Small Suburban winner:
East Hampton High School
East Hampton, New York
Let it out, Lorenzo Rodriguez tells his East Hampton High School football players when pulling them aside at practice because they’re frustrated and struggling mentally.
“If you have to cry, go ahead and cry,” says Rodriguez, an East Hampton assistant coach. “Tell me what’s happening.”
Many of these players are Latino. Rodriguez, a first-generation American of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, recognizes the challenges for these players just to be on the field. He’s had players who are gay and can’t come out because of their culture. He’s coached players who need to work part-time jobs to pay their family rent. He’s seen players bottle up whatever pressures they’re facing.
“Our Latino community is very masculine – be strong and show no emotions,” Rodriguez says. “We don’t think about mental health and therapy. A lot of them see it as a bad thing, and it’s not, but it’s sad. We tell ourselves, ‘Throw some dirt on it and keep moving.’ Football kind of did that for me when I was younger. However, as a father, I’ve changed.”
The Hamptons are not simply the Long Island resort area where wealthy, privileged families spend the summer in second homes. East Hampton is also a blue-collar community heavy on service jobs like housekeepers, fishermen, landscapers and carpenters.
The Latino population of East Hampton Township nearly doubled to 26.4% between 2000 and 2010; it was 5% in 1990. Today, more than half of East Hampton High School students are Latino, a massive shift that caused the school to completely change how it engages Latino students and parents, including in sports. Sports participation mirrors the color of the students – about 60% of East Hampton athletes are Latino, and it’s not just due to soccer. Football, baseball, track and field, cross country, swimming and field hockey are other sports that school officials say have, to varying degrees, added more Latino students.
Nationally, fewer Latino youth ages 13-17 (40%) play sports on a regular basis than White (44%) and Black (41%) youth. For its ability to entice more Latino students to play high school sports and engage with their families, East Hampton is recognized as the Aspen Institute’s Project Play winner in the Small Suburban Schools category of our Reimagining School Sports initiative.
About eight years ago, the East Hampton Union Free School District recognized it had a serious problem. Three students committed suicide within three years. All of them were Latino. “You have immigrant families coming in who don’t have access to bilingual services and are very reticent to take advantage of mental health services, and you have the perfect storm for a horrible situation,” says East Hampton Superintendent Adam Fine, the high school’s former principal. “And that’s exactly what happened to us.”
The suicides also highlighted a division between the school’s relatively economically comfortable population of White families, who were established in the township, and the newer, poorer Latino residents. Administrators noticed Latino families feeling alienated as their children struggled to adjust in school and without a way to truly voice their concerns.
“Many years ago, the school was the institution – you don’t question the school, everything they do is right,” Fine says. “At some point on Long Island, our White, entitled parents said, ‘Wait, I’m paying taxes and I’m going to tell the school what to do.’ We needed a little bit of balance. We had a group of Latino families that felt in the shadows, and there were definitely immigration concerns where people thought we’d call (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on them, which isn’t the case. What I found is the Spanish-speaking community is just as much an advocate for their own children as the White and African-American communities.”
The school district created a community liaison position to communicate directly with Latino parents. Now, every school email goes out bilingually. For athletics, that means parents who only speak Spanish can read what sports are offered, how and when to complete forms, and who to contact for more information.
As the demographics of the U.S. continue to change, many high schools may have no choice but to find new ways to engage Latino students or risk being unable to field teams. The advice from Teresita Winter, East Hampton’s community liaison, for other schools: Go to where Latino families are to give them information. She visits local community settings and churches where they gather, even speaking at the end of Catholic Mass to introduce herself and invite families to school events.
“I became a familiar face to them,” Winter says. “I met them where they were. I didn’t ask them to come to this big, intimidating building. I said, let me go to them first and then they’ll come, and that’s exactly what happened.”
A couple years ago, the East Hampton High School athletic department hired a bilingual assistant to help translate. “She’s a big, big help,” says Athletic Director Joe Vasile-Cozzo. “If someone calls my office, they’ll get a translator if needed.”
Not surprisingly, soccer is the school’s most popular sport for Latino students. On the girls team, 21 of the 24 players are Latino. Many speak both English and Spanish, but not all.
“My coaches are very, very inclusive,” says Melanie Luque, a bilingual soccer and lacrosse player. She enjoys lacrosse as her favorite sport – not soccer, her father’s favorite – after learning lacrosse from her older sister. “The coaches try to organize lists of Spanish terms, so all the kids understand – terms like ‘shoot the ball’ and ‘offsides.’ It’s a little difficult during games when coaches give out commands to the whole team. It gets lost in translation.”
Cara Nelson, the girls soccer coach, says she knows just enough Spanish to communicate with players who only speak Spanish. “What’s wonderful is so many girls on the team are bilingual and they will translate for their teammates,” Nelson says. “You can explain things by showing them how to correctly kick a ball or pass it, and they understand your gestures. That becomes trickier in a game situation and trying to explain a tactical perspective.”
Robert Velez, who played soccer at East Hampton until 2021, says his coach, Don McGovern, also understands Spanish well enough to communicate with his Ecuadorian-born parents while Velez served as the intermediary for his mom. “Schools should encourage more coaches to have some understanding of Spanish or be bilingual,” Velez says. “That really opens up opportunities. A lot of very talented kids in sports are Hispanic. Sometimes they’re shy or walk away because they’re scared and don’t know how to communicate.”
The girls soccer team, which has 50 players this year, has never made cuts in Nelson’s five years as coach. That’s more difficult for the boys soccer team, which some years has more than 80 students try out for 56 varsity and JV spots. Students who are cut are encouraged to try playing another sport.
The biggest beneficiary is football. About 20% of the team is Latino, lower than the overall student population. But the increase in Latino players – they’re often soccer players who get cut and play defensive back or wide receiver – saved football at East Hampton, which struggled with participation as the Black population decreased and Latino students increased.
Three years ago, football participation was down to 22 students so East Hampton temporarily ended the varsity program while maintaining a JV team. The varsity team simply stopped during that season due to safety concerns. Because of how conference alignment worked based on student enrollment, East Hampton was playing larger-roster teams while losing badly and suffering injuries.
“Kids start seeing that and stop playing,” Fine says. “At that point our board was like, ‘We’re done. Why are we even trying to field a team?’ We knew the participation numbers nationally were declining due to head injuries. It was exponentially worse in East Hampton. Even myself as the principal, I’m seriously like, ‘Why are we even pushing this?’ We were close to dead.”
East Hampton now has 60 players through a shared program with two other nearby school districts. School officials credit the sport’s survival to the hiring of new coaches under head coach Joe McKee who live in the community and relate to kids in the hallways. It also helped that Vasile-Cozzo, the athletic director, successfully appealed to Section XI of the New York State High School Athletic Association for East Hampton to drop down to a less-competitive conference.
“We were allowed to come in as a new program, giving us time to rebuild,” Vasile-Cozzo says. “There’s no youth tackle program out here. We really are a developmental team. Next year we’re supposed to go back up (to a more competitive conference). That’s going to be the tell-tale sign if we survive. We’re not ready. I’m going to petition to stay where we are. I think it will be denied.”
Vasile-Cozzo acknowledges that football is a very expensive sport and places the price tag at about $250,000 annually – $4,200 per participant – to operate at East Hampton. There’s no gate revenue from home games; tickets are free. Why still play?
“When we didn’t have football, the energy in the school building was different,” Vasile-Cozzo says. “For me, athletics is worth it. Thankfully, the board allowed me to not give it up.”
Robert Rivera (middle school), Jaron Greenidge (high school JV) and Rodriguez (varsity assistant) have added Latino representation for potential football players to see and hear. In 2017, Rodriguez started a youth flag football league to replace the Police Athletic League tackle football program that discontinued due to parents’ fears about injuries.
There are now 155 kids in the flag program from prekindergarten through sixth grade. Tackle football in East Hampton doesn’t start until the seventh grade. Since some parents remain scared, Rodriguez encourages them to have their child wait until high school to start tackle.
“Look, it is a violent sport,” Rodriguez says. “However, I explain how it relates to our community. See, a lot of Latinos are blue collar and work multiple jobs and bust our butt to try to get to the suburbs and survive. Football is like that with all the hard work you have to do. Once the game slows down for them, they’re like, ‘I got this.’”
Why still play football at East Hampton? Perhaps the answer can be found in essays that many former players wrote about Rodriguez, who works as a warehouse manager during the day and also subs as a custodian.
Strategies that East Hampton High School uses that stood out as exemplary to the Aspen Institute and our project advisory board:
Engage students through personal workouts
In our national youth survey of high school suburban students, 44% of males and 33% of females said they work out at a gym. The older they are, the more suburban students say they work out – 28% in ninth grade vs. 44% in 12th grade. East Hampton has a fitness center with an instructor who helps athletes and non-athletes alike. “The kids really like it because the instructor will do a program specifically for you,” Athletic Director Joe Vasile-Cozzo says.
Go bowling for more athletes
Some students don’t want to run and sweat a lot. How can a school still keep them engaged? East Hampton offers bowling with 15 participants. The sport dried up for a while when the community’s bowling alley closed and picked up when a new location opened. “It’s a sport you can grab all kinds of different kids – not necessarily your athletes, but kids that really love competition,” Vasile-Cozzo says.
Use the power of triathlons to inspire girls
What if every girl believed she was brave, strong and capable? The East Hampton Union Free School District’s mental health coordinator runs an initiative called i-tri, which trains middle-school girls to complete a youth-distance triathlon as a metaphor for life’s journey in order to achieve big goals. The focus is on middle school because i-tri says research shows that the largest drop in self-esteem occurs during early adolescence (69% of elementary school-aged girls reported being “happy the way I am” vs. 29% for high school girls).
One player didn’t have a good relationship with his father when he met Rodriguez. “Lorenzo filled those shoes like nobody else could’ve, and honestly, I wouldn’t want it to be any other person,” the player wrote. “He just talks to you like a human and doesn’t try to downgrade you.”
Another player came to East Hampton knowing no English after living for 11 years in Colombia. He was very skinny and couldn’t communicate to teammates. It was Rodriguez who was “always pushing me and trying to make me take out the best of myself and believe in me,” the player wrote. “All of those words – ‘you can’ or ‘you can do better’ – were some of the things that were always in my head and made me the person I am today.”
Then there was a player who came to America after many emotional traumas and lived on his own starting at age 15. He never had a chance to be a kid and have fun. He met Rodriguez in the hallway and joined the football team. “I eventually turned to him for help, talking about how to manage money, what career to choose, what adulthood is like, and just the usual girl problems,” he wrote. “Basically, I saw him as a father or a big brother.”
By letting it out, East Hampton players stay true to who they are, and the school evolves as the country’s demographics continue to change.