Too many times, we hear about a teen that “fell through the cracks.” So everybody shakes their heads and says, “how sad.”
Yano Jones
Thankfully, there’s someone doing something to close the cracks. Yano Jones, an educator and athletic trainer in Omaha, Nebraska, works during the day at Northwest High School teaching juniors and seniors about how to prepare for college. Then, during the winter and spring months, he trains them on the field to help them maximize their athletic skills at the Red Zone Academy, which he founded. Again, the idea is to help them get to college, perhaps on an athletic scholarship.
Jones said most of the youth in his program at Northwest – funded by Omaha’s Bright Futures Foundation — are the ones who would normally have fallen through the cracks. Their grades are too low to really get into college, so they would just give up or never consider higher education as an option.
The athletes he works with at Red Zone Academy are much the same. They are, for the most part, pretty good athletes – not the stars – who perhaps never thought they had the talent to get a college scholarship.
And since Jones works with many kids who come from “at risk” backgrounds, it makes the work he does all the more important.
In addition to the athletic training at Red Zone Academy, Jones builds an hour of study time into each session. Plus, he shows the student-athletes some of the details they’ll have to take care of to get a college scholarship (transcripts, clearinghouses, what position suits them best in their sport, etc.).
Jones is a former standout athlete who played football at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska, where he received his degree.
“It’s rewarding helping students who may not ever have gotten into college, the kids with 2.5 GPAs and below,” Jones said of his work at Northwest. As far as Jones knows, “no one else in the country is doing it as a class in high school, that’s what takes it to a whole different level. We’ll be with the kids consistently, every day.”
With regard to athletics, Jones says “there are kids who athletically can do it but academically don’t. They don’t take care of the little things.”
He said he hated to see potential academic or athletic talent go to waste, so he decided to do something positive.
His list of successes is long – 17 teens from his Red Zone Academy class of 2008 alone have gone on to play sports at either a 4-year university or community college.
That’s a lot of lives helped by one person being motivated enough to take time to simply patch some cracks.
