Two years ago, San Francisco-area sophomore football player Lucas Kehs was at a dinner table with his cousin, Nels Thoreson, the head coach at Justice High School in Lafayette. He was shocked by what he heard.
“He was saying how two of his kids played a game without cleats; they were running around with sneakers,” Kehs said. “That stuck with me to this day.”
With two more years to go with the Novato High Hornets in affluent Marin County, the offensive lineman knew he had a plan for his senior project.
“It has to have something to do with the community or benefitting someone,” Kehs said of what has become a tradition at the school. “You get experience in project planning. I started it at the beginning of the year and it lets us learn how to do long-term project management.”
His cousin’s football team certainly qualified as a worthy subject. An at-risk school — its mascot, fittingly, is the Phoenix — that plays 8-man football, Justice “is a last stop,” Thoreson said, that involves a lot of low-income kids with a variety of behavioral issues, mostly gang- and drug-related. And those problems can transfer over to the field. Justice was 0-8 last fall and 1-8 in 2014. Its best player from two years ago, a player prominent in the team’s lone victory, recently died of a drug overdose.
And Thoreson never really knows who or how many he will have for a game.
“A lot of these kids roll the dice,” said Thoreson, whose duties include assistant registrar. “We accept any kid no matter what he might be — right out of rehab or on parole or probation. … For us, it’s about way more than wins and losses. With a lot of these kids on probation or in drug court, they go to jail on Friday afternoon and on the weekend. I always say that we’ll see how many get on the bus for a game.”
Kehs wanted Phoenix players to at least have appropriate gear and not have to play in sneakers or share receiving and linemen’s gloves. So he was able to raise about $500 and started collecting as much new and slightly used equipment as he could to help them. For example, he had one teammate who began the season with a pair of cleats for practice, then another for games, then another new pair toward the end of the season.
“Everyone was really generous,” Kehs said.
Ultimately, he gathered about 15 pairs of cleats — along with several pairs of pants, gloves, wrist bands, under garments … but “no libel equipment, no shoulder pads or anything like that.”
He also sought out the head of his local UPS office, who cut him a deal. “I sent two huge boxes for $100,” he said.
And when the boxes arrived recently, Thoreson said, “it was like Christmas, which was pretty awesome. It’s the nicest stuff some of these kids have seen, something they could take ownership of.”
Thoreson insists he didn’t know until very late in the process what Kehs was doing for his Phoenix.
“The kids are just super pumped,” he said. “To have someone think about them in San Francisco … we’re just so proud that (Lucas) chose us for his project. We’re so grateful.”
Kehs was treated to a group photo and video from Justice and called it “awesome … that video put a ribbon on it and was far more successful than I could ever imagine.”
Bound for San Francisco State, Kehs said, “There’s such an abundance of money here in Marin County … it was a collective effort, there was such generosity. I had a chance to do something special.”
Neil H. Devlin: ndevlin@ or @neildevlin
