Charles Hughes was in the worst place a football player can be.
Harlan’s sophomore receiver and defensive back was so deep into negative yardage a year ago you feared he might languish there for good.
What’s scary is that his problem was not on the football field but in the classroom, where his grades were a bigger mess than Eddy Curry’s contract talks. Within a year, however, Hughes had vaulted from eligibility risk to academic standout, and he is now as good a bet to attend college as he is to find the end zone.
Credit this comeback to Play It Smart, a National Football Foundation program that uses kids’ passion for football as a hook to get them more interested in schoolwork and personal development.
“We’re lucky to have it,” Hughes said. “It has had a huge effect on me.
“Without Play It Smart, I think I’d be on the same track I was.”
Hughes is the latest example of Play It Smart’s worth. The program started in 1998 and arrived in Chicago three years later, initially at Hubbard.
By last year Dunbar, Harlan and Hyde Park also were Play It Smart schools. The latter two joined last fall as part of a multimillion-dollar U.S. Department of Education program that helped the program grow to 128 schools nationally in 2004-05.
Miriam Merrill, a former University of Cincinnati track athlete, started Hyde Park’s program. Each program has an “academic coach” who runs study tables, teaches life skills, sets up community service projects, helps with college preparation and serves as a mentor and ombudsman.
When Harlan lost its academic coach, Merrill agreed to do double duty. When she arrived in January, Hughes was already in trouble. His report card was peppered with D’s and F’s, and his best grade was a C-minus.
Hughes had done OK in junior high, but like many freshmen he struggled to adjust to high school. Merrill ran a “Thousand-Yard Club” in the off-season, giving out positive or negative yards for good or bad grades as well as yardage for study table and community service performance.
Hughes quickly sank to minus-400 yards but was plus-500 by the end of the school year. With Merrill breathing down his neck, he worked hard at study table and even started to show up at her office during lunch hour to work.
“The Play It Smart program is actually a shelter for him,” said Harlan coach Carlos Burnes, whose support of the program has been crucial to its success.
Soon Hughes’ worst grade was a C, and he even rocketed from F to A in biology.
“He’s my turnaround story,” said Merrill, who is once again the academic coach at Harlan and Hyde Park. “He’s a hard worker.”
Improvement gave Hughes a confidence that fueled more progress.
“Play It Smart has helped me want to come to school,” he said. “I used to come late; now I get up earlier.
“I think I read more too. I really want to learn. It gets easier if you do it, and if you see good grades, you want to see more of that.”
It’s clear we need more, not less, of Play It Smart, but the national expansion program slowed when the federal money unexpectedly dried up.
That threatened plans to add Play It Smart programs at Chicago Vocational, Fenger, Simeon and South Shore this school year and even cast doubt on the health of a couple of existing programs.
Fortunately, other sources stepped to the plate. The Chicago Bears agreed to donate $20,000, which will go to Chicago Vocational and Fenger, and state Senators Jacqueline Collins and Kwame Raoul helped arrange for one-year State of Illinois funding to fill the gap.
As a result Simeon, which is in Collins’ district, is getting $25,000, and Dunbar, South Shore and Hyde Park, which Raoul represents, are getting $63,000. Play It Smart is directly funding Harlan and Hubbard at $25,000 apiece.
National Football Foundation President Steve Hatchell said he is optimistic Congress will soon grant Play It Smart funding to resume its expansion program.
Stephen Wilkins, project manager in the Chicago Public Schools Department of Sports Administration and president of the local Play It Smart advisory board, said he hopes to get a Chicago Play It Smart program approved as a supplemental education service provider. Such status could allow it to tap into federal No Child Left Behind funding.
That’s important because although Play It Smart funds many of its programs, it wants to do it for only four years, hoping schools by then will find their own funding sources.
It’s also important because Chicago’s public high schools are failing to adequately prepare students for college and the workplace. CPS chief Arne Duncan recently announced the start of a far-reaching program to change that.
Play It Smart could help. According to the National Football Foundation, program participants have a higher graduation rate than the national average, and more of them enroll in college than do peers at the same schools.
Charles Hughes’ mother, Betty, doesn’t need numbers to realize that. All she has to do is look at the letters on her son’s report card.
“It has made Charles more motivated,” she said of Play It Smart. “I hope more people get in it because it really helped him.”
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btemkin@tribune.com
