HICCUP a slam dunk, gets b-ball court built

Brian Mickelson

March Madness is the time of the year for millions of college basketball fans to watch the best teams in the country compete for a national championship.

But for the youths living in Boston’s Harbor Point Housing Development, basketball is much more than just a game.

To them, basketball is a vital part of the Healthy Initiative Collaborative-Community University Partnership (HICCUP), a program charged with teaching them about leadership, responsibility and community activism.

These kids, most ranging in age from 9 to 17, have met every Wednesday for the past five years at the Walter Denney Youth Center and Geiger Gibson Community Health Center with students from the University of Massachusetts Boston and their project leader, associate professor Joan Arches. Since its inception, the group has had one simple goal: getting a basketball court built in or around Harbor Point as a means of getting youth off the streets and giving them something fun and productive to do.

And after five years, they were still waiting.

In the program’s first year, HICCUP members conducted surveys and began drafting a proposal for the court, to be built on the rarely used tennis courts in Harbor Point. But when they presented the proposal — and 400 signatures from community members supporting the courts — to the Tenants’ Task Force, Harbor Point’s management council, their request was refused.

“Initial problems were security, hours of operation and cost,” said HICCUP member Arthur “Bookie” Jones.

Although they were discouraged, the HICCUP kids decided to try for a new location — the John W. McCormack Middle School in Dorchester. They wrote letters to Mayor Thomas M. Menino, held bake sales and car washes to raise funds, and last year organized a Halloween party for the community’s senior citizens. They even used visual aides to communicate their concerns about the state of McCormack’s courts.

“We took pictures of the court and made poster boards so that when we asked for grants we could show people that we really need this,” said Jones.

And the pictures tell the story. The vegetation growing through the cracks that riddle the court makes the blacktop feel more like baseball diamond than basketball court. There are no lights, and no guarantee of safety during late-night hours.

But help is on the way. HICCUP’s efforts recently led to a pledge of support from City Year Boston, an AmeriCorps service organization, which will send 1,000 community volunteers to the McCormack School on May 5 to help renovate the basketball courts.

According to Arches, who teaches community planning and human services at UMass Boston’s College of Public and Community Services (CPCS), the community became really committed to making the new McCormack court a reality after a “huge planning event” held last June. But she’s quick to note that the kids deserve the lion’s share of the credit.

“If [the kids] hadn’t been pushing this agenda, if they hadn’t been making it something that was really important, it wouldn’t be happening,” she said.

Nor would the upgrades be so extensive. The assistance from City Year will guarantee not just renovated courts, but also new benches, murals and a fence for added security.

Now it’s up to the HICCUP kids to once again take charge and determine who will be responsible for the court’s upkeep and security once it has been refurbished. They continue to meet in the Denney and Geiger Gibson Centers to discuss plans, which Arches views as a clear message to adults living in the community that may have a misguided view of area youth.

“The youth here get involved because it’s a place for them to come to have a voice, make a difference, work for change in the community and to change the way people see youth in the community,” she said.

Even the youngest HICCUP members, like Maressia Sneed, know and cherish the value of what they are doing, and see themselves as future leaders in their neighborhood.

“We try to make Harbor Point a better community, so that the younger kids, when they’re older, will have something to do,” said Sneed, a seventh-grader at John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science in Roxbury. “We’ve been on a journey, and now we’re towards the end of it. But when we start a new one, we’ll still need help because not many people know about HICCUP.”

Echoing Arches’ sentiments, Sneed sees HICCUP as a way to show grown-ups that some kids want to be the solution in their communities, and not part of the problem.

“When adults stereotype us kids as having no direction, it won’t help us to achieve things,” Sneed said. “We know that we’re not troublemakers, and we can prove them wrong and achieve what we want to when we put our minds to it.”

Although the program’s young participants still have much to learn about leadership, they have a pretty sophisticated idea of what it takes to bring an entire community together to act for the greater good.

“The most important part of leadership is dedication,” said Jones. “If you’re a leader, you have to be dedicated to what you’re doing. You have to have goals that will [point] you in a positive direction.”