Local athletes teach middle-schoolers about HIV through Grassroot Project

In a classroom at Walker Jones Educational Center, four Howard track athletes, a George Washington soccer player and a former all-American sprinter from Georgetown push tiny desks and chairs against the walls to create a playground for the afternoon’s game.

It’s called HIV Attacks!

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And it starts with 12-year-old Natia Bland, who has volunteered to play the Human, standing in the center of a circle surrounded by nine middle-school classmates who pick whatever Germ or Disease they want to be.

“I’m Pneumonia!” one blurts out.

“I’m the Chicken Pox!” says another.

“I’m Swine Flu!”

Amid riotous giggles, a game of dodgeball begins, with Germs and Diseases trying to hit the Human with a soccer ball.

Their instructor, former Big East champion sprinter Deidra Sanders, aided by the varsity athlete volunteers, counts the hits (only under-handed throws aimed below the waist allowed) before time expires.

Poor Natia gets tagged 20 times. But that’s only Round One of a game designed to teach what HIV is, what it does to the body and how treatment works — lessons that unfold in subsequent rounds in which the characters of Immune System, HIV and ARVs (antiretroviral drugs) step inside the circle to alternately defend, attack and protect the Human.

It’s part of curriculum crafted by Tyler Spencer, a former rower at Virginia, who launched the nonprofit Grassroot Project in 2009, inspired by his experience in Africa as a volunteer with Grassroots Soccer, which used professional soccer players to raise awareness and break the stigma of AIDS and HIV.

Back stateside, Spencer volunteered with MetroTeen Aids as a college senior and was stunned to learn that one in 20 Washington residents has HIV — a higher incidence than in many African nations. So he decided to try to replicate for Washington youngsters the curriculum he had witnessed first-hand in sub-Saharan Africa.

Instead of enlisting school nurses or public-health advocates as instructors, Spencer drafted local college athletes to lead the games designed to drive home key messages about leading healthy lifestyles, avoiding risks and handling peer pressure. As he envisioned it, a Washington-based Grassroot Project would benefit not only middle-school students but also college athletes.

“A lot of Division I athletes go through school completely insulated by their teams,” Spencer said in a telephone interview from England, where he’s pursuing a doctorate in public health as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. “They don’t leave campus; they don’t have time to get out and experience anything outside school and their sport. Their sport is their career in college, but only one or two percent go pro. This is a great way to get college athletes to do something related to what they do in sports but tied to something better.”

Back at Walker Jones in northwest Washington, it’s the last day of a semester-long series of sessions led by Grassroot volunteers. Fittingly, it begins with a lightning round of catch, in which students must blurt out something they’ve learned each time a classmate hits them with a bullet pass.