RSS
Home
No spring playoffs necessary: Boys and Girls Club keeps sports going at Canoga Park High
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
I went to Canoga Park High School and started walking around campus, expecting to bump into the school’s various sports teams out practicing. That has typically been my experience at high schools as a sports reporter: walk around campus and I bump into one team after another. Tennis, lacrosse, baseball, softball, volleyball, swimming, track. Coach after coach tells you how his team is doing. One story after another.
But when I first showed up at Canoga Park High School several months ago, the scene was different than I expected. The softball team was playing a game, and the baseball team was away, and the volleyball season had ended the day before, and the track coach had canceled track practice because it was too hot. And yet there were a large group of athletes milling around the weight room, and it wasn’t for spring football.
No, the Boys and Girls Club has landed on the Canoga Park campus, and it’s carrying the weight of several athletic teams in the process.
One minute, George Hernandez is standing with athletes outside the weight room. Moments later, he’s walking over to the cafeteria. Wherever he goes, there are different groups of students involved in different after-school activities. They all know him.
“‘Sup, George,” says one.
“‘Sup Drew,” Hernandez says. “I know you weren’t riding that thing earlier ...” and they go on conversing, talking about something they both saw earlier that day. Drew looks to be a high school freshman. A minute later, Hernandez is talking to an adult who walks by.
“Estan a dentro de la cafeteria,” he says, and he continues in Spanish, telling the man where he can find who he’s looking for. During these afternoon hours, one gets the sense, George Hernandez is a problem-solver. Among other things.
Hernandez is the high school director for the West Valley Boys and Girls Club, and after two years on the campus at Canoga Park High School in the San Fernando Valley, one gets the feeling he likes it there. And that he is liked. But he wasn’t always so popular.
“Initially we had very little interest,” Hernandez said of the after-school program he started on the high school campus. “The first month we were on campus we only had two students signed up. The second month maybe we had 22. But by our second semester on campus, we had built some relationships with teachers and coaches, and we drew some more people in while we were on-campus during the summer. Now we’ve got 150-250 students participating per day.”
The Boys and Girls Club is better-known for working with elementary schools. Funded mostly by federal grants dispersed through the Los Angeles Unified School Dsitrict’s after-school program, it had only elementary programs in the West Valley until 2007.
“There was no blueprint for what we were doing,” Hernandez said. “The district didn’t even have one.”
Hernandez was charged with starting an after-school program that had an academic component. But he couldn’t just tell students to start meeting in the library for after-school study hall. Nobody would come.
Needing to know what kind of after-school program the students would attend, Hernandez put out a survey asking the kids what they wanted to do after school. Ninety percent of the responses said, ‘Hang out with friends.’
So Hernandez arranged for the program to obtain a room with a pool table, a television and a foozball table in it.
