LANSING — In a world where summer camps and organized youth sports, tutors and athletic trainers can cost an arm and a leg, and where there are fewer and fewer places for adolescents and teenagers to go, the Lansing School District has a program that offers it all to students at a very reasonable rate:
No charge.
There are a lot of great offerings and good ideas in our community worth highlighting. Lansing schools’ Student Development Program at Don Johnson Fieldhouse is a gem. It’s the brainchild of Jon Horford, who several years ago, after narrowly losing a bid for a state House seat, put his energy into something with more ground-level impact, with the hope of removing barriers for students, the same way a mentor had for him.
“I’ve had some of my former (University of Michigan basketball) teammates come through and some Michigan State players come through, and other people, and they all say the same thing, ‘I would literally live here if I was a kid,’ ” Horford said. “ ‘This is free? You guys can do this all for free?’ ”
Free to students. The three-year-old program, which was backed initially by a federal grant (rescinded last year by the Trump administration), is now being largely funded by the district, supported by former superintendent Ben Shuldiner and now Jessica Benavides, along with help from a number of community partners.
The summer session begins Monday, June 8, running through Aug. 13 — 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays — offering basketball, volleyball, soccer, tennis, strength training, e-sports, foosball, gardening, cooking, with free meals daily, and haircuts with the Mobile Barber on Mondays and Tuesdays. During the school year, it’s a daily afterschool program, also with an emphasis on tutoring.
And it’s not just rolling out the balls or handing a kid a shovel and packet of seeds. There’s a lot of guided and supervised instruction — including from people like former MSU assistant basketball coach Mike Garland, MSU women’s basketball star Moira Joiner, who’s back this summer, and tennis with folks from the Todd Martin Youth Leadership program. There’s also soccer run by Real Lansing FC, as well as help from professional athletic trainers, and so on and so forth.
The Cristo Rey Community Center provides many of the program’s meals and the Greater Lansing Food Bank pays for the hot meals delivered by Cristo Rey. Even the foosball tables were a gift from Foosball Clubs USA. Want to help? They’re always looking for more community partners.
It takes a village, so to speak — including about a dozen dedicated folks doing everything from coaching volleyball, to teaching kids how to garden and cook, to keeping the trains moving.
“They really make it work,” Horford said.
The hope this summer is to have as many as 200 students of all ages coming through each day for some length of time, double last summer’s total. During the school year, they get closer to that number more regularly. No advanced sign-up is necessary. Parents are asked to come in the first time they drop their child off and sign a permission slip.
Keyshawn Summerville, an all-state guard graduating from Sexton, has been coming to the program since the summer after his freshman year. He’s the sort of high-level player that benefits from having Garland, Horford and others around, and from the pickup runs. But he’ll tell you there’s more to it.
“It has everything that a young athlete would need, honestly — a weight room, basketball, great mentors around you, people who want to see you succeed,” Summerville said. “And that’s why I involve myself up there.
“It feels like a place where you go just to hang out with friends, or if you want to feel welcome. It’s just great vibes.”
Vibes are part of the allure Horford and Co. are trying to create.
“We don’t expect kids to identify as an athlete,” Sue Wheeler, the district’s director of health and wellness, said. “Initially, we had to overcome that because kids thought, ‘Oh, I have to be good at basketball,’ and we said, ‘Nope, you don’t have to be an athlete at all. You can come in and do strength, conditioning, running. You might try these sports (like basketball and volleyball).’ But when we saw that kids were real hesitant, we added art, we added gardening and nutrition. So, whatever your interest area might be, you could find a place here.
“Some kids would come in and just do art. And then our trainers would come and engage with kids and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come in and try volleyball with us. And then they go, ‘I do like this.’ ”
“The peak vision,” Horford said, “It’s not even necessarily about the sports aspect. It’s just about giving people a safe place to go to make friends, to develop healthy habits and skills.”
At the most basic level, that’s what’s hardest to find outside of school for middle- and high-schoolers.
“You give kids a place to go and something to do, it turns out, man, good things normally come out of it,” Garland said.
Garland — who coached under Tom Izzo for 22 seasons, with an interlude as the head coach at Cleveland State after a decorated run coaching at Belleville High School — joined the Student Development Program fairly early on. He had his mind set on mentoring young people in some way, and when he met with Shuldiner about his own ideas, this quickly came up.
“It fits,” Garland said. “It’s what I wanted to do. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.
“You can talk about Xs and Os, fundamental skills, but until the mindset gets right, none of that means anything.”
Garland — who separately has his third annual Champions of the Heart Gala at 5:30 on Tuesday, June 9, at Breslin Center, raising money for CPR training and AEDs throughout the community — loves watching the influence older kids have on the younger ones in this setting.
FROM 2023: Couch: Mike Garland escaped death against long odds thanks to two men and a team of people he can’t thank enough
“I’m a big believer in older kids getting a chance to take leadership and show younger kids the way in a positive environment. That’s big,” Garland said.
“I don’t know if there are too many programs in country that are like this.”
Probably because it takes a lot — including, for this program, care of an iconic but aging facility.
Renovations at Don Johnson Fieldhouse are in the works, including adding another basketball court, a commercial kitchen space and multi-purpose classrooms, using $1.2 million allocated in the most recent state budget, along with some additional fundraising. The next big upgrade includes raising money to air-condition the building.
Among the ways the program can generate revenue: It gets a portion of the proceeds from any non-Lansing School District rental of Don Johnson.
“Besides having meaningful programming in this space, so it’s utilized in an extremely impactful way year-round, we wanted to also show, before we went to fundraisers, not only are we doing this work that genuinely impacts the community, we have ways to get money to start meaningful renovations,” said Horford, who credited Senate Appropriations Chair Sarah Anthony, D-Lansing, and state Rep. Kara Hope, D-Holt. “I mean, we raised a lot of money to get these renovations done, and then the next ask will be to help get air-conditioning. … I think air-conditioning is actually borderline essential.”
That’s a barrier he and the district have to overcome, so that there are no barriers for the kids walking through the doors.
“I just know what removing barriers can do to benefit the lives of students,” Horford said of his mission behind the program. “I know what someone removing those barriers for me did. … I was definitely the least talented of all the Horfords, even my sisters. I don’t think someone like me actually goes to Michigan and gets my degree paid for, and then I get my master’s degree paid for (at Florida), if someone doesn’t remove all these barriers for me. I just know the benefit that it can have, directly, personally, to change a life.”
FROM 2017: Jon Horford once threw tantrums on the basketball court; now he’s connecting with kids
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Couch: Lansing schools Student Development Program a gem for athletes and those just looking for a place to feel welcome
Reporting by Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal | USA TODAY Network
