Transforming A Community Through Football

Try explaining American football to a foreigner. Begin with the colorful padded uniforms and helmets the young men wear. Then describe how they violently run into each other at full force as they try to steal a leather ball designed to look like a pig’s bladder. Next try to describe the onlookers. Grown men with painted faces and bodies in support of their favorite team, screaming, cheering, and sometimes shedding tears. The United States is the only country that worships the gridiron and its players. Many newcomers to this country can’t imagine why we watch it, let alone why young men want to play it.

Now imagine the newcomer you’re trying to convince to play the game is a high school athlete (or his mother). The absurdity of the game makes it challenging to convince young men to play the sport when there are much more logical options like soccer or cross-country.

That was the challenge Belmont High School faced. The school, mostly comprised of newly immigrated Hispanic families, has found a way to not only convince students to play, but they’ve built a program from the ground up with these neophyte players.

Over the years, the Belmont Sentinels have built championship-winning cross-country and soccer programs. But with most of their students coming from Central America, building a winning football program has been harder than convincing the NFL to institute stricter concussion protocol. In the first 92 years of Belmont’s history, the football program had never reached a California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) championship game, let alone won it.

“For a lot of our families, there is a culture shock with understanding the game of football,” said Neil La Sala, Belmont’s Athletic Director. “I’ve had some parents in my office and I’ve had to explain to them what the game is, what it could offer to their son, and why we would like to have him on the team. They just kind of see it as a sport of brute force and ignorance. Their culture doesn’t have a lot of familiarity with the game.”

Recruiting students’ parents to let them play a game of “brute violence and ignorance” isn’t the only obstacle Belmont football faces. The school is located in the neighborhood of Westlake, a community without youth football programs to teach kids the fundamentals of the game. Unlike other high schools in the Los Angeles area that have feeder programs, when students enter Belmont as freshmen, they have to learn the sport from the ground up. This presents a challenge for coaches. “Everything our coaching staff teaches them is from square one. It’s from the absolutely most basic level,” said La Sala.

When hiring football coaches, La Sala looks for someone who, as he describes, “understands what they are getting into: that they are going to have a lot of raw ability that they’ll have to channel and develop from the lowest level.”

In 2012, he found just the right man for the job. Gregg Barden was Belmont’s junior varsity head coach for 19 seasons. Barden was content coaching the JV level; but La Sala recognized his ability to develop players, and called him up to be the varsity head coach for the 2013 season.

In Barden’s third season as the head coach, Sentinel football stepped out of the shadows, and finally found success. The 2015 season was a transformative year for the Belmont program. As the number in the wins column increased, so did the number of fans in the bleachers. By midseason, the stands were filled to capacity, a huge increase from the mere hundreds before. There was a buzz surrounding Belmont football that had never existed in the past. “Facebook exploded, and we were packing the place. The stadium holds 1,600 people, which isn’t much, but for an urban California high school that’s pretty darn amazing,” La Sala explained, with a smile on his face.

Barden led the Sentinels to a perfect season that ended with a trip to Cerritos College to play Hollywood High School in Belmont’s first-ever Los Angeles City Section championship game. Excitement spread through social media and in the newspaper, and 5,000 Sentinel fans travelled to watch the team make school history. “We had people coming out of the woodwork,” La Sala said.

Belmont went on to beat Hollywood 24-7 and became LA City Section champions. Fans, parents, alumni and students all celebrated with loud cheers and grins from ear to ear. After a 92-year football drought, Belmont football was born again.

The pieces had finally come together for the diverse school. But just as success came, adversity loomed. Prior to the championship game, Barden dropped a bag of bad news on La Sala’s desk. “Win or lose, this is going to be it for me,” Barden told him.

At the conclusion of the season, La Sala was burdened with the task of finding a new head coach. The prior season’s success made the Belmont job a highly sought after position, giving La Sala and his coworkers a lot of applications to sift through. “Guys were sending things like newspaper clippings of themselves, irrelevant things that weren’t even required,” La Sala explained.

The candidates were narrowed down to three potential coaches, who were then interviewed. Once again, La Sala went with a junior varsity coach: Scott McLane from Lincoln High School. “One of the first things out of his mouth was his emphasis on scholarship, and that’s what really peaked our attention,” La Sala said. “We wanted someone who was going to be a character developer, a sportsmanship model, and that really came out with his philosophy and his vocabulary.”

McLane immediately prioritized academics. He implemented “The 3.0 Triumph Program,” where he and his assistant coaches provide the student-athletes with mandatory tutoring before every practice. If a player blows off the tutoring session, no matter how important they are to the team’s on-field success, McLane sanctions them by sitting them out for a quarter during the next game. “He puts an emphasis on student in student-athlete,” La Sala said.

With a new no-huddle offense, and a quarterback who has never played the position before, the 2016 season so far hasn’t been the Cinderella story experienced a year ago. The team is 4-3 heading into their last games of the season. But the win-loss total doesn’t dictate McLane’s success. Capitalizing on last season’s momentum is vital for increasing support for the program, and McLane has been its biggest booster. He’s working to get parents and the community involved by showing them how they can contribute to their kids’ development on and off the field. Throughout the season the team has potlucks, dinners, and other events that connect the team with parents, and invite the community to be a part of the program.

In the coming weeks, the Sentinels have some key games. If they win them, they will be back to the playoffs. But to La Sala and his staff, the playoffs aren’t the most important goal. They believe that what matters most is the transformation of Belmont football and its players. When a school without a feeder program wins a football championship, and Hispanic families with no understanding of the game assemble to cheer them on, the real win isn’t found in the score, it’s found in the community they’ve created.