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Where Notepads Meet Shoulder Pads

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Times Staff Writer

Hands raised high, the middle school boys left no doubt with their enthusiastic response to the NFL player’s question: How many of you guys would play football all day long?

But the next one stopped them cold.

“How many of you like to study all day long?” asked Derrick Deese, a free agent who played for the San Francisco 49ers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Two hands went up, followed by a few more reluctant ones.

“The fun part is what you see Sunday,” when NFL games are played, Deese said. But Monday through Saturday is all study, with just a couple of hours of practice. “You study film, you study your opponent, you critique your opponent.... If you don’t want to study, they don’t want you on the team.”

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With that, Deese heaped another lesson on the students in the NFL Impact Program, a summer day camp begun this year at USC to exercise muscles and minds.

About 90 boys from Los Angeles campuses -- including Audubon, John Adams and Markham middle schools and Foshay Learning Center -- spent a little more than three weeks in July at the free camp, learning about accountability and responsibility, blocking and tackling. Math, science and English classes were also part of the mix.

The program targeted boys entering the seventh and eighth grades. Counselors at the boys’ schools helped choose students to participate.

“Football is the main draw here,” said Denise Woods, director of the program. “They all want to walk, talk and look like football players.”

But “a sports program alone doesn’t impact the kids’ lives,” said Riki Ellison, a former player for the 49ers and L.A. Raiders who came up with the idea for the camp. “The essence of the whole program is to develop these young men from disadvantaged male youth, so you give them a chance in life so they can help our society further down the line.” He hopes to introduce the program in other cities, linking children to universities nationwide.

So before they slipped into padding and black or white jerseys for afternoon football training, the boys attended classes.

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The academics stayed close to the sports arena. Math problems calculated the passing and rushing yards of such NFL greats as Peyton Manning and O.J. Simpson. Science experiments with paper airplanes simulated the necessary precision for throwing a football. And reading assignments centered on “Crash,” a book about a seventh-grade football superstar and bully.

Students became immersed, “not really putting two and two together that this is math,” Woods said.

But they also were learning a bigger lesson. Spending time in classrooms, on the field and in the cafeteria gave them “the sense that they can get here,” said USC football coach Pete Carroll, who helped design NFL Junior Player Development, the camp’s on-the-field component.

Many participants came from schools plagued by gang violence. Some were from single-parent households.

“They see violence, they see hostility. The remedy to every problem is confrontation,” said Wayne Lewis, a camp instructor and an English teacher at Audubon. “That’s not a real-world thing that they can be successful with.”

Lewis stood in the middle of his classroom one morning as his students reflected on the last few weeks. All of them wore nearly identical outfits: a white shirt and royal-blue sports shorts.

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On the blackboard were the words “conflict,” “respect,” “accountability,” “team,” “multiculturalism” and “anger,” key concepts throughout the camp.

“Why did I put ‘team’ and a question mark?” Lewis asked the boys. “What does ‘team’ mean?”

Three hands shot up.

Lewis called on Shelton Anderson, 12, a Curtiss Middle School student. Like many of his peers, Shelton wore knee-high socks in the style of some famous athletes, despite the unrelenting heat that accompanied practices at the camp.

“The individual is responsible for the team and the team is responsible for the individual,” Shelton said. Lewis nodded vigorously and asked Shelton to repeat his answer.

“Oh, man, that is sweet,” Lewis said. “We’ll leave it right there.”

Lewis has lost a student every year in the three he’s been at Audubon -- including 13-year-old Devin Brown, who was shot by a Los Angeles police officer after a pursuit in February 2005. Lewis pointed to 14-year-old Andrew Butler as an example of what drove him to get involved with the NFL Impact Program.

“He’s right on that line where you go either into the gang thing or you can do the right thing,” Lewis said. “He was the ideal candidate.”

For Andrew, the program was something to do over the summer. He lives down the street from USC, with his aunt, brother, sister and two cousins. His brother helps his aunt, a bus driver, care for the children. Andrew sometimes pitches in, taking the bus to pick up his cousins from day care.

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He never knew his father. His mother drops by about three times a month.

Andrew said he tries to avoid trouble, but he worries that trouble will eventually snag him.

“Sometimes the police have to come out there and arrest some kids,” he said, referring to campus fights. “I think they might mistake me for one of them.”

Some instructors said they were learning too. “Just being here really humbles you,” Woods said. She told of a camper who complained that his stomach hurt. After some probing, she learned that his last meal had been lunch the previous day, when he’d eaten in the campus cafeteria. He had no food in his house and had gone to bed hungry.

“You take them and get them something to eat, and they’re just so happy,” Woods said. “They’re so happy to be here, so happy to get attention.”

Paul Chavez, a math teacher at Markham, and other teachers said they witnessed changes in the youths during the camp: better attitudes, less cursing, more pride in their appearance.

The punishment for bad behavior had something to do with it. Even in the last days, it wasn’t uncommon to see a student doing up-downs, a form of discipline that involves running in place, dropping to the ground and then jumping back up.

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But one of Chavez’s students in particular -- Darius Dawkins-Garrett, a slight 12-year-old from View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter Middle School who effortlessly darted through opponents on the football field -- went from sitting in the back, hitting and punching his peers, to becoming more engaged.

“I didn’t want to make no friends,” Darius said during practice one afternoon, describing his initial standoffishness. “I just wanted to be alone.” He remembered one science experiment that involved making an airplane out of a straw and cut-up index card. He didn’t think it would fly and even wrote in his notebook that he thought the exercise was stupid. He was surprised when it worked.

When asked, Darius immediately named science as one of his favorite subjects.

“I don’t know, I just got to liking it,” Darius said of the camp, “and I changed.”

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