REGIS REWARDS SUPER STUDENT
East Boston High soccer star earns college scholarship
When Yesica Calderon received a text from one of her teachers yesterday summoning her to the library at East Boston High School, she immediately began to worry.
“I thought it was something bad,” the 18-yearold senior said — even though she has a 4.8 grade point average in Advanced Placement and honors courses and heads the girls’ soccer team.
But when she opened the library door and her teachers, coach and teammates yelled, “Surprise!” Calderon turned around, thinking it was for someone else. Then Laura Bertonazzi, Regis College’s dean of undergraduate admission and retention, stepped forward to present her with a letter of congratulations — Calderon had just been awarded a full scholarship that would make her the first person in her family to attend college.
“I hugged her, and I hugged my coach. Then I saw my mom and my sister and her husband, and I cried,” she said. “I knew if I did not get this scholarship, I was not going to college. And I cried out of joy to see my mom happy.”
The daughter of El Salvadoran immigrants, Calderon was chosen out of seven students recommended to Regis College by Scholar Athletes, a nonprofit founded in 2009 by Suffolk Construction to reduce the opportunity gap for urban high school students by supporting academic achievement through athletics.
Today, it serves nearly 5,000 Boston and Springfield students in 22 “zones,” school-based learning centers that are open during and after school, offering student-athletes mentoring, tutoring, college application help and post-secondary planning.
“We want them to have the same reverence for making that great grade as they do for winning a game,” said Daphne Griffin, the organization’s interim executive director. “And Yesica is a prime example of that.”
Calderon said she plans to major in social work because she wants to “serve as someone children can come to. Everyone deserves to be heard and told to not give up.”
Headmaster Phillip Brangiforte just hopes that in the years ahead, she’ll return to East Boston High School to show other students “that if you work hard, good things can happen.”
Her coach, Richard LaCara, describes her as “shy by nature” but a “natural leader by example,” one who’s generous both on and off the field, glad to help her teammates with homework and as happy to assist with goals as she is to score them.
“She’s not hanging out with the wrong crowd; she’s doing her homework until 2 a.m.,” LaCara said. “She stayed on the straight and narrow, and it paid off. Cinderella got the slipper.”