Large Urban winner:
Harding High School
St. Paul, Minnesota
Hay Blu Day has heard many stories about her life in a refugee camp in Thailand, where she was born and lived for four years. The accounts provided to her by family members usually involve violence and sadness. Day remembers only one personal memory: American soldiers arriving in a tank while she returned to her house because she was thirsty.
Day is a member of the Karen (pronounced k’REN) people, an ethnic minority from the nation of Burma (also known as Myanmar). Karen refugees, who fled oppression from the Burmese government, began arriving in Minnesota in the early 2000s. St. Paul has the largest U.S. population of Karen people and Hmong people, an ethnic group inhabiting southeastern China and northern parts of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand who first arrived in Minnesota in 1975.
At Harding High School, where Day attended, more than half of the population is Hmong and 38 different languages are spoken by students. Fifteen percent are English Language Learners who experienced interrupted education due to war, civil unrest, migration or other factors. Most parents of Harding students have no cultural history with sports and understandably prioritize putting food on the table through hard-working jobs and ensuring their child is educated, says Harding Principal Be Vang, a first-generation Hmong.
Day says she and many students don’t feel connected to their parents – “It’s academics and only academics” – so they play sports as a distraction from their home lives. She hid injuries from her parents, including concussions, because telling them could have meant debates over playing sports. She never wanted to lose the adrenaline of sports, especially badminton – a popular sport at Harding and one that urban students nationally identified in the Aspen Institute survey as a sport they want to try.
“I feel like I’m alone when I play, in the sense I’m at peace,” says Day, who played badminton, volleyball and soccer before graduating in 2021. “There’s nothing to really worry about. You have teammates wanting the same thing as you. There’s no confusion of anything. You just play the sport.”
Harding recognizes these cultural differences among its students, and the challenges and opportunities to engage them with very limited resources. For its ability to adapt a sports model that tries to meet students where they’re at, Harding is recognized as the Aspen Institute’s Project Play winner in the Large Urban Schools category of our Reimagining School Sports initiative.
Harding offers sports based on what students want. This includes embracing exploding soccer growth among its Latino and Somali populations (95 soccer players before COVID-19) and net sports popular with Asian students (46 badminton players, 41 tennis players, 37 volleyball players). Although boys volleyball is not funded by the St. Paul school district or sanctioned by the state, Harding provides a club volleyball team for boys because of the huge demand.
“I have to scrape for money, volunteer coaches and gym time,” says Harding Athletic Director Kathy Jackson, who expects to use some of the Reimagining School Sports $20,000 award to fund boys volleyball. “We’re working at the district level to try to fund boys volleyball, but if you add something, something gets taken away. And then all of the other St. Paul high schools will feel pressured to offer it, and they have more gym-space limitations than I do.”
Swimming has gained popularity among Hmong students at Harding. Of the eight girls on the team during COVID-19, seven were Hmong. Jackson has a theory why: Swimming is a quiet and private sport at Harding with fewer participants than other sports. To stay safe during the pandemic, the swimmers voted to only participate in virtual meets at their pool, rather than traveling.
“I don’t see a lot of Hmong people in Harding sports,” says junior Kalani Yang, who developed a love of golf from her dad and became a rare Hmong student to qualify for the Minnesota state golf championship. “I wish they could join a sport so they can see the long-term friendships you make but it’s OK if they don’t. I think joining a sport really helped me get out of my comfort zone.”
Sports participation by Harding students regularly occur in starts and stops, even during seasons. Some need to care for siblings, parents or grandparents. Some need jobs to make money.
Jackson estimates 40% of Harding athletes work during their sport season and 60% do so in their offseason. “I can count a lot faster the number of times we’ve had every kid who signed up for football appear at practice than the number of times we have kids missing,” says football coach Otto Kraus, whose team ended a 28-game losing streak in 2021.
Every year, Kraus cautions his new coaches against taking a hard line by tying practice attendance to playing time in games. He understands why football is not a priority for many Harding families, who face accessibility challenges he never had growing up. Most of his players are on their own to register for the season, remember when practices start, and find a way to get there.
“Using playing time as a punishment is out for us,” Kraus says. “Truthfully, it has to be individual relationships with the kids and understand why they’re missing practice. Dealing with missed practices here takes a lot of patience and conversations to make sure it’s fair, but fair doesn’t always mean equal.”
Still, getting students to play football is a struggle. Many parents fear injuries – and even the principal worries about safety because Hmong people generally are small in stature. When Kraus arrived four years ago, there were 22 returning players. That eventually grew to 65 before COVID-19 reduced participation to 35.
For the 2021 season, Harding has merged football programs with Humboldt High School, which almost disbanded its team. As of early June 2021, 40 players between the schools had registered – four times more than Harding usually signed up on its own by that time. Kraus says he’s optimistic of reaching 65.
This might be the last chance to save football at Harding. The demographics have changed, with those who played tackle football now moving to the suburbs while more refugees live in the city. From 2000 to 2020, St. Paul’s White population decreased from 67% to 57%, while Hispanic/Latino residents doubled from 8% to 19% and the Asian population increased from 12% to 19%.
St. Paul’s feeder tackle programs are dying even as flag football thrives with the Hmong community. Flag is an intramural sport at Harding played by about 50 students. Some local middle schools offer flag. And it’s a popular sport at the annual Hmong International Freedom Festival in St. Paul. For many years, the Hmong community has self-organized a flag football league for adults and some youth.
“We’ll be holding (tackle) practice with 35 guys and griping that we need more players, and next door there are 40 to 50 kids playing flag,” says Kraus, whose team hosts an annual flag tournament to show support. “Early on, I fell into this trap of telling them, ‘Come play football and play for your school,’ but I’ve changed my thinking on it. I get it if you’re a 100-pounder, you can have a great time playing flag with awesome running, catching and agility skills. When you line up against a 200-pound linebacker, it’s not the same sport.”
Hmong families “absolutely are sending a message of what they want,” Jackson says. “At some point, the conversation has to be, why are we continuing to offer tackle football? But that’s a really strong tradition in America. And if we had a flag football team at Harding, who would we play? The structure is not in place.”
Off the fields and courts, Harding athletes are encouraged to talk openly about a traumatic 2020-21 school year for students of color, with the murder of George Floyd in nearby Minneapolis and anti-Asian violence happening around the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China. “Every day when I open my phone I see new violence against Asians,” says Lang, the student golfer. “It’s difficult to read. I want to do something about it.”
Twenty-one percent of Harding students are Black, slightly higher than the city population of 16%. Many live near where protests and riots happened after Floyd was murdered by a police officer. “I have a family member close to (Floyd), so we kind of knew who he was and it hurt a little more,” says Emmanuel Hawkins, a senior football player who is Black. “My coaches were always very open to communicate when I was feeling upset or emotional about the situation. They’d talk with me and explain why I might be feeling that way.”
Alisia Lemmons, a five-sport athlete during the pandemic who is half Mexican and half White, says the racial turmoil caused her to self-reflect on coaches she had in middle school who were biased toward White athletes.
Lemmons says Harding’s predominantly Black high school girls basketball team, led by a White coach, created spaces for hard but valuable discussions.
“Our coach really talks about how each of us should have pride in our ethnic background, culture and identity, and we shouldn’t change just because society tells us to,” Lemmons says. “He says we’re the generation of change. I’ve heard that so many times over the past year from so many people. I believe it 100%.”
Harding is not perfect. Several students say that while they love many coaches and believe they truly care about their athletes, they wish the coaching staff was more diverse and adaptable to individual student needs. Only 5% of the coaches are from a racial or ethnic minority.
“Right before a (badminton) match, I get in a mode where I look really down and I don’t feel as good, but then I play my best,” Day says. “The coaches don’t understand that, but another person who helps our team realized that and said don’t worry about it, just do what I’m doing. With athletes who have language barriers, some coaches tend to go nicer on them than English-speaking students. Sometimes you have to push a player if you want them to do their best.”
The Aspen Institute selected Harding despite a relatively low number of students participating in sports programs – just 21%, below the national average of 33% for urban schools. For all of its exemplary efforts amid an array of challenges, there remains room for growth, for creating the conditions to engage more students.
Day says she wishes more parents would let their children play sports. Vang, the school principal, says Hmong parents are slowly doing so. St. Paul’s Sunisa Lee recently qualified for the Tokyo Games as the first Hmong-American Olympic gymnast – a byproduct of Hmong Minnesotans now in their 40s fighting for access to sports. Still, Vang says, many parents don’t view sports as an added benefit tied to education. These parents can’t be forced to change their perspective, she says, especially not by White coaches or teachers who may lack an understanding of cultural barriers and obligations.
“It can come off as, ‘I know your child best,’” Vang says. “I tell parents, just go to one of your kids’ sports, even though we don’t understand the games. Just see the excitement they have on the field.
“But our parents are such hard workers, and often times, they don’t have the flexibility to leave a job for a couple hours for a game at 3 pm. The structure of sports should change if we want more parents to come, especially in high-poverty, urban areas, to integrate their values into athletics.”
Strategies that Harding High School uses that stood out as exemplary to the Aspen Institute and our project advisory board:
Intentionally promote transformational coaching
When new coaches are hired at Harding High School, Athletic Director Kathy Jackson provides them with a book she wants them to read: “InsideOutCoaching: How Sports Can Transform Lives.” The book, which has been used by the Minnesota State High School League to train coaches, emphasizes the need to be a transformational coach to change students’ lives rather than being a transactional coach just trying to win games.
Embrace adapted sports
In 1992, Minnesota became the first state to officially sanction adapted sports by a state high school league. Today, St. Paul Public Schools, the district for Harding High School, has an adapted sports athletic director and runs bowling, floor hockey, soccer and softball. These are usually co-op teams in the city and divided based on whether a student has a physical or cognitive impairment, with one practice and two games per week. Harding had 16 bowlers before COVID-19.
Make registering for sports easier
The registration process can be a nightmare in urban areas, where families have less time to complete documents or, in some cases, can’t read the documents. Extensive paperwork from the Minnesota State High School League changes every year and much of the legalese is difficult for students or their families to understand, Jackson says. Harding is in the process of creating a cheat sheet with registration information that is translated into Hmong, Somali, Spanish and Karen.