Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott speaks of 'transformative' impact of sports

Sports changes lives. It’s a message Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott has promoted within his city when he speaks to an audience, or when he drops by one of its recreation centers to play with kids.

When you ask Scott to go into more depth, though, about the role it has played for him, a product of Park Heights on Baltimore’s northwest side, he thinks of his high school days, when sports gave him a chance to leave home.

When Scott, 40, was growing up, kids across Baltimore lived in neighborhoods weighed down by violence and economic despair. He remembers witnessing death by drug overdose and fleeing gunfire as a boy.

City high school coaches found another way to avoid it. They pulled together a regional “super team,” as the mayor describes it, that competed nationally in the AAU Junior Olympics.

Those days of giving everything he had with a baton in his hand, and then handing it off — and trusting what his teammates would do with it — gave Scott lessons, for sure, ones he has taken with him during his dramatic rise as a politician.But they also did something else.

“Participating in track and field saved our lives,” Scott said in an interview with USA TODAY Sports last spring.

Sports not only took Scott away from the violence but it led him to his coach, a father figure, really, in Freddie Hendricks at Baltimore’s Mervo High School, and helped him realize his full potential in the classroom.

Scott rose from a high SAT score as a sophomore to a small public honors college in rural Maryland to Baltimore’s city council. He was elected the city’s youngest mayor in 2020, cradling the lessons and opportunities of his athletic career.

“I wouldn't be here if I if I did not run track a Mervo High School,” Scott says. “Sports is what made me who I am. It's where get discipline from. It's where I get that deep spirit of competition and the understanding of how to work together and work with different types of people.”

A broader look at Scott, a Democrat who contests GOP candidate Shannon Wright for a second term in Tuesday’s balloting (he’s expected to win re-election), gives us all a chance to reflect on how profoundly our athletic experiences, as well as the ones we are now giving our kids can, can shape us.

Here’s what Scott’s journey teaches us about the value of sports that can help us better understand our own.

Sports are not just a means to an end. They can be 'transformative,' no matter where you come from, or where you end up.

Park Heights gets national recognition once a year as the host of the Preakness, the second leg of horse racing’s triple crown.

“Every other day, my neighborhood was ignored,” Scott told an audience last May at the Project Play Summit, which was hosted by his home city.

But Scott’s home neighborhood did have the Towanda Recreation Center, where he began running track at six years old.

We all get the sports bug somewhere different. You can’t put a price on the impact of that moment, or where it takes you. That might be a podium, like the one where Scott and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore spoke at Project Play, or the national stage, where the two found themselves last spring guiding constituents through the aftermath of the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Neither man can really remember his life without sports. You could say their sports experiences not only brought them to those critical moments last spring, but helped endure them.

“Some of my earliest, some of my best, some of my worst, some of my most informative memories are with sports,” Moore said at Project Play, which seeks to create sport-related access and opportunities for kids, especially those who need them most.

Like Moore once was. Raised by single mom, a daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Jamaica, he calls himself “probably the most improbable governor in America.”  

Moore’s dad died when he was 3. His mom took him and his two sisters to live with his grandparents in the Bronx, New York.

Basketball courts were a spot to which he could escape, and where he felt safe.

“It’s a place where you met some of your lifelong friends,” he says. "It was a place where you learned all of the beautiful things you can learn from team sport: How to win properly, how to lose properly, the importance of being able to trust the people to your left and your right and to make sure that you’re practicing so they can trust you back. I think that sports has always placed an outsized role in my life, in my understanding, in my acceptance.

"I’m a big believer in the role that sports can be not only be unifying, sports can really be transformative."

Sometimes, just the opportunity to play is enough to give kids the confidence to dream about what is next.

Sports teaches you about yourself, and it can make your 'big rivals' into your friends

Moore went on to play football at Johns Hopkins University. Scott just wanted to be a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a decision heavily influenced by his coach.

Mervo didn’t have a track of its own but it had coach Hendricks, who, the mayor says, “forced me” into a college placement program known and CollegeBound.

Hendricks also took him away from the streets where, Scott has said, he lost friends and loved ones to gun violence, dealt with police harassment and was once handcuffed after being mistaken for a robbery suspect.

Scott has carried the lessons as a 3,000-meter steeplechaser like his baton.

It didn’t matter what you did with that baton, coach Hendricks would tell Scott and his teammates, if the person to whom you handed it off didn’t match your intensity.

“You're only as good as your weakest leg,” he would say.

You can learn as much about yourself competing for your teammates as you can against an opponent.

Sometimes, like in politics, these were your adversaries from a previous competition. Scott found himself competing against his “big rivals” from across the region that formed his AAU Junior Olympics team. Then he found himself giving all he could for them, learning discipline in the process.

“We took that into life,” he says. “Think about how we challenge each other and push each other to see how we can can be the best version of ourselves. And that's really what you learn from sports: You learn how you're going to deal with adversity, you learn how you're going to deal with pressure situations. And I think you learn how to be a leader, right? When you're in sports."

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Sports exposes kids to role models and unforgettable people and experiences. Sometimes, parents just need to get them to practice.

You probably haven’t heard of a basketball player named Willie “Hutch” Jones, unless you’re from western New York. While the 6-foot-8 forward averaged 15.8 points per game for Vanderbilt in 1981-82, and played two seasons in the NBA, his true imprint has come in empowering kids through their sports.

According to the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame, of which Jones is a member, his educational and sports programs in his hometown have served more than 10,000 children in the city.

“The great thing about his work is that youth learn fundamentals, both of a sport and of life,” says Lucy Candelario, who runs Jones’ programs through here community center (TheBelleCenter) on the lower west side of Buffalo.  “That’s why the sports programs are effective: Sports are life.”

Once the kids are situated at their center, the benefits are off the charts in terms of personal development. "The Belle," Candelario says, has "graduates" that include several lawyers and members of the military, including one man who graduated from high school and boot camp and recently came back to thank a counselor.

What complicates the process, Jones has found, is that moms and dads rely too much on him to get them there.

“The parents are lazy and don't want to do it,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “They'd rather have me come and pick them up in a bus or a van and their car is in the driveway, and they’re sitting in there on a couch. So now the kid can't have this opportunity. Our enrollment across the board probably would be higher if more parents bought in for their investment, their child. Don’t wait for Coach. It's your child. You had that baby. You need to take care of that baby all the way around. You can't just leave the baby on the porch, or just in the yard. They need to get out to get exposure.”

It's a good reminder for those of us caught up in the rat race of travel and club sports: The true value of sports, like the programs Jones offers, is free.

Candelario has found that as long as a kid has a stable adult showing love and care, he or she will respond to it. She and Jones see kids who grew up in a cycle of neglect, which they are repeating as parents, or their kids are being raised by grandparents.

“The parents are incarcerated, strung out, or whatever the case might be,” she says. “We are the parents for these children.”

Many of us already have that stability. Scott had it through his sports, and through coach Hendricks. Back in Baltimore, he asks famous Baltimore athletes, like Super Bowl-winning receiver Torrey Smith, who had it, too, despite a childhood that constantly shifted from temporary housing situations, to speak to the city’s youth.

“They show these young people how how sports can help them,” Scott says, “that not everyone’s going to go and make a whole bunch of money. But they can use it to put themselves and their family in a better position.”

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'Winning is never the goal': Sports stays with us, no matter when our career officially ends

Baltimore saw a 20 percent drop in homicides last year, ending a surge that began following the 2015 death of arrestee Freddie Gay from injuries suffered in police custody. Gay's death led to looting and rioting.

Following the unrest, Scott, then a city council member, helped started the Volo Kids Foundation, a free sports access program that has expanded to eight U.S. cities.

Scott says he has helped open or renovate 11 new recreation centers in Baltimore, expanded middle school sports offerings and reinstituted summer midnight basketball that gives kids a safe place to play.

One of them is his stepson, Ceron, 9, who played in the Under Armour basketball development league earlier this year a the UA House, a modern facility built in large part through the company’s long-term investment in sports in Scott’s city.

“I'm the guy that lets the coach determine what happens on the court and how it happens," Scott says with a laugh.  "And I don't question anything but just really be a supportive and attentive parent.”

He says he quiets his infant son, Charm, by watching "Auntie Angel Reese," a Baltimore-area native turned WNBA star. He plays in a league himself to “let all the 20-something-year-olds know that the mayor’s still faster than them and they can’t catch me.”

It’s all part of a message he continues to deliver of how sports creates and molds us, no matter how long our athletic career lasts. When he accepted the Democratic nomination for mayor in May, he closed with a line from late Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland that can apply to elections, of course, but also to sports.

“Winning is never the goal,” he said. “Completing the work is.”

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com