That was forty years ago, but in many ways little had changed, save for the fact that the building had gotten older. It was all but impossible to spend any time inside Hope and not be constantly reminded of both its age and that it had become another city school that no one seemed to have any faith in. A few years earlier it had been divided into three mini-schools, each with its own principal, and each with its own supposed theme. Hope also had adopted so-called block scheduling, which meant the classes were appreciably longer, ninety minutes instead of the traditional forty-five or so.
On the surface it might have seemed like an educational version of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But, if nothing else, it made things more orderly. Or as one of the school’s social workers explained, “There’s always the potential trouble when everybody’s in the halls. That’s when things happen. So having less hall time makes things better, regardless of anything else.”
By all accounts the new system had improved Hope.
But even though both faculty and students liked it, the block scheduling system was abolished in 2010, supposedly so all the public high schools in the city would be uniform. That spring scores of students walked out of Hope during the school day and marched downtown to City Hall to protest, to no avail.
To the coaches, though, this was all politics.
They were always fighting the things that transcended both the politics of the building and the various educational philosophies that seemed to be constantly changing. Hadn’t Nyblom been through something like nine principals and countless vice principals in his twenty-four years? Hadn’t he learned that, at some level, teaching was simple? Wasn’t it all about doing the right thing?
That was at the heart of his message. Be on time, work hard, do what you’re supposed to do, care about others, be a good teammate. These were the lessons he had grown up with, coming of age in southern Rhode Island as a “swamp Yankee,” the name given to people who often were “land poor,” people who believed in old-fashioned values like family, faith, and helping others, people who had both a strong sense of place and of doing the right thing. All those timeless qualities that long ago had become the articles of his faith. All the truths that had survived all the years and all the educational theories. All the things he kept stressing every day, which the culture outside his gym so often seemed to oppose.
So he looked at the fact that there were some Brown students at Hope every afternoon offering to tutor students. He looked at the resources that were available to kids that too often weren’t utilized. He knew there were nights when parents could meet with teachers about their child, but only a handful would show up in a school of roughly nine hundred students.
That was Nyblom’s ongoing frustration, this sense that so many kids could be significantly helped if they—or their parents—would just listen to those trying to help them.
He had seen it get worse in the past couple of decades. More kids with social problems. More kids with academic problems. An appreciably smaller school than when he had first started, more Latino now, where twenty years it had been more African American. A lack of respect for adults. Words like “motherfucker” and “nigga” accepted parts of the language in ways they never were before. An increased sense of entitlement. The fact that the overwhelming majority of fights at Hope were between girls. The increasingly transient nature of the school population. More poverty, more kids wearing the same clothes every day. More and more kids in gangs, even the ones you would never have imagined as gang members. The fact that so very few kids ever got picked up after road games when the bus come back to Hope, the sense that so many kids were on their own.
This was Nyblom’s world, one he had seen get more hard-edged and complicated the longer he’d been at Hope.
“Dave’s going to have to send a couple of these kids packing and it’s going to kill him,” Moors said one afternoon during another lousy practice where the coaches were all but yelling into the wind. “These kids are different. There’s such a ‘me’ attitude. Wayne cares about Wayne. Manny truly believes he’s a Division I player, but he doesn’t sleep right. He doesn’t eat right. Doesn’t live right. Doesn’t ask anyone for help. And all the people hanging around him, all the people always telling him what he wants to hear? They think he’s great. And he thinks he has control of the team because he’s a senior and he’s the best player, but nobody listens to him.”
Moors shrugged.
“But his mother works three jobs, and his father lives in Delaware and is in and out of his life, so it’s not like it’s easy.”
The practice going on in front of him was typical: Nyblom frustrated, Wayne Clements not around, all the flaws on display. Corey Brinkman, the only white kid on the team, a football player who was trying to play basketball in his senior year, had realized he was simply too far behind the others and had quit. So had a skinny Hispanic kid Nyblom was always calling Ricky Rubio—in reference to the flashy NBA player from Spain—to the point that I had never learned his real name. He was just Ricky Rubio.
“We’re averaging thirty-four points a game,” Nyblom said loudly. “My son’s rec team gets that by halftime.”
“This is making me sick watching this,” Moors muttered. “We go down to South Kingstown and spend half the time playing like we’re scared. Hope High School was never scared. People were scared to come here. When my brother played here in the ’80s people would be lining the walls here. Crowds were crazy. They intimidated teams. They were a tough city team, and other teams around the state were scared to come in here. There would always be cops all over the place. Now we’re the ones who seem scared. I don’t know what happened. Playing soft? This is Hope High School. We can’t be soft.”
“STOP FOOLING AROUND AND BOX SOMEONE OUT!” Nyblom yelled. “WE CAN”T KEEP DOING THIS.”
He whistled and everyone stopped. He called them to midcourt.
“Gentlemen, we can’t keep doing this,” he said, softly now. “One game we played well, even though we lost. The others? We haven’t played well at all. We have to get stronger. We have to get quicker. We have to get better ball-handling. And there’s no magic formula. The only way to do it is to put more time in.
“And gentlemen, the coaches can’t keep screaming and hollering at you all the time. You have to do it. You have to figure it out together.”
The players stood silently.
“You have to figure it out—and the other kid who’s not in the gym today? He’s got to figure it out too. You have to figure out why you don’t go to the weight room. You have to figure out why you don’t get more shots up every day. Because that’s what good teams do. Teams that want to win, that’s what they do.”
He stopped, and looked at the players standing around him, as if to somehow make sure they were hearing his words, really hearing them.
He pointed at Aaron Lynch, a six-foot-three senior who was new to Hope this year, having moved to Providence from Connecticut with his father.
“You are a wonderful kid, Aaron,” he said. “But you have to get stronger.”
He pointed to another kid, who wore a dark headband.
“If you don’t learn the plays I can’t use you.”
He pointed to junior Devante Youn, a rugged six-foot-three forward.
“Two years you’ve been trying to get in shape. I don’t get it.”
He looked around at all the players.
“It comes with a sacrifice, gentlemen. We can’t make you do it. Today’s practice was a waste of time. I didn’t see anyone bust it. You play as if you don’t want to be here. It’s bad, fellas, it’s real bad.”
And it didn’t get any better against Cranston West on a Friday night before Christmas at home. Nyblom’s last message to his team in the cold Health Room was that they all needed a Christmas gift, a win to get things moving in the right direction.
“Be a leader,” he said, pointing to Manny. “And yelling at people is not being a leader. Let me do that.”
But soon they had lost their way, another ugly, low-scoring game that was like a rugby scrum down the stretch, another game that could have gone either way, until it went Cranston West’s, in another heart-wrenching defeat.
“Are you ever here?” Nyblom said to Wayne Clements as they walked down the small set of stairs that led to the Health Room.
“You blaming me?” Clements asked.
“No, I’m not blaming you,” Nyblom said. “I’m trying to get you to help us.”
Once again, the room smelled of failure and defeat. Once again, the players had forlorn looks on their faces. All except Manny Kargbo, who walked in carrying a box of popcorn.
“You should be here every day,” Nyblom said to Clements, shaking his head.
He turned back to his team.
“Last year was last year. I don’t know if we’re still trying to live off that. We had a great tempo out of the gate tonight and then nothing happened. And we can’t keep turning the ball over. It’s killing us. We had twenty-three turnovers tonight and that’s just too many. No one really did anything bad, but we just don’t do enough positive things.”
He turned to Johnson Weah, who sat at a table with his head in his hands.
“Look at me. Don’t get down. We need your effort. We need your hustle.”
He stopped, took a breath.
“Pick a day next week when we’re on vacation,” he said to everyone. “Come down to the house. We’ll spend the day. We’ll figure it out.… We should be 3-1. Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.”
Nyblom was calming down, almost visibly coming down from the emotion of the game. Then he saw Manny sitting in front of him with his hand in the popcorn bag.
“Do you really need to be eating that popcorn?” he said sharply. “Because I told you not to. So do you really need to be putting on another show? Like the one you put on the other night in South Kingstown yelling at everyone? STOP EATING THE POPCORN.”
* * *
It was the day after Christmas, a Wednesday morning, and there was no heat in the gym. There also was no Angel Rivera and no Jeremy Rivera, the two supposed cousins who both lived in Chad Brown on the other side of the city, and no Dennis Wilson, either.
Last year Wilson had made some big shots in the state tournament at the Ryan Center at the University of Rhode Island, but so far he’d been a nonfactor, missing half the time. It always seemed to be something. Girlfriend problems. Working with a teacher after school at his charter school on the other side of the city. Something. Providence has four public high schools, but now there are also over a dozen charter schools, most too small to have their own athletic teams, so their athletes are dispersed to the four traditional high schools.
“What’s up with Dennis?”
Nyblom shrugged.
“He says his mother is moving back to Georgia.”
Nyblom’s affect was that’s just the way it is, as if he had long ago tried to stop worrying about things he can’t control. As if that were the only way he could survive emotionally in a school where there were always so many things you couldn’t control. But on a team that couldn’t shoot there was no question that Hope was a better team with Dennis than without him. Nyblom still had expectations: Wayne’s knee would get better, and Manny would get himself emotionally straightened out, and Dennis would start to make some shots, and Ben would get tougher, and Johnson and Delonce would find their basketball legs after football, and Hope would be the team Nyblom kept believing they could be, as good as any team in Rhode Island. But he had come to know that it’s always fragile, a delicate basketball ecosystem that can self-destruct at any minute, a team that had started out 0-4, even though some of the key pieces from the team that went to the state finals last year were still here.
To Nyblom, though, there was no real mystery to it. You got better by putting the work in. You got better by working hard in practice. And if there was no heat in the gym on a cold winter morning? Well, that was part of it too.
No one had ever given him anything. His father had worked for the Recreation Department in South Kingstown, one of those guys who went to work every day, no questions asked, because that was what being a man was all about. So this is what he knew, what he always had known. And when he had come to Hope in the fall of 1989, such a different world than the one he had grown up in, he brought the values of his childhood with him: work hard, treat people with respect, do the right thing. The varsity coach at the time was Jerry Morgan, a black man from Gary, Indiana, who first had come to New England in the early ’60s to try out for the New England Patriots, then landed in Providence, where he played in the fall for a semiprofessional football team called the Providence Steam Roller.
It wasn’t long before Morgan came to realize that the largely segregated Indiana of his youth, where blacks and whites essentially grew up in different worlds, in many ways had been better than what he was seeing in Providence with its de facto segregation.
“Most of our families were intact, and we didn’t have drugs and guns,” Morgan said.
Nyblom had learned from Morgan. Saw the way he dealt with kids: tough on them, but always giving them another chance, too.
“We need to score points, gentlemen,” Nyblom said now as the team scrimmaged. “Shoot the ball.… I don’t care if you miss a hundred shots in a row, Ben, we need you to shoot.… SHUT UP AND PLAY.… You want to get on the floor, Devante? Play harder.… You keep playing like this, Eli, and you’ll get on the floor.”
Eli.
His name was Elijah Lewis, a skinny little left-handed sophomore guard with a high fade haircut and an often bemused look on his face, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. He was from Bridgeport, but his mother was originally from Providence, so here they were, not that anyone seemed to know why. This, too, was Hope: kids coming and going, transferring in, transferring out, for all kinds of reasons. One kid on the team had attended Mount Pleasant, another city school, but after being threatened by a classmate there he was moved to Hope in what was called a “safety transfer.”
In the beginning Eli seemed ticketed for the jayvee team, just another young kid with potential, but now he was flying around the court as though he were on skates on a smooth sheet of ice, darting here and there, making plays, an obvious talent.
“Someone wants more playing time,” Moors yelled out. “You keep playing like this, Eli, you’ll never get off the floor.”
This was a graphic reminder to everyone in the gym that starting lineups weren’t chiseled in stone, that the roster was like the stock market, players moving up or moving down. That, too, was Nyblom’s coaching style.
It was vacation week, so everything was a little looser, a little less structured; some kids were away on break, or who knew where. It was one of Nyblom’s fears, the sense that his players had too much time on their hands, offering the potential for trouble. He liked it best when they were in the gym, days with some structure. There were roughly thirty-five gangs in Providence, with roughly two thousand people identified as gang members, according to the Providence Journal. They were the kids Nyblom used to see hanging on the corners years ago when he drove Laurence Young home, the kids in school one day and gone the next, now “on the street,” code for they probably were never coming back.
This was Nyblom’s reality, the world he lived in every day, so he had become extremely sensitive to what was happening to his team’s psyche. Who seemed troubled? Who seemed to be drifting? Who has having trouble in school? Who had girl problems? Who might have something going on at home?
One person who seemed different in the gym, but in a good way, was Manny Kargbo.
“He’s torturing you, Quenton,” Nyblom yelled to Marrow. Manny was getting to the rim anytime he wanted. He also seemed happier. He had come back from Christmas with a new haircut and a new attitude, almost as if they had been presents under the Christmas tree. He smiled. He talked to both teammates and coaches, engaged in ways he rarely had before, emerging as the Manny everyone had been waiting for.
“You should have been with me yesterday,” said Moors, coming over and sitting beside me in the first row of the bleachers. “There was a jayvee tournament at Mount Pleasant. We lost to St. Ray’s by thirty-four. One kid got locked out of the gym. Another kid got taken out and went behind the bench and took his shirt off. It was awful. Kids mouthing off. One kid got taken out and goes to sit a few rows back with a couple of the varsity guys who were there watching. Another kid got taken out and started taking his sneakers off. And the kids that don’t start, or get taken out of the game? They sulk.”
Two kids came into the gym in street clothes, one about six-foot-five, the other shorter.
“Look at that sad story,” Moors said.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“That’s Shaq,” said Moors.
Shaq.
His real name is Shaquille Jones, and I had been looking to do a newspaper story on him for a couple of years. Once he had been one of the state’s rising schoolboy stars, right there with Ricardo Ledo, who in the spring of 2013 was chosen in the second round of the NBA draft, even though he had never played a minute of college basketball. But then Shaq Jones had left Hope to go to Notre Dame Prep, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, nudged there by Leo Papile, the founder of the Boston Amateur Athletic Club, one of the showcase AAU teams in the country, which has sent innumerable kids off to college kids in the past thirty or so years of its existence. Notre Dame Prep is one of those places in the basketball world where a lot of lost souls go in search of that nirvana called NCAA eligibility. To Jones, it was a very different world from the one he had grown up in just off Camp Street on the East Side.
“I was always around bad things as a kid,” said Jones, who grew up with his grandmother, a woman who used to sometimes ride the Hope bus to away games when he was playing there. “My friends were criminals, breaking into people’s homes, stealing cars. But I wasn’t like that. I was trying to be a father figure to my younger brother, because I didn’t have a father figure. And I had older kids who protected me, told me basketball could take me places, that I had a gift for it.”
In many ways, Jones was an inner-city stereotype: an absent father, a mother who was in and out of his life, being raised by his grandmother, a lost kid trying to use his basketball talent to give himself a better life. The basketball world is full of them, of course. Some are the ones we see on television, the winners in the great basketball lottery. The ones we don’t see? They still periodically show up in their old high school gyms, looking for futures they never found.
Jones had been on a team full of college prospects at Notre Dame Prep, far away from Hope and the Rhode Island Interscholastic League. In his mind, he and his teammates were all on the same fast track to a college basketball world of loud cheers and TV games, the fantasyland dangled in front of kids as if it’s some magical kingdom.
“I loved it,” he said softly. “You had to go about your business, and I grew up from that. I was a starter, and I knew I was going to college.”
Then his girlfriend in Fitchburg got pregnant.
He said that last February he’d been thrown out of school for what he calls a “campus incident.” He stayed in Fitchburg for a while with his son’s mother. Now he’s back in Providence looking to get his GED with hopes of going off to a junior college next year. He’s only nineteen.
So now he was sitting in the first row of the bleachers watching practice.
“What would you tell those kids out there?” I asked.
“I’d tell them to listen to the coaches. Not be hard-headed,” he said.
He nodded at Nyblom, who was on the court running the practice.
“Me and him bumped heads,” he said softly. “I would get frustrated.”
He looked away for a second, and when he spoke again his voice seemed to come up through layers of regret.
“But now I know that my dreams were his dreams too.”