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The phone call was one of the most disturbing I’ve received, because on the other end was a big, strong man openly weeping from almost the very first word.
Quiet, controlled tears, punctuated by long, uncomfortable pauses in which he tried to gather himself.
He was a middle school football and baseball coach in Montgomery. I’m not sure of the date, or even the year, but it was some time in the mid-2000s.
The coach, a former college football player and longtime Montgomery-area youth coach, had just received the news he’d been dreading: The city council was going to stop city funding of middle school athletics and instead shift the burden to the Montgomery County School system.
Everyone knew what that meant. Most programs were going to be cut by the cash-strapped school system. Most coaches were going to lose their jobs. Most of the kids were going to be out on the streets in the afternoons, instead of in a gym, on a baseball diamond or on a football field.
The results, the coach knew, were going to be catastrophic.
“Where are those kids gonna go, man,” he asked, between the tears. And he just kept repeating the question. Over and over. Until finally, near the end of the call, he answered his own question: “The streets. They’re gonna be on the streets.”
He was right.
A few weeks ago, for the second time in the last few years, the Montgomery City Council voted to send $100,000 per year to MPS to help fund middle school athletic programs. It’s nowhere near enough, of course, but it at least recognizes the importance of those programs, if not the mistake of failing to fund them for more than a decade.
Several city council members said as much, noting the positive impacts on at-risk kids that occur through those programs.
That’s true, by the way, in lots of cities, not just Montgomery. But Montgomery provides the starkest example of the benefits and the consequences of those programs and the failure to fund them.
Because the predictions of the coach were, if anything, not dire enough. Over the last few years, Montgomery has been plagued by youth violence. Juveniles commit an astonishing percentage of crimes in the city.
The kids are committing crimes younger and younger. They’re carrying guns younger and younger. They’re joining gangs younger and younger.
Now, to be certain, it wouldn’t matter if Montgomery’s middle school athletics programs were funded like the Yankees, there would still be issues with youth violence and crime. Because sports don’t typically eradicate poverty or the gigantic problems poverty creates.
But there would be a lot less youth crime, you can bet on that.
That’s because it’s around the middle school age where kids – particularly those who lack proper parental guidance at home – are often lost. They fall into the wrong crowds, fall victim to the chase of easy money and quick friends, all in an effort to find a place to belong. To find someone who cares for them.
And that was the argument of my coach friend.
Every day back then, that coach picked up a half-dozen kids and took them to school or to practice. He drove them home at night. He made sure they had something to eat. He punished them if teachers said they acted up. He showed them day in and day out that another human cared about them.
And he wasn’t alone. At the time, Montgomery’s middle schools had dozens of coaches, most of them doing all those same things for their dozens of kids.
When you added them all up, you were talking about, quite literally, hundreds of children. Hundreds of children in a structured, beneficial system. Hundreds of children who had someone standing between them and roaming the streets, breaking into cars, trying drugs or alcohol, joining a gang, carrying a gun.
Hundreds.
But the cost was too much, city officials said. On paper, it probably looked like a good dollars-and-cents idea. In actual implementation, however, it was devastating and has no doubt contributed to the sharp rise in youth crime.
I bring it up now because Montgomery, like Birmingham and other bigger cities, has been the target of criticism over the past year, as issues with crime – and particularly, juvenile crime – have grown. Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, just like his counterpart in Birmingham, Randall Woodfin, has caught much of the blame for those issues. And for not fixing those issues quickly enough for some people.
But the conditions that led to many of the problems these cities face didn’t begin the day they took office. In most cases, the current mayors were in grade school (or not even born) when the courses were set.
In some instances, those original acts were mired in cruelty or racism. In other cases, like the middle school sports cuts, it was a decision that maybe looked good on a budget but was disastrous in the lives of real people.
And one everyone is now paying dearly for.
