Surfing Stokes At-Risk Youths

It’s taken three summers, but Alvin Caver concedes that he has turned into a California “surfer dude” who says “stoked” a lot.

Alvin, 17, a senior at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles, and dozens of other youths have a newfound enthusiasm for a sport they previously knew virtually nothing about. It came from getting involved with an organization called Boarding House Mentors, which introduces surfing and snowboarding to at-risk minority youths from South Los Angeles.

Boarding House Mentors wrapped up its surfing season Sunday with a contest that drew 40 South Los Angeles youths, ages 10 to 20, under cloudy skies at Will Rogers State Beach in Pacific Palisades.

Teaching novice surfers how to catch waves, however, is just the beginning. Its organizers say their effort, one of at least several programs around the country introducing inner-city youths to surfing, uses the fun of the sport to help establish good relationships between the young people and their adult volunteer instructors.

Dameian Hartfield, a 33-year-old former gang member who now serves as a Boarding House volunteer, said their outings turn participants “back into kids.”

“In my community, in Watts and the Nickerson Gardens apartment housing projects,” Hartfield said, “it’s real violent ... real negative, and the kids have to grow up fast.

“When they first get here, they come here kind of hard, like ‘I’m not going to surf. I’m not going to participate. I’ll just watch.’ But then, they see everyone start having so much fun, they start having fun.”

Giovanni Douresseau, a 13-year-old eighth-grader in his second year with the program, echoed the sentiment. He now surfs regularly with a mentor he met last year. “When you go surfing, people are always inviting, and they’re always your friend,” he said.

The group started as an idea conceived by Alan Scott, a pioneering skateboarder in the Venice and Santa Monica area in the 1970s. Scott also was an accomplished surfer and felt that the sport had changed his life for the better. To form a program to inspire others, he teamed with Maria Busby, a swimming and surfing instructor, and Tony LoRe, president of Youth Mentoring Connection, a Los Angeles group that pairs youths with adults who volunteer to serve as their mentors.

The program quickly took off. Today, a husband-and-wife team who were early volunteers and who met each other while surfing at Topanga State Beach -- Andy Kastenberg and Grace Padilla-Kastenberg -- are its leaders, with Andy serving as chairman of the board and Grace as the unpaid executive director.

Padilla-Kastenberg said she and her husband are trying to raise funds to expand the program to serve more young people. This was the group’s fourth season of surfing, and this winter will be the third year of snowboarding. A new skateboarding program is planned for spring.

Enthusiasm was evident at Will Rogers beach on Sunday. The young surfers let out whoops of excitement when Busby asked the group circled around her at the beginning of the day, “Who’s ready for a surf contest?”

Douresseau later explained that surfing always gives him a feeling of being “cleansed.”

“Like some surfers say, ‘Any bad day in the water is better than any good day on land,’ ” he said.

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stuart.silverstein@latimes.com