A path that comes full circle
Mentoring program helps young teens to become the leaders of tomorrow
The working-class neighbourhood in Scarborough where Lorenzo Freeman grew up housed numerous ethnic groups and they didn’t always get along.
“Sometimes they fought each other,” he says. But the rivalries took a gentler form at the local YMCA, playing out on the basketball court instead of the streets.
“It was a safe place to go,” says Freeman.
Freeman first began visiting the Y when he was as young as 4, trailing along while his older brother played basketball.
His mother was working and then in school. She needed something to occupy her two highly energetic and athletic boys that didn’t involve “tearing the house apart,” Freeman says.
That initial introduction was the beginning of a long journey for Freeman that would eventually see him become a program director at the YMCA, leading a staff of 14.
Along the way, he was mentored and has, in turn, mentored others in the values and skills needed to succeed in life.
The YMCA, he says, is “my place where I come to interact with family and friends. It helped me grow and understand responsibility and learn how to be a leader. It helped me understand the impact of being a role model.”
In those early days, Freeman’s own role models were most often the young people who ran the YMCA programs.
“They saw my brother and I had potential in basketball and they helped us understand that basketball could help us in life,” he says.
While initially Freeman dreamed of a career in the game, what stayed with him were the messages about team work, setting goals and hard work that he learned from those instructors.
One mentor in particular used to emphasize the value of teamwork by saying: “When it’s one versus five, I’m always going to take five.”
“That’s a message I try to instill in the kids I deal with as well,” he says.
By the time Freeman was 15, he was volunteering at the Y and he handled the work so well that staff members referred him for a part-time job. He
“They saw my brother and I had potential in basketball and they helped us understand that basketball could help us in life.” LORENZO FREEMAN YMCA PROGRAM DIRECTOR
started off one day a week, coaching 6- to 9-year-olds in basketball and then running the house-league program.
In the meantime, some of the kids from his neighbourhood had embarked on more dangerous journeys, getting involved with gangs and drugs.
“A couple of friends went that way,” says Freeman.
“I’d be with them and something would be going down, so I would just get out of there. I’d tell them, ‘I’m not about that life.’ ” Sometimes, he says, those friends would send him away themselves, telling him, “You don’t want to be here right now.” Freeman continued to work at the Y part-time while he attended Centennial College for marketing and business administration. When a full-time position came up, as one of the YMCA’s veteran staff members, he applied for it and got it. “For me, my main objective was working with kids from different backgrounds and different walks of life,” he says. “I wanted to be that older friend — someone they could talk to. I know when I was a teenager that made all the difference. You think you can’t talk to your parents at that point. You think they wouldn’t understand. It helps to have someone there who is older and not a family member.” Freeman sometimes sees kids bring their anger over something that happened at home onto the basketball court. With a little prompting, he says, they can often be persuaded to let it go. Sometimes he can clearly see that they’re headed for trouble and he does his best to reroute them. “I remember one kid in particular who was caught up with the wrong crowd,” he recalls. “They were thieving — there were even some incidents at the YMCA.” When staff members confronted the boy, he was shocked and upset, so Freeman sat down with him for a talk. “You can’t keep going down this path,” he told the boy. He pointed out that the boy had been a soccer player before he got involved with basketball at the Y. “Making that switch wasn’t easy, was it?” asked Freeman. “But it was worth it. It’s better to work hard to get the things you want.”
Hard work. Responsibility. Time management. Team work. These are all things that the YMCA’s programs taught Freeman and that he, in turn, has tried to pass on to the next generation of kids in his Scarborough neighbourhood. Those things translate into real skills — skills that can help kids land part-time jobs or handle educational pursuits, says Freeman. Some of the kids Freeman has coached over his 11 years at the Y have gone on to play basketball at Canadian and American universities.
“I can look back and say, ‘I knew this person when he was 7 years old and just maybe I helped a little,’ ” he says.
And that lost boy, the one who was headed for trouble, he listened to what Freeman had to say. He began to volunteer at the YMCA and managed to land a part-time job at the Scarborough Town Centre.
Recently he applied for a job at the Y himself. Full circle.