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....July 18, 11:02 AM |
| Coach Green: Coach Prepares Kids For NBA And Life
By Courtenay Redis Swiveling in his desk chair, Tyrone Green is a man in constant motion dressed in high-top shoes, T-shirt and long shorts, looking 10 years younger than his 58 years.
Coach Green tells me that every kid is welcome to his practices and most come by word of mouth. He’s been running basketball teams and community clinics for the last two decades, and has seen more than his share make it to the NBA and WNBA. Born in the Bronx but raised in the Astoria Housing Projects in Queens, Green knows first hand the odds stacked against many of his players. He plans to continue to improve those odds through the nonprofit he founded in 2000, For the Good of the Neighborhood. The program currently operates at PS 141, PS 149 and IS 10 in Queens; Ft. Green in Brooklyn; and Westchester. Promoting academic and athletic development for kids in the NYC metro area, it welcomes kids of any age, talent level, race or economic status. “Mr. Green don’t discriminate,” he said. His business cards and Team Noah T-shirts read, “it takes a village to raise a child.” For Green, education is the key that unlocks the potential for the kids he coaches. “Not every kid is going to the NBA,” he said, or even play ball in college. Yet basketball hooks the kids, and once Green has their attention he brings in drug awareness counselors, holds essay-writing contests and enlists a friend who ran the gang unit at Rikers Island to put a little fear in their hearts. He’s hoping to keep these big-city kids young while exposing them to the mature risks lurking in their schools and streets. When his kids walk around in shoes without laces, or pants below their underwear line without belts, he educates them on the history of that style (prison inmates who are denied things with which to hang themselves or others). When they use the “N word,” he expounds on the history of slavery and discrimination in America and tells them that their homeboy talk just set back Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X’s accomplishments by a few decades. “Mr. Green don’t play that,” he said of himself, and in his four years in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, he faced off with members of the newly-forming Bloods and Crips gangs who had to check their coats (and guns) at the door if they wanted to play on his court. And they did. For a man who keeps an NCAA championship ring in a safe deposit box and a Final Four ticket in a glass case, who sits under a wall full of the game’s memorabilia, Green’s oft-repeated phrase that, “it’s not about basketball,” seems at first hard to believe. Yet, among the countless framed photos, albums, newspaper clippings and trophies decorating his living room in Flushing, Green tells me his favorite is a an old 4-by-6 photo on his mantle, of him sitting among a group of elementary school students in a classroom. He said of all his collection, this particular snapshot holds the greatest meaning. It represents what’s most important to a man who coached four boys into NBA status and an WNBA all-star. “Getting a good education,” and becoming respectful, good men and women, is the legacy Green wants to be remembered for. Again, it’s not about basketball. “I tell all the parents,” of the 12 to 18 year olds he coaches, “that I guarantee your kid will graduate from high school,” Green said. And what’s more, he makes a point of keeping them in college as long as possible even when they and their parents fight him to go pro. Green is recognized nationally as the man who helps develop future NBAers, with the likes of Joakim Noah, Ron Artest, Lenny Cooke and WNBA star Chamique Holdsclaw on his score card. And while he revels in the success of his players, he takes as much delight in what he has kept them from doing. His role in keeping kids in school, off drugs, out of gangs is, in his eyes, his greatest achievement. Green’s resistance to the pressure on talented players to sign contracts before finishing college, or even worse, straight out of high school, is an ongoing battle he wages among the city’s poor who see the NBA as a way out of the hood. |
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