probably a community college, where he would like to play football. He wants to be involved in sports, perhaps as a trainer or physical therapist. He wants to coach.

And Shumpert turned into a pretty good football player, even without playing Pop Warner. He has rushed 42 times for 539 yards this season, a 12.8-yard average. He has scored seven touchdowns.

And he really is a new person.

A year ago, said his coach, Bill Coen, “getting him into class was difficult. But now he’s in class and has good grades. His work ethic ... he’s one of the first guys out, he listens, and does what we want him to do.”

One of the things Shumpert has been asked to do is carry the ball for Chatsworth, and he’s done an outstanding job. His coach marvels at Shumpert’s ability to run North-South. “He has a natural ability to get into the end zone,” Coen said.

Credit Deion Sanders. Shumpert said he was watching “Beyond the Glory,” and Sanders mentioned how easy it was for him to tackle runners going from sideline to sideline, but struggled against those running straight into him. And since Emmitt Smith, the running back from the Dallas Cowboys, had always stressed running North-South, Shumpert decided at the end of last season he would adopt that style.

It has suited him.

So has his new lifestyle. He no longer cringes at criticism.

No longer affiliated with his former gang in West Covina, where he got his start, Shumpert is trying to avoid the life of crime.

At juvenile hall, he realized gang-banging was fruitless.

“I got locked up, and after that it was, ‘Damn, all this for nothing,”’ Shumpert said. “Now, I’ve got nothing to show for it. I think it made me a lot wiser.”

And, in the long run, a lot better.