By Preston Williams
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Wakefield School prides itself on students who take two periods of English each day, a nationally recognized literary magazine and an annual graduating class of independent thinkers.
Tearing down walls, ripping out insulation and spraying studs with mold deterrent? Not in the brochure of the school in Virginia horse country, about 40 miles west of Washington, which costs $12,000 to $16,000 annually to attend.
So you'll have to forgive the Wakefield boys' basketball players for not knowing how they would react, emotionally or physically, to the task they are undertaking as you read this.
The Owls decided to forgo the school's traditional Ski Week to travel to New Orleans this week to gut houses as part of the rebuilding efforts from Hurricane Katrina. They traded white slopes for dashed hopes.
A few days before flying out, they were both eager and skittish about their endeavor.
"I'm not ready for it," team manager Morgan Vandermast said with a nervous laugh. "I know I've seen nothing compared to what we're going to see. It's just out of my comfort zone."
"I've seen some of the pictures that my parents took, and it looks devastating, but I think once we get down there, it's really going to hit a bunch of guys how bad this is," said junior Ross Ozburn, whose parents volunteered in New Orleans last fall for their 25th wedding anniversary. "It's going to be one of those moments that really hits you like how much life means to you and how good we have it here."
For sure, this isn't Snowshoe Mountain Resort in West Virginia, where many of the school's students are spending the week after exams. It's safe to assume that the Wakefield students there did not pack dust masks or update their tetanus shots before leaving town.
And it's safe to assume that the lodge accommodations will be a bit more relaxing than the 40 bunk beds at Trinity Christian Community, which is hosting the Owls and a school contingent from Kennebunkport, Maine, for the week. The groups are sharing meals and rooms with six full-time volunteers.
It is not uncommon for school groups to volunteer, said Sandy Brown, volunteer coordinator at Trinity, but this is the first athletic team she can recall staying at the facility.
The Wakefield players are helping in the Hollygrove section of New Orleans, a working-class neighborhood on the western fringe of the city, where the average annual income in 2000 was $30,659 -- or about two years' worth of schooling for the pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade set at Wakefield.
A spokeswoman for the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center said that most Hollygrove homes took in four to eight feet of water; according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, two feet of water or more classifies a home as "severely" damaged.
"When they're gutting, they'll see things familiar that they have in their house -- maybe a book that they've read -- and realize this was a family that had a real life," Brown said. "They'll see how their life was just stopped in time. Food still sitting out. It's not like they were prepared or wanted to be out of that house."
Almost 80 percent of the Hollygrove homes were built in the 1940s or '50s, and 53.7 percent of the residents had lived there since 1989 or earlier. So these were homes, not just houses. Twenty-eight percent of the Hollygrove population live in poverty, according to the 2000 figures, more than twice the national average. And 10.4 percent have bachelor's degrees, less than half the national average.
The neighborhood, with almost 7,000 residents, is 94.7 percent black. Rap music fans might be interested to know that Lil Wayne grew up there.
There was initial reluctance to skip Ski Week. After all, Ski Week has been a tradition at Wakefield since the school opened in 1972. But the Owls decided to put teeth into the school's motto of "Seek the Challenge, Make a Difference, Lead an Extraordinary Life."
All the players and coaches are paying their own way -- about $500 a head -- and some families lost their deposits at the ski resort because of the change in plans.
"We talked about stepping up and not living in the gray part of life, and my kids said, 'I want to do something different and be a part of something,' " Wakefield Coach Scott Barron said.
Senior Kevin Tedeschi, a team captain along with Ozburn, has attended Wakefield since first grade and has participated in Ski Week about every year. "It's a good getaway," he said, "but this is, too. It is a sacrifice, but it's not that we're losing anything."
Freshman Eric Wilson survived a hurricane as a boy in the Virgin Islands. He was unsure if his experience would brace him for New Orleans or stir up sad memories of the destruction he witnessed in St. Thomas.
"I just saw it as time away from school" then, he said. "I was happy. But I was too young to understand the financial and emotional state that my parents and grandmother were in."
Few of the Owls have done the kind of unskilled labor they are doing in New Orleans. They had to sign waivers to absolve Trinity Christian Community of liability. "Some people might be a little scary to be around with a hammer," Ozburn joked.
Injury-prone senior Aaron Phipps, who has worked some construction, was given half-serious orders that he had to stick within three feet of Barron but 10 feet from everybody else.
The Owls also are squeezing in some basketball. Trinity has contacts at Tulane University, so the team is practicing there to prepare for a home game Saturday against rival Highland. They also plan to attend a New Orleans Hornets practice.
As the trip drew near, the quizzical stares about missing Ski Week had disappeared.
"I think everyone is a little jealous," sophomore Brenton Lewis said, amused at the irony. "They want to go, too."
Varsity Letter is a weekly column about high school sports in the Washington area. Check out the Varsity Letter blog weekdays at
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/varsityletter.
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