L-R: Anna Quinones-Alvarez, Jessica Eberhard, Danielle Thomas, Ana Alvarez. Photo; Gardere Youth Alliance
Sports create fellowship and can increase social trust, including the ability to show empathy for others. There is no more valuable way to create social trust in sports than through community-based sports participation because of the social, emotional, physical and academic benefits that come from physically active children. The following article comes from the Aspen Institute’s State of Play Baton Rouge report. The report assesses the opportunities and barriers for more children to access sports and physical activity in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as waters receded from New Orleans, another tide began to rise — this one composed of lives displaced. Baton Rouge, with its inland safety, became a point of arrival for some evacuees. It wasn’t home, but it was close enough.
Darin Fontenette witnessed a steady stream of arrivals from his home in the Gardere neighborhood.
Among his new neighbors were children who needed something to hold on to — something as familiar as play, which transcended the boundaries of the unfamiliar place they now called home.
A single dad then, Fontenette saw a chance to do work that mattered. Here were kids who needed a bit of direction, and he had some to give.
Fontenette arranged to get the children involved in sports. He loaded them into his car and work trailer and took them to a nearby BREC park, a rough patch of grass then.
Something deeper began to take root. An informal program named the Gardere Youth Alliance was born.
“The neighborhood got a lot of evacuees from New Orleans and that raised a lot of conflict in an already high-crime place,” said Danielle Thomas, who leads the Alliance now. “The sports program became a form of peacemaking.”
Fontenette’s vision grew, and with it, so did the number of participants. Within two years, there were enough children to form a football team. The girls formed cheer and dance squads. The boys, once football season ended, took up basketball.
Fontenette funded much of this effort through his lawn-care business. He found supporters to cover the cost of the Alliance’s growth.
Thomas, then a graduate student at LSU, crossed paths with the Alliance in 2012. What had begun as research — an academic study of the football program — quickly became her volunteer work.
In time, the demographic landscape of Gardere shifted once again. This time, the change came from an influx of Hispanic workers who had come to Baton Rouge to rebuild other people’s homes after the Great Flood of 2016. Gardere, with its affordable housing, became their new home.
Fontenette adapted. Soccer — fútbol — became the new language. He reached out to the local Hispanic church, arranging a meeting for soccer parents. Thomas, who had grown used to Fontenette’s spontaneity, was nonetheless surprised when, moments before the meeting, he said to her, “Come on, walk with me. You have a soccer background, right?”
“I do,” she replied.
“You speak Spanish, right?”
“No, I don’t. What are we doing?”
“We’re having a soccer parent meeting.”
That day, they signed up 60 children, enough to field five teams.
Recently, as Fontenette has moved on to invest more in family, he also decided it was time for the organization to move into a new season. Fontenette intends to continue to lead the Gardere Youth Alliance and its longstanding football program while Thomas and Ana Alvarez, who have been co-leading soccer under the Alliance's umbrella since 2015, will establish a nonprofit that specializes in soccer. As they make this transition, Thomas continues much of the work she has done since 2015, transporting children to soccer practices at BREC’s Burbank Park, two miles from Gardere, the home of the Baton Rouge Soccer Club (BRSC).
BRSC, recognizing the financial barriers that many of these families faced, offered discounted fees for their recreational league so all of the Alliance children can play with BRSC. For those who still struggled, Thomas raised money, often paying out of pocket. As a result, many of these children moved up to the competitive leagues, some supported by scholarships. Teammates’ families stepped in, providing rides to practices and games, weaving together a network of support.
In time, the soccer program grew not just in numbers but in depth. Thomas and Alvarez recruited volunteers, including Alvarez's daughter, Anna Quinones-Alvarez, who began as a player and transitioned recently into coaching with the Alliance. Anna, who wants to study business and sports management in college, reflected on the lessons she learned. “It’s taught me patience, for sure,” she said. “And how to deal with different types of kids and learn how to calm them down when their parents yell from the sidelines. I just tell them that their parents are doing this out of love.”
The Alliance is facing a pivotal moment, with Fontenette and other leaders from the Gardere neighborhood continuing to invest in football and the Gardere Youth Alliance while Thomas and Alvarez will strengthen their collaboration with BRSC as they lay the groundwork for a new, second-generation nonprofit. The new nonprofit will allow them to pursue additional grant funding and broaden their reach across other parts of the parish.
“Anna is going to take over, she just doesn’t know it yet,” Thomas quipped.
Jon Solomon is Community Impact Director of the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative. Jon can be reached at jon.solomon@aspeninstitute.org.