Eastside story: Rapport amid Roosevelt-Garfield rivalry

Not even the weather feels the same, not with a warm evening breeze — a little too warm for November — drifting across the football field at Los Angeles Roosevelt High.

There is a buzz in the air from coaches barking and players yelling encouragement to one another and neighborhood folks who have come out to watch practice, chatting in the stands.

The new kid, the one at linebacker, has been warned that nothing compares to the week when Roosevelt plays rival Garfield for the unofficial championship of the Eastside.

Teammates have told Aaron Jones about the pep rallies at lunch and the 20,000 people expected to attend Friday night’s game at East Los Angeles College.

“They told me that my heart will be pounding,” Jones says. “It will be so loud I won’t be able to hear a thing.”

It all seems so new — like another world — to a 17-year-old whose life has flipped over and turned around.

Just last fall, he was struggling to avoid trouble at a school halfway across the city. He was trying to stay brave for his mother and five younger brothers and sisters, all of them crammed into a couple of rooms in a homeless shelter.

Thinking back, Jones searches for the right words to describe what he has been through. This isn’t your typical linebacker, his features soft and his demeanor hesitant.

“It was a hard situation,” he says. “I did what I had to do.”

If Jones is still trying to find his bearings in a new life, at least new teammates have told him something else about the Roosevelt-Garfield rivalry.

Something that might make the game feel a little more familiar.

Choosing a path

When times got rough, Brianita Jones says she had nowhere left to go.

The single mother got her family into a sheltering program that put them in a six-bedroom house in South L.A., a place they shared with others in the same predicament.

The two oldest boys — Aaron and 15-year-old Eric — slept in one room; Brianita and her four youngest squeezed into another.

“At first it was hard to accept,” she says. “I was embarrassed.”

The mother and her eldest son talked at night, helping to prop each other up. She told him: “You can either be depressed about it or you can rise above and overcome.”

It was a lesson he took to heart.

“I wanted to stay positive,” he says. “I didn’t want to go down the wrong path and steer my brothers down the wrong path.”

The Joneses spent more than a year in the program before Brianita, while still unemployed, got help from her mother and rented an apartment late last fall.

But for Aaron, home was only part of the equation. Being a role model meant doing better in school, and he did not see that happening at Washington High, where he says there were too many fights on campus, too many kids goofing off in class.

A friend told him about Roosevelt. It sounded like a good school, but there were other issues to consider.

The campus was an hour away by bus. And Jones, who is African American, would be joining a student body that was 99% Latino.

“There weren’t many blacks,” his mother says. “I was worried about him.”

An open door

A few years ago, Aracely Soto-Vasquez decided to move her four children from the San Fernando Valley back to Boyle Heights, where she had grown up. The single mom missed her old neighborhood.

“We’re very welcoming here,” she said. “We’re known for the family.”

Her oldest son, Richard Martinez, started attending Roosevelt, playing for the football team, and could feel that sense of community in the way students treated one another.

So last spring, when he spotted a newcomer outside the locker room, Martinez introduced himself.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll show you around the school.”

Martinez and Jones had a lot in common, growing up in big families, no dad in the house. They hit it off and spent much of the summer together. Jones got something more than a new best friend out of the deal.

It is common to find a crowd at Martinez’s house, where, his mother says, “Every kid is welcome. They know our door is always open to them.”

Jones was shy at first, not sure why these people were being so nice. As he grew more comfortable, he told Soto-Vasquez about the troubles his family had suffered.

“Honey, it doesn’t matter,” she told him. “Everyone has had problems.”

At some point, she began calling him “m’ijo” — my son. Jones began referring to her and her kids as his other family.

Now Brianita and Soto-Vasquez talk on the phone all the time. With the boys playing side by side — Martinez is also a linebacker and team captain — Jones often sleeps over after Friday games, saving himself the bus ride back for Saturday morning practice.

“They opened their home to him,” Brianita says. “They’ve been wonderful.”

Jones senses a kind of destiny.

“It was unexpected,” he says, quietly. “But God makes situations and puts people in places.”

‘Feels like family’

The Garfield rivalry is more than just Friday night — the pep rallies and special events stretch all week, many of them transpiring at the center of campus, in a quad festooned with cardinal and gold.

As if Jones did not have enough to think about with the game, he also finds himself — again, unexpectedly — elected as homecoming prince.

Growing confident in his new home at Roosevelt, he has accumulated friends one by one. He explains: “I walk up and say hello. Nothing fancy.” His little brother, who also transferred to the school, has watched it happen.

“A lot of people are starting to like him,” Eric says. “I think he’s becoming more of a leader.”

Coach Javier Cid says Jones has blossomed on the field, quick and always smart about the defensive game plan. In the classroom, he has improved upon his C average with a string of A’s and B’s.

“When he comes home at night, no matter how hard he worked on the football field, he hits the shower, has dinner and then studies,” his mother says. “He’s focused.”

“Focus” has been a key word around the team this week. The players know they must ignore the distractions and the roar of a big crowd.

It will be nerve-racking at first, Martinez warned Jones. But he also explained this rivalry is a little different.

Players from both sides live in the same, close-knit community. Many of them attended middle school together before going separate ways.

“The game is more brotherly,” Martinez says. “It’s more like, let’s see who is better rather than let’s kill each other.”

Jones has been around the school and the neighborhood long enough to understand.

“It feels like family,” he says.

After all that he has endured in the past year, so many changes, so much upheaval, the new linebacker is starting to grow accustomed to that feeling.

david.wharton@latimes.com

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