Chauncey Billups is walking across the Regis University campus past four young women eating lunch on the grass.
“Hi!” one calls out. “Thanks for a great season!”
Billups smiles and waves but keeps moving, on his way to a life skills class at the Porter-Billups Leadership Academy, where at-risk kids are playing “The Game of Life” and learning minimum-wage jobs don’t get you very far.
The trade that brought Billups back to Denver last fall didn’t help just the Nuggets. It helped the PBLA, which will need all his celebrity to get where it’s trying to go.
“One thing that I love about the program is it’s not about athletics,” Billups says. “I know that sounds weird, but I remember being these kids. Growing up in the inner city and having to worry about the gang activity and my gang friends and all the things that you deal with growing up in the neighborhood.
“You really don’t have much. You don’t have much going on. You go to school and you don’t have all the clothes everybody else is wearing. The pressures of dealing with that, the pressures of being a follower— I remember all of that.”
The PBLA solution is old-fashioned, reflecting the disciplined approach Lonnie Porter has brought to coaching basketball for more than 40 years. It emphasizes academic excellence and college scholarships, but also leadership, manners and balancing your checkbook. Most of all, it emphasizes doing the right thing and making the right choice, every time.
Four years ago, when he was still playing in Detroit, Billups partnered with Porter, who had been operating the academy on a shoestring for a decade.
“I just believe in kids, and I believe in people skills, and I believe in etiquette, and I believe in when you’re talking to somebody, look them in the eye, and I believe in things that are going to help you compete in life and not on the court or the field or the dugout,” Billups says.
“Of course I like (sports) and that’s fine, but that’s only one season of your life. And I believe in giving kids tools that will last for every season of their life, all their life.”
College environment
Of 133 kids at the academy last summer, 45 percent were Hispanic; 35 percent were African-American. One quarter came from families with household incomes less than $25,000 a year. Only 13 percent of the parents had college degrees.
Luis Castaneda, 16, started coming to the academy in the fifth grade. His dad paints houses.
“Hard work,” he says. “I want to make my parents proud because nobody in my family has gone to college.”
Jasa Perry, 14, recently moved with her family to Chicago, but she’s back for her fourth year at the three-week summer program. “I want to be an ob-gyn,” she says.
Anthony Jones, 16, will be a junior at Thomas Jefferson this fall. He’s never been to New York, but he dreams of attending film school there.
“We stand out amongst the crowd — do the right thing and be a leader,” he says of his fellow academy students. “It’s always in the back of my head.”
Victor Sundin, 17, has been attending the academy since the third grade. He’ll be a senior at North this fall. “Do the right thing, or Mr. Porter’s going to talk to you,” he says. “He can say the nicest thing to you, and you’ll be, like, shaking.”
Hannah Burleson, 14, will be a sophomore at East this fall. This is her sixth year at the academy. “Being on a college campus in the third grade is really cool,” she says. “I want to work in criminal justice and be a homicide detective in the gang unit.”
Oscar Lomeli, 20, has attended the academy for nine years. He’ll be a junior at Regis this fall with a double major in accounting and Spanish. “Being on a college campus made it feel like college was a realistic goal,” he says. “It was a place where I really felt confident.”
The academy’s most important contribution, looking back?
“I guess the fact that they just believed in us,” he says.
Like most of the teachers in the program, Sonja Hassler of Thunder Ridge Middle School keeps coming back out of sheer amazement.
“There are no disciplinary issues,” she says. “There are no behavior issues. You get to teach.”
Billups’ commitment
Porter’s fear, ever since he started the academy with a couple dozen kids in 1996, is that it will die with him. So for years, he’s been trying to raise an endowment to fund it beyond his death.
First came the dot-com bust, then the housing crash. Raising money has been a challenge.
“Chauncey has taken this thing to a different level,” says Porter, the winningest college basketball coach in Colorado history. “To be honest with you, I felt like I had taken it not necessarily as far as it could go, but it was kind of like we had hit a wall. For it to advance, we needed something else. Chauncey opens doors I can’t get in.”
The goal of a $14 million endowment remains a long way off. Even after four years of Billups’ involvement, the academy has raised about $1 million.
“It’s a commitment that is steep,” Billups says. “My thing is, if these kids do what they’re supposed to do, we can’t let the kids down. I have always been a man of my word, and I’m going to stand up on that.
“We just always feel like if we’re doing the right thing, right things will happen to us. So we’re not going to be too stressed out and say, ‘Man, we’re behind,’ because at the end of the day, we’re going to make it happen.”
Even without the endowment, Porter can now see the next generation of academy leaders: his daughter, PBLA director Staci Porter-Bentley, and the Billups brothers, Chauncey and Rodney.
On his way out of life skills class, Porter, now 66, stops to address the kids.
“You are beautiful,” he tells them. “The way you conduct yourselves is just off the hook. You guys don’t know how much you mean to us.”
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297 or dkrieger@denverpost.com
