Philly athletes missing college opportunities as lost seasons keep recruiters away

German Shepherds, gentrification, and good football have complicated Steve Quigley’s quest to build the type of program at Kensington High School that could help change the future of his football players.

After the Tigers program began in 2011 with three straight junior-varsity-only seasons, Quigley — currently in his second year as head coach — finally led Kensington to its first winning season in 2019.

Sports cancellations and postponements caused by COVID-19, however, mean the Tigers haven’t played since. Unlike programs such as Imhotep, Northeast, and Simon Gratz, which have consistently produced Division I and II players, Kensington is still relatively unknown to college coaches, even those literally down the street.

As a sophomore, Janiya Victor was a standout shortstop on the Bartram High baseball team. Her coach, James Ockimey — who also coaches Victor in girls’ basketball — believes her baseball skills translate well to college softball. He also believes she could play college basketball. The problem, Ockimey says, is that Victor is now a senior and hasn’t played either sport in years.

Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday reported 4,327 COVID-19-related deaths, a record in the U.S., which has lost more than 393,700 people to the virus.

Locally, it remains unclear if officials will loosen restrictions that would allow high school sports to resume within Philadelphia. Leagues outside of Philadelphia such as the Inter-Ac and some Catholic League schools, have finalized schedules and either began practicing or have taken steps to do so.

Public League teams have been approved to hold voluntary workouts outdoors with limited numbers of participants and following proper health guidelines, though not every team has done so.

In a statement to the Inquirer, Jimmy Lynch, the executive athletic director for sports in the school district of Philadelphia, said, “we’re continuing to work with the city on a safe and healthy return to play.”

Lynch added that contingency plans have been developed to ensure as many athletes can participate in as many sports as possible this year.

As time marches on, however, area coaches fear that the athletes who need exposure to college coaches the most will remain hidden, that young women of color without college prospects will continue facing barriers to employment, and that idle teenage time could lead to even more victims of gun violence.

“The impact is huge,” says Philadelphia councilman-at-large Isaiah Thomas, who is also the longtime basketball coach at Sankofa Freedom Academy Charter. “It’s not just about playing sports. The impact [of not playing] is part of the DNA of our city.”

After Quigley, 32, led the Tigers to a 9-2 record in 2019, he took a few players to Temple’s football camp that summer. When they arrived, he learned the Owls’ recruiting database didn’t even include Kensington. In a literal sense, Temple’s recruiters didn’t know Kensington had a football team.

“We kind of laughed and said, ‘You probably didn’t have a reason to before, but we’re on the rise in our eyes,’ ” Quigley said.

Yet the Owls’ practice facility on Diamond Street is only about a mile from the grass lot on Front Street that doubles as Kensington’s practice field and as a neighborhood dog park.

Gentrification in Kensington and other sections of Philadelphia have been sources of contention and controversy for years. In fact, a national study released in 2019 included Philadelphia as one of seven cities that accounted for nearly half of the country’s gentrification.

Dog parks, according to some who study urban development, can be signs of gentrification, as younger residents move into areas and care for animals before having children.

Both the football team and dog owners have been respectful of each other’s space, Quigley says, but interactions have occurred nonetheless.

“You could be running around a cone [at practice] and next thing you know it’s not a linebacker chasing you,” he said, “it’s a legit German Shepherd. And we have kids who are scared of dogs.”

In a zip code long plagued by poverty, crime, and drug abuse, and whose residents fear being priced out of their neighborhood, Quigley knows his players — some of whom he considers Division I and II talents — have already faced daunting life obstacles before the pandemic struck.

Financial losses suffered by NCAA member schools in 2020 have likely added even more barriers.

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At least 350 NCAA sports were cut in 2020, according to an ESPN report in November. “Budget shortfalls” were the most cited reason, said ESPN, which also that month announced its own plan to eliminate 500 jobs, citing, in part, revenue losses related to the pandemic.

Quigley fears consequences beyond his players control will continue to make their paths to college more difficult. One of his top players from 2019, Jason Clark, is now a 5-foot-10, 170-pound senior quarterback, who combined to run and throw for nearly 40 touchdowns as a junior.

“The only thing against my kids is that it says ‘Kensington’ on the front of their jersey,” Quigley said. “We just haven’t been around long enough that people can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Imhotep, or that’s Northeast.’ We don’t have any tradition or legacy like that.”

Quigley is less concerned with the college prospects of Clark, an honor roll student, than he is about underclassmen who haven’t been introduced to the weight room, haven’t gotten any reps, or upperclassmen who are losing hope.

“If football is the thing that motivates them to the next level of their education and it’s taken away,” Quigley said, “I’m afraid of what’s gonna happen.”

The first time Bartram baseball coach James Ockimey saw Janiya Victor field ground balls, the sophomore’s grasp of fundamental hand placement made her look like a natural.

Ockimey knows baseball. He’s coached it for more than a decade. His nephew, Josh Ockimey, starred at Neumann-Goretti and is in the Boston Red Sox organization.

“Her hands went together like peanut butter and jelly around the ball,” Ockimey said in a phone interview. “Her top hand was always over the ball. You never saw the left hand without the right hand.”

Victor quickly became one of the Braves’ best players, batting second or third in the lineup and finishing the season with a .684 batting average, including 33 hits, 6 doubles, and 2 triples, all despite only appearing in five of the Braves’ 10 games because her 2019 girls’ basketball season ran long.

That year she was also honored by Philadelphia City Council, which passed Resolution No. 190474 to recognize Victor’s achievements. She also earned All-City baseball and basketball honors as a freshman and sophomore. The sport that helps her get to college, she says, is the one she wants to play.

“This is my senior year and this was the year I was supposed to give it my all. It’s stressful. It’s a lot. It’s really hard for me to handle it, to be honest.”

Victor, now 18, is a senior who hasn’t played much, if any, of either.

“[The pandemic] is in the way of everything, for real, for real,” Victor said in a phone interview. “This is my senior year and this was the year I was supposed to give it my all. It’s stressful. It’s a lot. It’s really hard for me to handle it, to be honest.”

Victor says she’s wanted to play a sport in college since she was a little girl playing baseball alongside her older brother, Najer, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, where the family moved from Philadelphia around 2008. The boys, she says, accepted her on their team because her brother accepted her.

She idolized Najer, who is a freshman pitcher and outfielder at Florida Gulf Coast University in Florida, where he played high school baseball. She even played the same positions — pitcher and outfielder — before moving to shortstop.

But Victor is also willing to follow her own path. She’s the only one of her siblings who plays basketball. At 5-foot-9, Victor is a competitive guard who Ockimey thinks just needs a chance.

The 52-year-old from South Philly who graduated from Bok Tech in 1986 then studied engineering at Virginia State has seen what happens to those who never got one.

“I still know more people from my neighborhood in jail than with degrees,” Ockimey said. “I just hope she’s given an opportunity to display her talent,” he said, “because she’s next-level material, on the court, off the court, and with character. I just hope she finds a place that wants her and wants to cultivate her.”

Victor says she’s wanted to go to college since she was a little girl. She still hopes either basketball or softball, which former Philadelphia baseball phenom Mo’Ne Davis now plays at Hampton, can still help her get there.

“I want to play college ball,” Victor says, “but I also want to be successful [in life].”

In addition to more barriers to college, Victor also potentially faces more obstacles if she is forced to skip college to enter the workforce.

The final 2020 jobs report from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics recently showed that the 140,000 net jobs that were lost in December were all women’s jobs, according to an analysis by Claire Ewing-Nelson of the National Women’s Law Center. While the overall unemployment rate for women was 6.3 percent, the NWLC found higher rates for Black women (8.4 percent) and Latinas (9.1 percent).

Amos Huron, executive director of the Anderson Monarchs — Mo’Ne Davis’s former team — hopes to connect with Victor and Ockimey.

“I definitely have a lot of concerns for the kids who are 15-18 right now,” Huron said in a phone interview. “I really hope we put our heads together and figure out what we’re going to do for them after they graduate from high school and not just say, ‘Welp, figure it out on your own.’”

Huron, 42, is a native of Washington, D.C. and the son of Douglas Huron, an avid baseball fan who also once worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and was the lead attorney for the government during the 1972 trial that resulted in the desegregation of the Alabama State Troopers.

“I grew up in a household,” Huron said, “where the two most common conversations were social justice issues and baseball.”

The Monarchs are a sports-based youth development organization in South Philadelphia serving young people aged 7 to 18 in various sports, not just baseball. Huron says he understands the health risks that disproportionately affect communities of color. He also understands the mental health of his athletes has also been affected.

“Without sports to motivate the young people to go to school and get good grades, I’ve seen a bigger drop off this academic year than all of my 10 years coaching sports, and these are good kids! That’s not a knock on the school or a knock on the young person. It’s a knock on the conditions that we are living in.”

“One reason team sports are so popular,” he said, “is because they fulfill a lot of what we need not just from an athletic perspective, but from a social perspective and a mental health perspective. So when you take away the team element, yeah, [athletes] are hurting.”

Philadelphia city councilman Isaiah Thomas recognizes that grades are suffering, too. Thomas, who coached Sankofa to a PIAA Class A championship in 2019, says without basketball, his players’ grades have tanked. The drops surprised him at first because he considers this year’s squad his most respectful team toward authority.

Part of the equation, Thomas realized, isn’t just that young people are sad because they can’t play the sports they love.

“Without sports to motivate the young people to go to school and get good grades,” he said in a phone interview, “I’ve seen a bigger drop off this academic year than all of my 10 years coaching sports, and these are good kids! That’s not a knock on the school or a knock on the young person. It’s a knock on the conditions that we are living in.”

Chief among his concerns, Thomas says, is that young people with idle time, living in dire circumstances, without the sports outlets that had always helped them cope, are becoming victims of gun violence simply because they are outside instead of at practice. Philadelphia had almost 500 murders in 2020, a 40 percent increase from the previous year.

“We have the perfect storm here in Philadelphia,” he said, “which is one reason why we see the gun violence so high.”

Frankford football coach Bill Sytsma lost two players to shooting deaths in 2020. First was 15-year-old Angelo Walker, who was shot and killed while riding his bike in July. Most recently, former Frankford player Dyewou Nyshawn Scruggs, 20, was shot and killed on Christmas Eve. Sytsma told The Inquirer the killing was caught on Instagram Live and witnessed by several of his current players.

Gun violence hit close to Thomas when a former student and intern was shot twice in September while driving her car on the way home from one of her two jobs.

The young woman, who asked to be identified by her middle name, Sierra, survived the shooting and the case is still pending.

Sierra played high school sports and in May graduated from a Historically Black College in Virginia, where she was also a cheerleader. She returned to Philadelphia because of COVID-19 and is currently in the process of applying to law schools. Similar to Huron’s father, she plans to fight for civil rights.

“Some of us really love our city,” Sierra said in a phone interview. “I came back because I wanted to make a change in the city that I’m from. I could make a change in a different city or state, but I am who I am because of Philadelphia.”