Ray Rice is a punishing tailback for Rutgers who earned his prep reputation at New Rochelle High School outside New York City.
Rutgers running back Ray Rice, a Heisman Trophy contender, benefited from the Play It Smart program.
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DeSean Jackson is an explosive wide receiver at California who went to Berkeley from the powerhouse program at Long Beach Polytechnic High School in the Los Angeles area.
They are being cited as leading contenders for the Heisman Trophy this college football season and, despite being opposite coasts, they are bound in another way.
Both are graduates of Play It Smart, a nonprofit program sponsored by the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame to help football players in inner-city schools with their studies.
“It helped me out a lot,” Rice said. “It helped me balancing academics and school work at the same time. It’s one of those things that every high school program should have. If a kid is going to go Division I, they need to be guided.”
Since being founded in 1998, Play It Smart has expanded to 136 high schools throughout the country. There are more than 200 Play It Smart graduates in Division I-A football, including seven at Rutgers.
Rice and Jackson said that Play It Smart offered them a taste of college life before they walked on campus. They were introduced to academic counselors and tutors, and were taught time-management skills.
“The Play It Smart program definitely helped me manage my time,” Jackson said. “We had practice at a certain time. We couldn’t practice until we had our study hall out of the way. It was like being a freshman in college.”
At New Rochelle High School, the Play It Smart program is based in a team room 10 feet from the office of the football coach, Lou DiRienzo. Since the Play It Smart program began at New Rochelle in 2004, its office has served as a gateway to the football field.
Any student who wants to play for New Rochelle has his classwork tracked by Andy Capellan, a retired principal at the school with a low tolerance for nonsense.
If football players cut class, they sit out practice. If they are struggling in a subject, an honors student tutors them. The results at New Rochelle have transcended simply helping star athletes like Rice and his Rutgers teammates Glen Lee and Courtney Greene receive Division I scholarships.
“Last year’s team, we didn’t lose one kid on the varsity to eligibility,” Capellan said. “We used to get clobbered in terms of eligibility.”
Capellan said that the program had helped send five New Rochelle players to Division I universities since 2004.
He said that before this run of players, he could not recall a football player from New Rochelle accepting a Division I-A scholarship for nearly 20 years.
“Most of them weren’t even graduating,” Capellan said. “And it’s not that we didn’t have anyone stellar or outstanding.”
At New Rochelle, a school of 3,200 students, Capellan said that the counselors did not have a lot of time to sit and explain to student athletes what the N.C.A.A. academic minimums were in order to earn college scholarships.
Capellan meets with the students in Play It Smart and their parents before the start of each season to lay out the specific classes and grades needed. The results of those talks and the subsequent academic support and preparation for the SAT through the program have been apparent.
“There’s not just kids going Division I and becoming Heisman Trophy candidates,” DiRienzo said. “There’s kids going to Division II and Division III schools because of the emphasis put on academics through athletics.
“There’s more kids not just settling for high school diplomas and moving on.”
The program is paid for by a $30,000 grant to each school, although that number can be tailored to fit the needs of a school. Capellan, who also coaches girls track and cross country, said he was supposed to work 12 hours a week to earn his $10,000 salary from Play It Smart as an academic coach.
But with meetings with players, teachers and parents, running study halls and tracking academics, he said that he worked close to 30 hours. (The other money goes to resources like computers and SAT prep.)
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