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Hogan Prep proof of urban renewal By J. BRADY McCOLLOUGH Steve Acklin walked into the soul food restaurant, and people looked up from their plates. The patrons of Niecie’s Restaurant at 59th Street and Prospect Avenue began to whisper amongst themselves. The boy was wearing a Hogan Prep football shirt. Soon after Acklin and his father were seated, a total stranger stopped by their table. She congratulated them and wished them luck in their game later that day against Mountain Grove. Then came the reverend, who said he would pray for them. Acklin and his father looked at each other, stunned. This really was a big deal. “The last time people paid this much attention to me,” says Acklin, “was when I won the spelling bee in middle school.” Apparently, word travels fast around Kansas City’s urban core. The Hogan Prep Rams are going to play for a state championship. They play Friday at noon against Blair Oaks in the Missouri Class 2 championship game at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, and they come with a message. “We’re representing urban schools,” says Acklin, a senior center. “We’re an urban, black team, and they don’t think we have the mentality or the strength to make it this far. We’re proving the critics wrong.” The critics had plenty of evidence before this year. The Rams are the first team made up of kids from the Kansas City School District to play for a state title since 1972, when Southwest tied and split the championship with Hazelwood. But even that was different. Southwest wasn’t integrated, and there was one black player on the team. So really, Hogan Prep, a charter school, is making history. The Rams may not play in the Interscholastic League with the other inner-city schools, but Hogan Prep is comprised of the same kids, and coach Phil Lascuola fights the same battles. “It tells us that there’s a chance,” says Central football coach Henry Newell. “A lot of us in the IL, we get this idea that we can never move beyond sectionals. Our kids have been talking about it all week long, and they’re excited. It’s big for all of us.” ••• Northeast coach Matthew Pyle wants to know how Lascuola did it. So we take you back to 1994, when Hogan Prep was Bishop Hogan, a private Catholic school. Hogan hadn’t won a football game in years. When Lascuola was hired, he was the school’s third coach in four years, and only 22 kids came out for football. The practice field was only 85 yards long, and the Rams played every game on the road for two years. But Lascuola had to make changes inside the program before he could fix the obvious. He made study hall mandatory. He started a weight program in the school’s basement with his own weight set from home. He told the players that if they wanted to be team captain, they’d have to lift a certain number of times over the summer. If a freshman was the only one who met the requirement, then the Rams would have a freshman captain. Most importantly, Lascuola wanted his team to know that he wasn’t going to abandon them. “He made us know that he wasn’t leaving,” says Joel Rogge, who played for Lascuola’s first team and is now a volunteer assistant. “He was going to be there to back us up.” Lascuola found out what being an inner-city football coach was all about. After practices, Lascuola ran a carpool out of his pickup truck. He spent hours on the phone each week with his kids’ employers at the local fast-food joint or grocery store, trying to work out schedules. He had fatherless players spending nights on his couch. It wasn’t rare for the phone to ring at midnight. “Coach,” the voice would say, “I’m in trouble.” “I didn’t have a father,” says Gary Helms, who played during 1996-99. “When I got in a wreck, he was the first to see me in the hospital. He made sure that I took the SAT.” In 1998, the Catholic church pulled out of Hogan. Not enough area families could pay the tuition anymore. There was talk that Hogan would be closed down. But after a year as a Christian school, the state decided to turn Hogan into a charter school. It would operate independently from the Kansas City Missouri School District, but take kids from the district on a first-come, first-serve basis. Hogan Prep, by putting a cap on enrollment, would offer smaller class sizes and a more disciplined learning environment. It couldn’t have worked out better for Lascuola. His program had already started to win games. Now any child could apply to Hogan Prep, which would help his numbers immensely. Lascuola had stayed, just like he promised that first team, and it was about to start paying off. “The key to success is that the kids have continuity,” Lascuola says. “I don’t think it’s anything I’ve done except just being here.” ••• Pyle thought he had the Northeast quarterback of the future in freshman Dawon Cummings. That is, until Cummings found out that he had been admitted into Hogan Prep after months on the waiting list. Cummings had made the decision by himself. He wanted to attend Hogan Prep not because of football, but academics. “I came here to stay out of trouble,” says Cummings, one of four freshmen to dress varsity for the Rams. “I convinced my parents to let me come here because I can achieve in sports and academics.” Hogan Prep senior Anthony Starks transferred to Hogan Prep after three seasons as the starting running back at Central. He is now “Lightning” to Devin Ray’s “Thunder” in the Rams’ backfield. If Starks had stayed at Central, he’d be playing for his third head coach. Starks’ stepfather, Ernest Jones, is the defensive coordinator and basketball coach at Van Horn. He hopes the IL athletic directors are paying attention to Hogan Prep. “I hope they understand that Phil Lascuola put the work in,” Jones says. “It’s going to take more than a year or two years for a coach to develop kids and get them to understand that he’s not going anywhere.” They’ve been playing quality football at Hogan Prep for years, but now people are aware of it. A kid from the inner city who wants to get noticed by college programs or play in the playoffs doesn’t have to move to Blue Springs or Lee’s Summit anymore. He can join the waiting list at Hogan Prep, located between Troost Avenue and The Paseo on East Meyer Boulevard. But once they arrive on campus, the kids learn that Lascuola expects more than simply winning football games. The Rams don’t start practice until 4 p.m. because the entire team has study hall from 3 to 4. “When they get here as freshmen,” Lascuola says, “they are behind academically. It’s a four-year process getting caught up for some of them.” The kids also get caught up in the weight room. Lascuola asks his kids to be committed there for 12 months, not just two or three. Starks can squat 400 pounds now, compared to 325 when he arrived from Central. “Some of those kids,” Newell says, “he’s had to work hard to make them what they are. It’s not like an all-state player left an IL team and walked into his school.” ••• It started with a win over Warsaw, Hogan Prep’s first sectional win in history. Then came the state quarterfinal against Lawson, which had beaten Hogan Prep in district the last two seasons. Hogan Prep went up to Lawson and won 24-14. “When we beat them,” Acklin says, “we knew we were capable of beating anybody.” The Rams really must have believed that, because on Saturday, they beat Mountain Grove, the state’s No. 1 team, 16-7. Next stop? “The Dome!” Acklin says. “We’re playing in an NFL arena. It’s beautiful, the whole thing. I feel like an NFL player myself.” Then consider Gaylon Acklin an NFL dad. He hasn’t been able to sleep all week. “I’ve had several people come up and ask me, ‘Are you going to St. Louis?’ ” Gaylon says. “I’m like, ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ I’m going, and I’ll be there with bells on. “Every day leading up to this game, I wish I could just slow time down.” The Rams leave this morning from school, where students, faculty and parents will see them off. Hogan Prep will stop on the road and eat Thanksgiving dinner. Phil Lascuola thinks that’s fitting, because, well, his team’s story is one of Thanksgiving. Lascuola doesn’t worry about the things the Rams don’t have — a sprinkler system, a scoreboard or stadium lights. Instead, he is thankful for the man who donated $500 for travel bags, so his team doesn’t have to walk off the bus with trash bags in St. Louis. He is thankful because spending the holiday with his team will be just like spending it with family. “I get teary-eyed when I think about it,” Lascuola
says. “It’s a dream, and now that it’s here,
it’s a special feeling.”
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J. Brady McCollough - jbrady@coveringsports.com (email) - 816-868-2621 (cell) |
