13-Feb-2012 - In Vermont, Bronx Players Help Team, but Stir Outcry

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Mugsy Leggett, a former Harlem Globetrotter, was on the line. He was trying to help a group of talented teenagers he had been coaching who were growing up in and around the notorious Edenwald housing project in the Bronx. He had a proposal: could they come to Vermont and play for Mount St. Joseph, getting a good education along the way? Mark Benetatos, the Rutland coach, was delighted. “We knew that we had to attract kids who wanted to play,” he said. “We didn’t care where they were from.” And so four boys from the Bronx arrived in September 2010 and a fifth a few months later, moving in with host families in this faded city of 16,500 and enrolling at a school that, with only 95 students, was barely afloat. Quickly, the basketball team was transformed, notching a record of 16-7 for the 2010-11 season, a stunning turnaround from the previous year’s 2-18. This season, the Mounties, as the team is known, are 15-1 and sailing toward the state playoffs. But the story of the Bronx boys in Rutland is not a uniformly happy one. Some students and parents are livid about their presence on the team, saying it deprives local players of court time and is an underhanded cheap nfl jerseys tactic by Mount St. Joseph to improve its team. This month they beat their archrival, Rutland High School, for the first time in five years, a 62-49 game that drew more fans to Mount St. Joseph’s small gym than it had seen in years. “I’ve never seen that kind of school pride since I’ve been here,” said nfl jerseys supply Matt Sanborn, a junior from Rutland who is captain of the Division 2 team. Though the atmosphere that night was electric, nasty comments have flown on Facebook, at basketball games and elsewhere in town, directed not only at the players, but also at Mr. Benetatos and Cam Gilligan, a local woman who agreed to host four of the boys in a modest brick home here. Racial epithets have been directed at the boys, all five of whom are black, as well as taunts like “Go back to New York.”  One hometown player has transferred to Rutland High, and other students have threatened to leave. On the Web site of the state’s largest newspaper, The Burlington Free Press, anonymous comments on a sports blog underscore the tensions, with heated debates over whether the Bronx players deserve to be there or are “imports” who have “pushed aside” local boys. “You could say they feel the team is cheating,” Shannon Murray, one of the Bronx players, said the morning after the team’s victory against Rutland. “They don’t understand that it’s all 10 of us that make the team win,” said Jaskin Melendez, a quiet senior also from the Bronx. Matt Sanborn’s older brother, Tyler, who played on the team and is now at Georgetown University, wrote a letter to The Rutland Herald last month taking the critics to task. “Are there good people that will come to the side of these young men and recognize their record of good citizenship?” he wrote. “Or will those that bark about ‘local kids’ and ‘imports’ be the only ones mlb jerseys from china heard in this city?” The team members say they are all exceedingly close — “We started as strangers and ended up family,” Shannon said — and are countering the attacks with actions instead of words. “We get back at them playing on the court and performing on the court,” Matt said. “We’ve kind of held each other accountable to that.” To Paolo Zancanaro, the school principal, admitting the boys from the Bronx was about fulfilling the school’s mission, not giving its basketball team a star turn. Alumni and other donors agreed to contribute a portion of the 5,000-a-year tuition for them, plus room and board.

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