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typingtess · 6 years

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NCIS: Los Angeles Season Nine Rewatch: "Mountebank"

The basics: A dead stockbroker with connections to a Russian crime lord has Sam going undercover as the broker's firm. Callen is out of the mix as one of his old aliases is the victim of identity theft.

Written by: Jordana Lewis Jaffe wrote or co-wrote “Honor”, “Patriot Acts”, “Dead Body Politic”, “Paper Soldiers”, “Unwritten Rule”, “Big Brother”, “Iron Curtain Rising”, “Exposure”, “Savior Faire”, “Beacon”, “Defectors”, “Exchange Rate”, “Black Market”, “Payback” and "Battle Scars".

Directed by: Terrence O’Hara, who directed “The Only Easy Day”, “Brimstone”, “The Bank Job”, “Borderline”, “Tin Soldiers”, “The Job”, “Backstopped”, “Crimeleon”, “Blye, K.” Part Two, “San Voir” Part Two, “End Game”, “Paper Soldiers”, “Descent”, “Ascension”, “Fish Out of Water”, “Blaze of Glory”, “Command and Control” (episode 150), “Matryoshka” Part Two, “Belly of the Beast” and "Payback".

Guest stars of note: Vyto Ruginis returns from season seven's "Glasnost" as Arkady Kolcheck Tembi Locke as Leigha Winters, Costas Mandylor as Abram Sokolov (brother Louis was serial killer Lucas Maragos in season two's "Little Angels), Uriah Shelton as Finn, Svetlana Efremova as Vladlena Sokolov, Jon Lindstrom as Phillip Nelson, Presilah Nunez as NCIS Analyst Dana Hill, Amy Stewart as Jen, Dan Southworth as Alika Hatch, Rich Ting as Keith, Mark Bloom as Victor and Americus Abesamis as Tomo.

Our heroes: Start another episode that gets wrapped up down the road. Plus, Arkady returns!

What important things did we learn about:

Callen: Victim of alias identity theft.. Sam: Really showing his financial wizardry this season. Kensi: Arkady likes her more than Anna. Deeks: Arkady does not care for him at all. Eric: Needs two seconds to break into a finance firm's computers. Nell: Looking to see how Callen was a victim of alias identity theft. Mosley: Pulled Callen from the case because he was the victim of alias identity theft. Hetty: Being sought in Hawaii by a friend of Sam's.

What not so important things did we learn about:

Callen: Finds a not so trusty ward (like Robin to Batman, which CO'D would know about). Sam: Reading the Wall Street Journal since he was 12. Kensi: Bringer of baked goods. Deeks: Enjoying Arkady's bling. Eric: Would not let Dexter Hughes date his sister if he had a sister. Nell: Takes out a guy with a pool cue for stealing Callen’s alias and running. Mosley: Working out of the armory. Hetty: Not in the episode.

Who's down with OTP: Kensi and Deeks go underground clubbing with Arkady.

Who's down with BrOTP: Callen and Sam are split up by Mosley for most of the case but are working together to find Hetty. Deeks found a shared love of inappropriate male jewelry with Arkady.

Any pressing need for Harm and Mac: Navy reservist Phillip Nelson doesn't survive the teaser.

Today in Harley: Crosstalk in Ops to start the episode on a down note but backing up Sam ably in the field works. She also learns a bit about Sam and his non-bluffing math skills. Catches Callen trying to sneak up on her. Gets Sokolov with the overwatch spray after worrying Deeks jinxed the operation. Good Harley day.

Fashion review: Dark blue button down shirt for Callen (Callen's shirt game has improved over the last two seasons or so). The brown henley makes an appearance for Sam. Kensi is in her white and dark blue stripped tee with a scoop neck. Medium blue v-neck tee for Deeks. Green plaid short-sleeve shirt over a pink tee-shirt for Eric. Grey and white sweater-jacket over a black pinstriped dress for Nell. Midnight blue dress for Mosley (much better look that the suits from the prior episodes and the jumper). Grey pullover top and burgundy suede jacket (fantastic!) for Hidoko.

Music: "Everybody'sTalkin'" by Harry Nillson opens the episode (great song choice). "(Loose Booty) Isa Real Thing" by Everyday People is playing when Kensi and Deeks visit Arkady at home. "Gimme You" by Pom Poms plays as Kensi, Deeks and Arkady arrive at the club.

Any notable cut scene: One short scene and really not all that notable. Mosley arrives in Ops looking for an update from Eric and Nell. They don't have one. And Callen hasn't called in. 36-seconds of nothing.

Quote: Mosley: "Sam, I want you to go in." Callen: "Yeah, we usually decide as a team which one of us is gonna go undercover." Mosley: "'Usually' being the operative word. There's a new sheriff, remember?" Callen: "You make it hard not to."

Anything else: On a winding Mullholland Drive in Los Angeles, a driver is chatting on his cell with a second man. The driver is also trying to get a TicTac while discussing business. The non-driver is looking to visit someplace called Mountebank. He insists Phillip – the driver – take him to that "lovely little town." Phillip the driver dropped his Purell as he is trying to drive, eat a TicTac, talk business with the guy who wants to go to Mountebank and clean up his Purell bottle. A near miss with an oncoming car has Phillip pullover to a mid-mountain off road area. As Phillip sits in his vehicle, a Jeep smashes into Phillip's driver's side.

The call is being monitored by outsiders who hear the accident.

Just inside the doors to the office, Callen is waiting for Nell. She is worried he's "stalking" her. Callen is just worried – someone opened up a credit card in his name. Nell wonders if it is Anna but Callen assures her that he and Anna are not at the credit card sharing point in their relationship. And it wasn't his name – it was Dexter's. Nell is not a fan of the Dexter alias – he is the picture of white privilege. Callen thinks it could be just routine identity theft but with the security breach around Sam that caused Michelle's death, it needs to be checked out.

Eric arrives. Callen asks Eric his opinion of Dexter Hughes – his alias. Eric is not a fan, wouldn’t let his sister (if he had one) date Dexter and would say that to Dexter's face. Callen reminds Eric that he and Dexter share a face. Eric backs down but tells Callen and Nell they have a case.

Up in Ops, Callen learns Kensi and Deeks are already in the field. A Joint Terrorist Task Force is working just a few blocks from their house. Eric, Nell and Hidoko sort of talk over each other to start the briefing. After not coming to a decision about who should go first, Sam just wants someone to start. Hidoko does. The JTTF heard the conversations in the car. Phillip is Phillip Nelson, the CEO of a financial firm. The other man was Abram Sokolov, a Russian oligarch who has been hit with financial sanctions by the US Government.

Hidoko plays the conversation. Callen and Sam seem confused. Nell wonders if Mountebank is a Swiss town. Sam isn't sure – Sokolov operates with protection from Putin. He is a skilled drug smuggler and arms dealer. NCIS is on the case because Nelson is a Navy Reservist. Callen and Sam are off to see the car wreck.

Kensi and Deeks are with the JTTF. Mountebank is code but nobody knows what it means. Abram Sokolov is involved with a number of JTTF conversations. He talks to a lot of different people all day long – he rarely sleeps. He also likes the ponies.

The area where Phillip Nelson's car was hit has no traffic cameras. There is no way to ID the hit and run driver. Sam looks at the tire marks – there are no skid marks. The driver didn't stop when he or she saw they were going to hit Nelson. They also hit Nelson while he was on the phone with Sokolov – proof of death. Sam thinks Callen's Dexter Hughes ID runs in the same circles as Phillip Nelson. The stolen ID could be a way to distract Callen – look what happened the last time the team was distracted.

Eric calls Callen but Mosley takes his little ear piece. She wants to talk to Callen. She wants Sam to go in undercover at Nelson's firm and get all of Sokolov's account information. Callen says the team usually decides who goes in undercover. Mosley points out the word usually and then reminds the men that there is a new sheriff in town.

Nell arrives with the news that the traders at Nelson's firm are beginning to short the market. The market could crash. The firm is betting big – they know something. Mosley wants them to find out what the firm knows and stop it.

Callen and Sam return to the office. Sam has a friend named Hatch working at Pearl Harbor who is looking for Hetty. If she is in Hawaii, Hatch will find her. Callen is worried that Hetty will be upset if she thinks the team is spying on her. Sam promises Hatch will be discreet.

Callen and Sam join Kensi, Deeks and Nell in the bullpen. Sam wants to know what he's walking into. Nell explains that Phillip Nelson's firm, West Valley Venue, does what big financial firms like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs do but do it with much smaller client base and do it in Los Angeles, which is not a financial capital like New York. Senior VP and Managing Director Leigha Winters took over Nelson's position an hour after news of his death was made public. "Money never sleeps," according to Sam. Sam will interview with a number of West Valley's executives before meeting with Winters. Until this morning they were not looking to hire but Sam's faux resume as Trevor Ward with "a very persuasive cover letter" impressed. Callen is worried about Sam going into such a major financial gig but Sam knows his stuff – even started reading the Wall Street Journal at age 12.

Mosley arrives. Hidoko is going with Sam on Overwatch. She's learned about Callen's alias having his ID stolen. Callen shoots Nell a snotty look – hey, she's not the one who stole your identity. Sam is fine having Callen as back-up but Mosley is looking out for both of them. Hidoko goes.

Mosley pulls Callen into the armory. She asks if he truly believes his comprised alias poses no threat to the case. Callen says he's takes every precaution. She tells him it is not an answer. He replies he doesn't have an answer but he working the case with both eyes opened as is the rest of the team. Until Callen can secure his alias, though she's like to have Callen backing up Sam, he's not in the field.

A very annoyed Callen goes to Ops to see Nell. He demands to know why she told Mosley. She did not tell Mosley. When he wants to know how Mosley knew, Nell asks how did Hetty know things? How did Granger? "I promise you it wasn't me." Nell find an apartment rented to Dexter Hughes. Callen leaves to check it out without apologizing. Nell says to herself, since Callen is gone, she's just doing what she does.

Kensi and Deeks visit with Mosley in the armory. She's cleaning her rather pricy guns. Kensi and Deeks explain they know a big time Russian guy who could help the case, big time. Mosley wants to know if the big time Russian guy could compromise the case. "Big time," Deeks replies. But there is a slight chance he could help the case. The big time Russian guy is a problem but he's also a "charming bastard" especially to "those people on the wrong side of the law."

Mosley knows of Arkady. She is concerned about his connection to Callen and to Callen's connection with Anna. Deeks assures Mosley that neither he or Kensi have a romantic relationship with Arkady, Anna and they don't plan on bringing Callen with them to see Arkady. Mosley is on board.

Callen goes through a series of interviews – all quite entertaining. A finance bro, the woman who has to deal with the finance bro, a spreadsheet whiz with his financial model all talk to Sam before Leigha Winters. Hidoko on comms wants to know how much Sam truly understands about spreadsheet whiz's model. He assures he was not bluffing.

Callen breaks in to his alias' rented apartment. It could be Callen's place. No furniture, a futon mattress on the floor.

Leigha Winters tells Sam the staff is impressed with him. She wants to know why Sam's Trevor wants to join the firm. Trevor explains he thought about opening his own place but decided he needed a partner. He saw that West Valley was shorting the market – they're not afraid to take big chances. He's the man to take big chances with the firm.

Kensi and Deeks go to Arkady's. He's offended they're knocking on his door before 8AM on a Sunday. It is after 11AM on Monday, Deeks tells him. Arkady won't deal with them until he has breakfast. Kensi has pastries. He won't talk until he has his coffee. Since it is transitional weather, Deeks brought both iced and hot coffee. Iced coffee it is for Arkady.

Arkady has three young women in bikinis, poolside. He orders them to go inside and play ping-pong. He tells Kensi and Deeks they are his nieces. Kensi asks about Abram Sokolov. Arkady tells Kensi how much he likes her – how he wishes she was his daughter and not Anna sometimes, "but please don't tell her." As for Deeks, "I care less so for you," according to Arkady. But he is concerned enough to share his Sokolov rule – stay as far away from him as you can. He prefers at least one continent. When he learns that Sokolov is not only in the US but NCIS is working to take him down, Arkady announces "you guys are in big trouble."

Sam meets with finance bro. Finance bro is going to keep busy to not deal with Phillip's death. Sam asks about foreign transaction. The company uses them to keep up with big guys. A few folks are going out for lunch but Sam's Trevor is staying behind to catch up. When finance bro leaves, Sam with Eric's help gets into finance bro's computer.

Arkady's bedroom is everything you'd think it would be. He has a large jewelry collection that Deeks is enjoying. Deeks wants a big gold chain with a diamond encrusted "D" and a "sexy little pinky ring." Arkady tells Kensi and Deeks he's does his best thinking in the shower and appears in a the most Arkady towels ever (little pom poms on them and everything). Kensi and Deeks are mortified. Deeks can see his nipples. Arkady wants to bring them to Sokolov's sister Vladlena.

Callen and Nell update each other on Sam's status (Nell) and the empty apartment (Callen). Callen found a receipt from a Santa Monica bar in the apartment's trash. Nell thinks someone is going to a lot of trouble to get Callen's attention.

Leigha chides Sam about not going to lunch with the team. He's ready for Taco Tuesday after Macrobiotic Monday. She also asks about his passport. There is a business meeting in Nicaragua and she wants him there.

Arkady takes Kensi and Deeks to a private club. The mountain of a man acting as a doorman, Timo, is friendly with Arkady. He lets them in, reminding them of the house rules. Arkady introduces Kensi and Deeks to Vladlena who, after he gives her a hefty stack of cash, insists her guests do a shot. Arkady is all in, Kensi and Deeks want to ask questions first. Vladlena shows them her weapon – Kensi and Deeks could not enter the club with theirs – so it is shots for everyone. "Oh, that's not good," according to Deeks.

Callen tries and fails to sneak up on Hidoko. She doesn't like it. Hidoko also fills Callen in on Sam's trip to Nicaragua.

Deeks is winning big at Vladlena's tables. He's got a huge stack of chips and a nice bit of Arkady's jewelry. Vladlena dismisses the others at the table. Alone with Kensi, Deeks and Arkady, she tells them she tried to give Abram, "the little snot", away as a baby. She regrets failing. The last man to ask about her brother, Vladlena says, wound up getting a bath in acid. Despite "terrifying head's up", Deeks asks about Nicaragua. Vladlena says it likely has to do with his obsession with the ponies. Nicaragua is a great place for horses and "because he can get away with whatever he wants there." She feels sorry for Sam visiting with Abram in Nicaragua.

Sam gets Sokolov's account info and figures out what Nelson was doing – mirror trading to launder Sokolov’s money. Mountebank is the mirror trading. Sam wants to find out what Sokolov is doing with the money. Nell calls Callen – she found Dexter Hughes. Callen tells her to bring her gun, she's going into the field with him.

At Vladlena's club, Deeks is arm-wrestling Timo. Deeks wins and winds up with Vladlena's necklace. At some point, Arkady lost his shirt -Timo is wearing it. Arkady and Timo are arm-wrestling. Vladlena explains that Abram found some dirt on Phillip Nelson and forced him to work for him. When Phillip said no to some transactions, that was the beginning of the end for Phillip. And now Abram has dirt on Leigha Winters. Kensi and Deeks need to get to Leigha Winters. Deeks returns Vladlena's necklace to thank her for her cooperation. Arkady presents Deeks with an invoice for his services.

Callen walks into a Santa Monica bar. Nell is playing pool. He tells the bartender he's looking for Dexter Hughes. The bartender points to a young guy in a baseball cap at the bar. The young guy runs out of the bar through the kitchen. Callen chases him with Nell going out the front door with the pool stick. She takes down fake Dexter Hughes with the pool stick. Nell gets a text message. Kensi and Deeks brought Leigha Winters to the boat shed. Callen brings not-Dexter Hughes there as well. Deeks thinks it is bring your kid to work day as Callen marches his charge to the upstairs interrogation room.

Kensi asks about Callen's "new little buddy". Deeks respects that a kid stole Callen's alias. Callen is a little impressed too but wants to know if the kid is involved with the case. Callen asks what Leigha Winters has told them. Nothing, according to Deeks, who is wearing all of Arkady's jewelry. Callen wants to know what Deeks did to Arkady. "Bling" is Deeks's answer.

Callen talks to Winters in interrogation. She knows she wouldn't be at the boat shed if NCIS didn't know what she was doing. Callen shows her a photo of not-Dexter Hughes. Winters has no idea who he is. Callen asks if the others at the firm know about Sokolov. She didn't know about Sokolov until a week ago. The staff thinks the mirror trades are for an oil company.

Winters doesn't have time to waste with Callen. She is supposed to meet with Sokolov in an hour. She has some of his money – money he will give the Ukrainians to fight the Russians, a war they can never win. The money would buy American weapons with the idea of getting the US dragged into the Russian conflict.

Callen and Mosley meet. They both agree Sokolov is worth more to them alive and thinking he's a free man than dead. Callen will lead the team – with Sam staying at the bank in case the plan fails – to take down Sokolov's deal. Hidoko will sub for Sam.

The team follows Winters to a warehouse. Deeks thinks everything will be fine -he's wearing his lucky chain (OK, Arkady's unlucky chain). Hidoko thinks Deeks jinxed them. In the warehouse, boxes of alleged sunblock are being prepared to transport the money. He is joking about the money. Winters wants to know why she's there. Sokolov doesn't trust her.

That's a signal for Deeks to distract everyone. He does. Nobody yells "federal agent" but Callen, Kensi and Deeks start firing at Sokolov's men. Leigha Winters drags Sokolov to safety. Kensi follows. In the street, Winters and Sokolov run into a person in a hoodie. The hoodie person is Hidoko and she sprays him with the Overwatch spray from season two (nice use of show history!). Kensi is up in a sniper's nest waiting for Winters and Sokolov. As Winters and Sokolov drive off, Ops starts to track Sokolov with the spray.

Mosley congratulates the team as they pack up at the end of the day. NCIS has recovered all the laundered money. No guns for Ukrainians and Sokolov thinks Leigha Winters is on his side. Deeks presents Mosley with Arkady's invoice. It is on a red cocktail napkin. And sticky. Callen mentions to Mosley that "Hidoko took names today." Mosley knows – she trained her.

In the boat shed, Sam is talking to his buddy Hatch from Pearl Harbor when Callen arrives. Hetty's boat is still in the Hanalei Bay marina. It has been there since September 6th (the episode aired October 29th). It has been abandoned on the island. Hetty never set foot on the shore. Callen tries to explain Hetty's trade craft but Hatch explains that no tiny white woman would move on the Island without his people being aware of her.

Sam asks where could she be. Hatch thinks she went with a smuggler named Tilo Iona. There was a rumor that a "Menehune" was on one of his boats. "Menehune" a Hawaiian phrase – a Hawaiian leprechaun. Sam ends the call. Callen wants to look into Iona but has something else to do first.

Callen goes upstairs to see not-Dexter. Callen asks if his young charge is 18. He is. Callen is relieved, fewer government agencies involved. Callen asks about Abram Sokolov, Leigha Winters and Grisha Callen. The kid does not know any of these people. Callen asks about the apartment. The kid admits to that – he needed a place to live. Callen quickly figures out the kid was from one of his old foster homes. There is a hole in one of the walls – Callen made it. Callen is fine with the kid keeping the apartment but he can't use Dexter's name again. Or the credit cards. Callen sees potential in the kid. Callen wants the kid to call him if he needs help. The kid introduces himself as Matt but quickly admits his name is Finn.

And Microsoft gets its credit. Yay Microsoft!

What head canon can be formed from here: Callen finds a Mini-Me. Out on the town with Arkady.

Episode number: Episode number 197, number five of season nine.

#NCIS: Los Angeles Rewatch #NCIS: Los Angeles #NCIS: LA #NCIS Los Angeles #ncis la

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builder051 · 7 years

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It’s the final countdown...

We done did it! 22 stories for 22 asks from the 100 Prompts List!!!

@summerblosoms requested #91 (yay for the only DIY pick). They said,

“If you could make Spencer have something along the lines of appendicitis and be really sick that would be great. Like have him faint at work or something from being so sick.”

Your wish is my command! This is probably slightly medically inaccurate. I’m basing it on what I think I know about Harry Houdini (which is not a lot).

Bear with me; it’s a bit long.

___

“Are you sure you’re ok?” JJ asks.

Spencer pauses as he slides into the backseat of the black SUV, trying not to wince as the change in position agitates his stomach.

“You took a hard hit back there. I wish you would’ve let the paramedics check you out.” JJ holds the car door open and watches Spencer shakily fasten his seatbelt.

“I’m ok,” he says. He’s been saying it for hours now. After the unsub had punched him in the gut, to the police and firefighters surrounding the scene, and a thousand times on the flight back home to Quantico. “I just need to wait for it to bruise and start healing.”

JJ sighs and gives him a sad smile. “At least come by my desk and get some Aleve. You…look like you’re having a hard enough time.”

“Yeah, ok,” Spencer replies. He waits for JJ to shut the door and climb into the SUV’s front seat, then leans back and shuts his eyes. The pink inflamed skin on the right side of his abdomen is tender to the touch of anything from his fingers to his shirt, and the dazed nausea that follows such a hard hit still lingers. He’s sure nothing’s damaged, though. The pain he feels isn’t the sharpness of a fracture in his rib or hip bone. Just generalized discomfort. That’s currently making him feel like he needs to vomit. But he’s fine.

The ride from the airstrip back to the office is short, made to feel shorter by the sleepy darkness outside. It’s after 11 at night, and while the agents are used to odd hours, it doesn’t make the prospect of sleepy paperwork any more inviting.

“Just do the minimum,” Hotch says when everyone piles out of the elevator and heads to their desks. “Only the most important paperwork. Get things written down while they’re fresh in your mind. Then go home.” He makes eye contact with each team member to ensure understanding. “And sleep in tomorrow. I’ll call if another case drops.”

Spencer trudges to his chair and opens a drawer of files. He selects blank case report forms and a pen, then sighs and bends over the desktop. The position forces his ribcage to put pressure on his stomach, and exterior pain and interior nausea combine in swirling uneasiness.

He works on the papers for a few minutes. He’s forcibly reminded of being a child in school, scribbling out answers on worksheets while trying to hide an upset stomach lest he be sent to the nurse’s office. He’d been eight years old. And he’d thrown up all over his math workbook.

But that’s not the situation now. Spencer’s an adult. Case reports are immensely more important than arithmetic problems, and he should be focusing. So what if he’s hurting a little bit? He can’t let small things distract him. It doesn’t even hurt that much. He’s fine.

“Spence?” JJ’s at his shoulder with a bottle of pills and a Styrofoam cup of metallic-tasting tap water. “Here.” She portions out a dose of naproxen sodium and hands it over. Her soft fingers linger for a moment on Spencer’s clammy palm. He draws back and tosses the pill down his throat, mostly dry-swallowing it before gulping down the water as a chaser.

“It’s ok if you’re hurting, you know,” JJ murmurs.

“I’m ok.” Spencer really wishes he has something else to say.

One by one, the agents take their leave. Garcia promises donuts and lattes in the morning to make up for the late night. Hotch tells her to stop spending her own money on the team, but the blithe tech analyst just whips out a pom-pom topped pen and scribbles down everyone’s usual Starbucks order.

“Americano with way too many sugars?” she asks when she makes her round to Spencer’s desk.

It is his usual favorite, but right now it sounds revolting. Spencer tries not to let it show in his voice when he says, “Yeah. Sure.”

“What’s wrong?” Garcia asks immediately, her mouth turning down in an expression of concern.

“Nothing, I’m fine,” Spencer lies again.

“Hey, but, no, no you’re not.” Garcia puts a hand on Spencer’s shoulder. “You feeling ok? I heard you got beat up…”

“Yeah, I’m just kind of tired,” Spencer says.

“Then get out of here.” Hotch approaches on Spencer’s other side. He has his briefcase in hand and his coat over his arm as if he’s on the way out the door himself. “Really, with a memory like yours, you can work all your forms in the morning.”

Normally, Spencer would humbly agree. It’s usually not a challenge to recall past events with a good degree of exactitude. Now, though, everything seems fuzzy. Except for the memory of the gloved fist coming into slow-motion contact with Spencer’s side before he’d had the opportunity to don a bulletproof vest or draw a weapon.

“I will,” Spencer says. “In just a minute. I really want to get this first page done…” He looks down at his sloppy scribbles and the two or three blank spaces still remaining on the sheet.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Hotch says, giving Spencer a serious nod. “If I find out you’ve stayed here halfway through the night, we’ll have to talk about you working yourself too hard.”

“Yes, sir,” Spencer articulates.

“I’ll get you an extra-special donut,” Garcia promises. Worry flickers in her eyes for a second, but Spencer pulls a pained smile that seems to placate her enough to take her leave.

Finally all the other agents are gone. Spencer lowers his head to his desk, ignoring the greasy forehead print he’s leaving on the case file. He should go home. He wants more than anything to sleep. But his gut is brewing a queasy feeling that ricochets off the pain in his stomach and shoots up to his skull. Because a headache to match his stomachache is exactly what he needs right now.

Standing up and walking and sitting and driving and walking and lying down all seem like hassles Spencer’s not equipped to deal with in his current state of misery. Maybe the painkiller JJ gave him will kick in soon and relieve some of the awful, swirling stress. He’ll shut his eyes, just for a moment…

Spencer starts awake and sits up abruptly. He’s still in his office chair, and papers and files leave creases in his clammy cheek. Dizziness assaults him as soon as he’s upright. The lamp on his desk is on, but all other lights in the bullpen are extinguished.

The lighted dial on his watch tells Spencer it’s a bit after 4 in the morning. He’s slept some, but in an uncomfortable position. He’s still less than rested. Spencer scrubs his hands over his face, his fingertips tingling as they drag over stubble on their way up to his hairline. His whole body feels sweaty and just shy of disgusting. A feverish ache thrums in his temples, and pain lances up and out from his stomach.

It’s too late to go home. But it’s also too early to do anything else. On a normal day, agents generally start filing in around 7. But after yesterday’s late night and the promise of a less-than-early start, Spencer doubts he’ll see anyone before 8:30. So really, he does have time to go home, shower, sleep, and come back. He abandons the idea when the motion to stand up has him swallowing down bile.

There’s still a clean shirt in his go-bag, so Spencer digs it out and heads for the bathroom to change. He’ll take every precaution if it means he can avoid his fellow agents knowing that he’s spent the night here. Spencer uses his shoulder to open the heavy washroom door, and the motion-detected light snaps on as soon as he’s crossed the threshold.

He squints against the brightness, but Spencer can clearly see that he looks awful. He slips out of his cardigan and unbuttons his white oxford shirt. He sheds his undershirt, wads up the fabric, and uses it to dab oiliness and sweat from his face. Then he turns his attention to the patch of blushed purple spreading over the right side of his abdomen.

The skin isn’t broken, but it’s inflamed with the slight puffiness that surrounds healing cuts. Blood has seeped under the skin to show up as a reddish-violet shadow that’s sure to darken to all colors of black and blue and green as it heals. Spencer dabs at the injury, and searing heat follows the touch of his fingers. His skin hurts on the outside, and something definitely hurts on the inside. Spencer’s stomach clenches, and he wonders if he’s going to throw up as he stands there, clutching the counter with one hand and praying he doesn’t fall over.

Pain signals often redirect to nausea. It’s unfortunate, but not uncommon. But Spencer feels sick too. Not just to his stomach, but all over. Tender aches creep into his lower back and up and down to the joints of his arms and legs. His head’s wanging. But that might be from dehydration. Besides the sip of water Spencer took along with the painkillers last night, he doesn’t know when he last drank. Or ate. But he feels so far from hunger it’s almost comical.

Spencer scoops water from the bathroom faucet and splashes it over his face. He uses a couple paper towels to dry off and wipe perspiration from under his arms. Satisfied that he’s as clean as he’s going to get, he shakes the wrinkles out of his fresh shirt and buttons it over his bare chest, cringing as the starched fabric brushes his injury.

He exits the bathroom and drops his dirty clothes in his go-bag. Then Spencer glances around for something to keep him occupied for the next few hours. He considers going back to the case file, but too much work done on it will arouse suspicion and potentially alert his co-workers to the fact that he’s been here all night. Spencer’s eyes alight on the coffeemaker, and though the idea of putting anything in his stomach is still revolting, at least sipping will be something to do. And perhaps the caffeine will get him feeling back like himself. Or at least make a dent in the headache.

He returns to his desk once he has a steaming foam cup in his trembling hand. The first sip feels energizing as Spencer swallows it, but it doesn’t taste good. More sweat breaks out across his moustache, and the heat of his bruise flares as the liquid drips into his stomach.

Heaving a deep sigh, Spencer opens his desk drawer and paws around for anything worth passing time with. He pulls out one of Rossi’s books and stares down at the face of his friend and fellow agent on the dust jacket. Spencer’s read it before, and he recalls most of the main points, but he opens it anyway and begins to read. He goes intentionally slowly, hearing Rossi’s voice in each word. Spencer’s used to reading for content alone, and he has to admit that the hours passed moving his gaze at a snail’s pace across the page is a welcome change. Or at least it is until his eyes start to lose focus and nausea begins creeping up on him again.

Overly sweet and coffee-flavored spit floods Spencer’s mouth. He sets the book on the desktop where it flops shut, losing his page. He brings both hands up to cover his nose and lips and sucks in a long breath that does little to soothe the bubbling tumult in his stomach. Heat flashes over Spencer’s skin, and his hands and feet feel unnaturally cold and damp.

He stumbles up and trips toward the bathroom as his liquid stomach contents start to make a reappearance at the back of his throat. Spencer sprints past the row of sinks and throws himself head-first into the lonely stall. He retches as soon as his knees hit the ground. His abdominals contract, igniting lines of lightning-hot pain across his bruised stomach. Spencer moans into the echoing toilet bowl and spits out strings of mucous.

The fact that there’s little to purge doesn’t stop Spencer’s stomach from turning itself inside out. He’s empty and aching after a few decent heaves, but dry retching quickly sets in, bringing more pain with each spine-arching contraction. He wraps his long fingers around the toilet seat and watches his knuckles go white from the bone-crushing pressure. He’s still so seasick he can barely move.

When the heaves dissolve into hiccups, Spencer shakily pulls himself to his feet, using the toilet paper dispenser for support. His eyeballs feel like they’re vibrating in their sockets, giving him the overall feeling that the earth is jittering beneath his feet. He crosses to the counter of sinks and splashes his face again, bringing a handful up to his lips to rinse the disgusting taste of caffeinated bile from his tongue.

After pressing a paper towel to his ashen skin, Spencer exits the bathroom. His loose plan is to head back for his desk and curl inward; just standing upright stretches the skin of his stomach and invites the roiling throb to escalate.

All ideas are dashed, though, when he opens the door to see the back of a blonde head and pink-sweatered shoulders bobbing around the desks in the bullpen.

Spencer lets go of the bathroom door without realizing what he’s doing, and the resulting slam jars him as much as it does Garcia.

“Oh my god!” the tech analyst shrieks, dropping the box of donuts in her arms and sending them bouncing across the floor and under Morgan’s desk. She whips around and looks for the source of the noise. Her eyes widen behind her brightly colored glasses when she sees Spencer. “Oh my god,” she repeats.

Garcia’s high heels clack as she rushes to Spencer’s side, but the sound grows fuzzy on its way up to his ears. Stars start to blink at the corners of his visual field, and Spencer’s head feels heavy and lopsided. Without warning, the world tips sickeningly, and the ceiling swaps places with the bullpen’s eastern wall. He blinks hard to see if the illusion will clear. But it doesn’t, and the back of his head smack against something hard.

“Reid! Oh, god, sweetheart…” Warm hands find Spencer’s shoulders, then move up to cup his cheeks. He forces his eyes open to see Penelope’s blurry face, then doubles instinctively onto his side as a rush of nausea forces itself up and out.

“Ok, you’re ok,” Garcia murmurs, patting Spencer on the back as he throws up spit and air. Then she changes tact, the panic in her voice escalating. “You’re not ok. You’re really sick.” She palms Spencer’s sweaty forehead. “You’re really, really sick.”

Spencer coughs and clutches his stomach, grunting in pain when he presses too hard on the wound dominating his right side.

“Your stomach?” Garcia asks. She reaches down and lifts the tails of Spencer’s untucked shirt to expose the bare skin underneath. “Oh my…” she trails off when she sees the spread of bruising. “You’re—Reid, I don’t…I’m gonna call an ambulance, ok?” She lightly palpates the discolored area on his stomach, and Spencer lets out an involuntary cry when her fingers rebound.

“Oh god, that’s right where your appendix is,” she worries. “If you got hit and it’s all infected…” Penelope trails off and yanks her neon-encased cell phone from her pocket. “I’m calling right now. You’re gonna be ok.”

Spencer hears the phone ringing out a couple times before an operator picks up. And over the tone, he can hear Garcia whispering, “You’ll be ok. You have to be ok.”

The ambulance ride and everything after is a blur. The next thing Spencer knows, he’s in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. He’s groggy, and every inch of his body hurts. He can see a nasal cannula in his peripheral vision, dispensing oxygen into his tired lungs. A glance to one side shows an IV stand and heart monitor. In the other direction is a chair. Garcia’s slumped against the wall, her eyes closed and mouth open in the posture of uncomfortable upright sleep.

“Garcia?” Spencer wheezes.

“Huh?” Penelope snaps up, wiping drool from her lip with the back of her hand. “I said you’d be ok, right?” she says sleepily.

“Yeah.” Spencer nods. “Yeah, I think you did.”

#criminal minds #fanfic #fanfiction #sickfic #injury #appendicitis #emeto #emetophilia #spencer reid #reid whump #penelope garcia #jj #jennifer jereau #hotch #aaron hotchner

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the-master-cylinder · 4 years

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Russell was born in San Diego, California, the daughter of Constance (née Lerner) and Richard Lion Russell, a stock analyst. Three of her four grandparents were Jewish. Her maternal grandfather was journalist and educator Max Lerner. Russell wanted to be an actress since the age of eight and started acting in school plays. She appeared in a Pepsi commercial that was taped locally while in high school. After graduating from Mission Bay High School in 1981, she moved to Los Angeles and began taking acting classes before landing her first role. She did a masters program in Spiritual Psychology at the University of Santa Monica and is a certified hypnotist and life coach, also from the University of Santa Monica.

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The day after graduating high school, with limited commercial and modeling experience. Russell set out for Los Angeles with a UCLA-bound girlfriend. She located a roommate, actress Diane Brody, via the campus bulletin board. Brody helped Russell line up acting classes and waitressing jobs. Accompanying an acting classmate to an audition, Russell walked away with representation. She was subsequently cast in an unapologetic PORKY’S clone titled Private School (1983)

Private School (1983) Chris from a girls’ boarding school loves Jim from a nearby boys’ boarding school. Jordan also wants Jim and plays dirty. Jim and 2 friends visit the girls’ school posing as girls.

Russell played Jordan Leigh-Jensen, “a spoiled rich girl willing to do anything to get her way.” As her romantic rival, the top-billed Phoebe Cates waged war for the affections of Matthew Modine. Critics excoriated the film’s leering sexism, but Russell’s recollections are pleasant. “It was like walking on air,” she recalled. “Phoebe Cates was my idol at the time, and she was so nice to me. We grew very close, and she was fun to work with.”

Phobe Cates, in fact, coached the novice actress who was nervous about her nude scene: “Phoebe said, ‘Oh, this is nothing-in Paradise (1982) I had nude scenes. To make matters more stressful, old acquaintances showed up on the day Russell was shooting her topless “Lady Godiva” scene. “I hadn’t seen these people in years,” laughed Russell. “They turned up on the set, outdoors in the middle of nowhere. The director made them leave. It was hysterical. I learned that day not to take it all too seriously.”

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She insists that reviews, citing herself as the film’s sole asset, caused no friction with leading lady Cates. Phoebe is very secure with herself, stated Russell “She should be. Look at her now! We didn’t pay any attention to critics.”

Offers promptly rolled in. One of the networks offered Russell a spot on any series she wanted Numerous agents called, Playboy asked her to pose for a pictorial on struggling actresses in Hollywood. Although she does not regret turning down Playboy, Russell admits that she, and her management, did not make the best choice of opportunities. Though she auditioned for smaller parts in higher profile filmy, she inevitably landed leads in B-movies.

Out of Control (1985) Teens (Martin Hewitt, Betsy Russell, Sherilyn Fenn) crash-land on an island, find vodka, play strip spin-the-bottle and run into drug smugglers

In Out of Control (1985), Martin Hewitt and Russell were cast as a prom king and queen who invite six of their classmates on a “grad night” chartered flight. The plane crashes and the kids acclimate themselves to survival on a deserted island. Most critics panned the film, but the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly gave it good reviews.

“We filmed in Yugoslavia,” explained Russell. “It was fun. There were a lot of us around the same age… Martin Hewitt, Sherilyn Fenn. Russell remembered that Fenn, who debuted in the film, “was the youngest of us all and very sweet. We both liked Martin. I liked him for about two minutes the first day, and she ended up breaking his heart. The producer, Fred Weintraub, said, ‘Sherilyn is going to be huge-she’s going to break a lot of hearts. He was right. She’s worked very hard and she deserves her success.”

Russell played the title role in her third film, Tomboy (1985), Her character, Tommy Boyd, was a curvaceous auto mechanic with car racing ambitions. The movie was dogged by controversy: despite it’s claims of feminist affirmation, TOMBOY was peppered with the usual B-quota of sex and nudity.

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Tomboy (1985) A strong-willed female stock car driver challenges her chauvinistic crush to a race to win his respect- and get him into bed.

“It turned out all right, said Russell. “Actually, that movie surprised me. I’ve heard a lot of people really loved that movie. At first, I thought it was going to be kind of dumb but I’ve gotten great response. I saw it about a year ago and thought it wasn’t so bad.”

Avenging Angel (1985) was more of a challenge for Russell. The film served as a sequel to 1983’s ANGEL, about a high school student’s double life as a hooker. “That was a rough experience, because I didn’t understand the character,” recalled Russell. “I felt kind of unsure I was still very young and this had all come very fast, and I hadn’t really studied that much. I didn’t totally relate to the character. Angel wasn’t an everyday girl. It was something new to me, and I didn’t have time to do any research.”

Avenging Angel (1985) Molly, former prostitute, has managed to leave her street life with help from Lt. Andrews. She studies law and leads a normal life. When Andrews is killed by a brutal gang, she returns to the streets as Angel to find his killers.

Although ANGEL had been released only two years previously, the sequel’s storyline picks up five years after the conclusion of its predecessor, Producer Keith Rubenstein and director Robert Vincent O’Neil felt that Donna Wilkes, who played the title role as the first ANGEL, wasn’t credible as a college graduate. The sequel’s investors, however, insisted that Wilkes reprise her familiar role. But it was Wilkes, pricing herself out of the market, who finally broke the stalemate. Cast as a streetwise heroine, Russell drew unflattering reviews from critics.

“Queen of Schlock Wants to Abdicate,” announced the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. After AVENGING ANGEL, it appeared Russell was fed up with her movie career. “I’ve done four B movies and now I’m just gonna stop,” she told a reporter. “I’ve paid my dues, and four is enough.” Russell also related that a meaty role in PRIVATE SCHOOL blinded her to its exploitation elements. She was critical of her involvement in B-films, and pledged to stop making them.

During the next two years, Russell turned to television, performing guest stints on T.J. HOOKER MURDER, SHE WROTE, FAMILY TIES, and THE A-TEAM, “I had down time, she noted. “I didn’t really want to do more nudity. I didn’t want to do B-movies and be taking my clothes off.” A lack of good scripts also prompted Russell to decelerate her movie output.

Cheerleader Camp (1988) A group of cheerleaders become the targets of an unknown killer at a remote summer camp.

Russell wasn’t obligated to disrobe in her next film, Cheerleader Camp (1988) which was initially promoted as BLOODY POM POMS. The plot: cheerleaders, including centerfolds Teri Weigel and Rebecca Ferratti, are sliced and diced while attending a wilderness retreat. The slasher epic hardly adhered to Russell’s speculations about a future in A-movies. “CHEERLEADER CAMP came along, and I liked the character, the actress explained. “She was kind of cute. She was getting driven crazy, and I could keep all my clothes on because the Playmates around me took all their clothes off. It was fun, too, working in Sequoia National Forest. I’ve always made friends with every film I’ve done.”

Following the film, she renewed a past friendship with actor Vince Van Patten. “I met him at the Playboy mansion when I first moved to L.A., Russell recounted. “We dated a few times, and then I never heard from him again. He was involved with the tennis circuit. We both really liked each other, but at the time he wasn’t right. I broke up with my boyfriend five years ago, ran into Vince at the Hard Rock Cafe and the rest is history. The timing was perfect.”

Trapper County War (1989) Two city boys (Estes, Blake) get in trouble with a backwoods North Carolina family (Swayze, Armstrong, Hunky, and Evans) when they try to help an abused step-daughter (Russell). Bo Hopkins and Ernie Hudson are the good locals who attempt to help the boys.

Russell’s last turn as a teenage ingenue was Trapper County War (1989), an updated, sanitized version of DELIVERANCE. Playing the 17-year-old adopted daughter of a backwoods family, Russell served as the city slicker’s love interest.

In Delta Heat (1992), a film noir thriller shot two years ago in New Orleans, Russell was cast as a deceased drug kingpin’s daughter. Academy Entertainment recently released the film on video. “New Line wanted it.” smiled Russell, but the investors had already made a deal with Academy. I think it should have come out in theatres. It’s pretty good.”

Delta Heat (1992) An L.A. cop investigates the death of his partner in the swamps of Louisiana. Enlisting the help of an ex-cop who lost his hand to an alligator many years before.

In Amore! (1993), “It’s Jack Scalia and Kathy Ireland and me, but you wouldn’t know it because of my billing,” laughed Russell. “I’m definitely in the movie. In fact, it’s only me and Scalia in the first half of the movie, and we get divorced and Kathy Ireland comes in. It was my first real comedy.” As the film started to roll, Russell had something else in production. I was three months pregnant at start time, and kept getting bigger!,” she revealed. “I finished the movie when I was four and a half months, and the filmmakers never knew I was pregnant.”

Her husband, who has retired from tennis, is producing a movie adapted from his own script. Rewritten by Dan Jenkins (Semi-Tough), The Break (1995)is a family affair for the Van Pattens. “It’s my first small part in a really good movie,” beams Russell “It’s like ROCKY or BULL DURHAM with tennis. Vince plays the veteran coach, with this rookie kid that he has to coach for the summer. I play the love interest to the kid. I’m the older woman.” She laughs, reflecting upon her ten-year development from PRIVATE SCHOOL starlet to more mature character actress.

When addressed with questions regarding nudity, Russell replied, “If BASIC INSTINCT came my way. I’m sure I wouldn’t have turned it down. It depends on who’s in the movie, what kind of part it is, what the movie’s about. But, you know, I’m not getting those types of offers or scripts anymore, so I’m not worried about it.

“I hope to do good work, to do entertaining, enjoyable projects,” Russell continued. Then, with a glimmer in her eye not at all reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, she smiled and vowed, “I’ll be back…”

Interview with Betsy Russell

What is the difference between the filmmakers you were working with in your early career versus the filmmakers of today? Betsy Russell: That’s an interesting question because I was just reading a little blurb online about a director on a movie I did called ‘Out of Control’ [1985, directed by Allan Holzman], and he went on to do award winning things, documentaries and other films. The directors I work with now are amazing, talented and insightful, but I’ve also worked with directors before who have gone on to do incredible things. For example, the dialogue coach from Private School [Jerry Zaks] went on to a Broadway career. All the people I worked with were fine. I don’t like to compare one to the other, they are all different.

When you made “Private School” back in the early 1980s, the videotape revolution had just begun. What do you think of how your images from that film proliferated from VHS to DVD to the internet? What do you think of the ability to download virtually anything from the internet, including those pictures of your younger days? Betsy Russell: When I said I would do the topless scene, because it wasn’t in the original script for Private School. I remember thinking I’m 19 years old, my body is great and for the rest of my life I’m going to have something on film that the people will say, ‘yeah, she’s topless but that is my Mom, that was my Grandmother, that was my Great-Grandmother’s first film.’

I remember thinking this is kind of cool, why not? Just to have it out there now in the ‘anything goes’ era, with Playmates becoming TV stars and the like, I am proud of it, I’m proud of my body and I’m proud of the sort of free feeling that my character had in that movie, not inhibited whatsoever. It’s more of a European-type feeling, that the body can be a beautiful thing. There is reason to hide it.

You were beautiful then, you are beautiful now, nothing to worry about. Do you remember the name of the famous horse on which you rode to 1980s movie glory? Betsy Russell: No, because he almost killed me. I didn’t know how to ride very well and I got on it just to get to know the horse. We didn’t have a very big budget so that the stunt guys had gotten some kind of wild horse. The minute I got on the horse it took off with me. Of course, everybody was at lunch except for the stunt guys, the horse wranglers and me. I thought I was going to die, because it started to run out of the stable area. Somebody finally stopped it. So I don’t remember the name, but it ended up being a quiet, passive horse after that incident.

You were fairly busy in the 1980s with your career. Was there anything that you auditioned for or didn’t do that you think might have led to a different career track? Betsy Russell: Yeah, I was a favorite of a casting director name Wally Nicita, and she eventually became a producer. She was a big fan of mine after Private School, and there was a film coming up called ‘Silverado.’ I was shooting ‘Avenging Angel at the time and I had an audition. It was a night shoot, I was very tired and I didn’t really understand the ins and outs of the business, I relied more on my manager to take care of that, and he was learning to as we went along.

So they called for me at the audition for Silverado, and I didn’t pay attention to who had been cast in it. I just looked at it as an ensemble piece, and the other movie I was auditioning for was a ski movie, in which I would star. I just said let’s go for the bigger part. As luck would have it, the audition was in the same building as Wally Nicita’s office, and she kept saying how much the directors and producers of Silverado would love to see me. I told her no, I was here for the other audition. She looked at me like I was the stupidest person on the planet, and never contacted me for anything again. Everything happens for a reason. I always believe my career would have been different had I done that part. I can’t say if it would have been better or worse. I’ve had a good run.

Tomboy had your character as a mechanic. How did this occupation change your character from a typical character? Betsy Russell: It defined her. I was playing a girl who loves auto mechanics. My oldest sister was a mechanic growing up. She did all the lube jobs on the car – she was that type of person. It wasn’t far out for me to imagine myself as that type of character. That’s what she did. She was a tomboy who liked riding motorcycles and playing basketball.

What are your thoughts on the trailer for Tomboy showing you as a strong female, but then cutting to you in the shower? Betsy Russell: I’ve never really paid attention to that. I don’t know that I’ve seen it. I guess strong females still have to take showers. They still like to feel sexy, so I don’t think there’s one thing that should stop someone from feeling sexy and showing their body if that’s what they choose to do. I don’t think it makes any difference in the world.

Tomboy is arguably feminist. Was this a draw for you? Betsy Russell: Yes, I like playing strong characters. I thought it would be fun. I was probably twenty-one years old, so the idea of playing this type of character was great. I didn’t think that hard about it. I said, “Ok, this is another role, this is what she does, and I’m going to get into it.” I started working with the assistant basketball coach at UCLA, trying to learn a little bit of basketball. At that point in my life I wasn’t thinking that long or hard about which role to take. I did have a couple of offers with Tomboy; I had another offer for another movie. I picked this one. I’m sure that was a draw for me.

What do you think makes it a feminist role? Betsy Russell: She has a career that isn’t the norm for women. Usually women rely on men to do all the mechanical things. It’s kind of unusual for a woman to be a mechanic. I think it’s silly to be unusual, but I guess it is.

In the same vein, what role does feminism play in Avenging Angel? Betsy Russell: I barely remember that movie, but I know Angel carries a gun. She’s a tough chick. I saw that movie maybe one time. I don’t remember it well, but I had a lot of fun doing it.

There were a couple of stronger roles you did early on. Did you find yourself drawn to the stronger roles? Betsy Russell: Typically the leads in movies are stronger women. Nobody wants to watch a wimp for two hours. I played more of a leading lady than the sidekick. I don’t think I’ve ever played the sidekick. If given the chance, I would have. I did what I thought was good.

How did you get your role in Avenging Angel? Betsy Russell: I auditioned first, but then the director fought for me. The producer wanted the girl from the first movie. The director said he wouldn’t do the movie without me. That was nice.

Do you remember having a favorite line from Avenging Angel? Betsy Russell: No, but a lot of people tell me their favorite line from it, and I don’t remember anything.

What were your thoughts on Cheerleader Camp (1988) and Camp Fear (1991) and how have these thoughts evolved over time? Betsy Russell: Camp Fear was somebody called me and said, “Would you and your husband, Vince, like to do this little movie? You’re going to make a lot of money for three weeks shoot, and it’s going to go right to video.” I said, “Great, I want to make a lot of money. If nobody sees it, I guess it doesn’t matter. It’ll be fun to work with my husband.” We did it. Who knew that YouTube would happen. I’ve never seen the movie, so I have no idea. I’m sure I was terrible in it. It would be hard to be anything but terrible in it. I’ve always seen bits and pieces on YouTube. My voice is really high in it. We had fun. My brother-in-law is in that movie. I remember the actor playing the Indian could never remember his lines; we laughed so hard we almost fell off a cliff. That guy who played the Indian asked Vince to be his best man at his wedding. We barely knew him so that was funny. That happened back when they would say, “No one’s ever going to see it.” You’d do it. As an actor, if you’re not working, you want to just work. It doesn’t matter all of the time if it’s best project if you haven’t worked in a while. You have to put some money in the bank. That’s why I did that. Cheerleader Camp, I hadn’t offered this role called Bloody Pom Pom’s at the time. I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, I don’t have to take any clothes off.” At that time, coming from Private School, Tomboy, and Out of Control (1985), I was tired of taking my clothes off. I wore those big nightgowns, and I just wanted to be taken seriously. That’s why I did that movie. I had a lot of fun filming it. As for Cheerleader Camp, we didn’t know we were making kind of a farce. Honestly, it was a little bit funny, but I took my character very seriously. We were rewriting scenes on the set five minutes before.

What are your views on nudity in film? Betsy Russell: I don’t have any negative views on it at all. In my twenties, I would say, “If it’s intrinsic to the character then I think it’s great.” I learned that word, intrinsic, just to say that. I really don’t have any problem with it. If it’s just thrown in there because it’s a low-budget movie and they’re trying to sell it, it’s really obvious. It takes you out, which isn’t always great. Sometimes it’s just right for what’s going on. It’s great that the actor or actress isn’t embarrassed to show it. If it looks good then it’s great. If it’s a person who looks terrible I would rather they keep their clothes on. If it’s important to the role and that type of film then it’s fine.

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Femme Fatales v02n02 0038 Bad Ass Women of Cinema: A Collection of Interviews Chris Watson hollywoodchicago

Betsy Russell: 80’s B Film Princess Russell was born in San Diego, California, the daughter of Constance (née Lerner) and Richard Lion Russell, a stock analyst.

#BABES

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onestowatch · 5 years

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How the Corona Virus Affects Your Favorite Artists and What You Can Do To Help

It is no secret by now that Rona is taking over and seriously hurting multiple industries, including the music industry. Analysts told Forbes the music industry could lose up to $5 billion. This is because since streaming came along, the primary income for artists shifted to touring and merchandise. As TOKiMONSTA told Vulture, “as a touring artist where the bulk of my living comes from touring, it’s a lot to deal with… I’m essentially not making any money this month, which is tough as a musician. This career is already really volatile.” She goes on to explain she is lucky to be a more established artist with savings, but that is not the case for all artists. Liam Parsons from Good Morning knows that struggle as he explains, “We took a massive financial hit from this… we’re at least down $10,000 on money already spent. In terms of lost guarantees and potential merch sales, around $25,000. We also left our jobs before we left, so we’re going back to nothing.”

So what can we do as fans, listeners and supporters? Here are a five key ways to help your favorite musicians stay afloat.

First, instead of collecting and hoarding toilet paper, collect and hoard your favorite music! Growing your collection of physicals, CDs, and vinyl’s is not only a great way to connect with artists, but also a great way to directly support them in this time. Besides, what else will you have to do once you’ve already finished the new show you wanted to see and re-watched your favorite show for the third time? Also, for the shopaholics out there, instead of going out to the mall, go online to buy your favorite artists’ shirts, buttons and other merchandise! You can satisfy your desire for a new graphic shirt while also being there for artists in need of support. A few tips though – make sure to purchase directly from the band or artist website instead of third party retailers who usually take their own deduction!

Second, another way to support is to tune in to all online content! Many artists, especially those who had shows scheduled, are getting creative and reverting to livestream concerts. Set time aside to tune in to these concerts, like you would to attend an actual concert! Yungblud, for example, plans to do a livestream where he’ll “be playing songs, gonna bring some of my friends out, do some skits, and do a late-night show — like a rock and roll version of fuckin’ Jimmy Kimmel. Try to give people a bit of positivity, laughter, and emotion.” That really will be one to watch. Support artist livestreams, watch their videos, subscribe to their Youtube or Patreon channels, and share their content and music in your playlists or on your socials. Everything counts!

Some artists are avoiding livestream shows because the energy does not always translate. In that case, revert to our other tips, like this next one- keep listening but don’t stream or download! Instead, listen to physical albums that you purchased. Bandcamp is another great place to listen to music. The platform allows independent artists to control their own prices and even allows you to donate as much as you’d like to the artist.

Fourth, are your favorite artists doing any crowd funding campaigns? Whether it’s GoFundMe or Kickstarter, contributing to these campaigns is a great way to show your support. Plain and simple!

Lastly, be sure to also show support for venues and music clubs. Why? Because arguably the group in the music industry that Rona hits the hardest is the tour and venue staff, from tour managers to the crew to the venue operators, all of whom rely on ticket and drink sales for revenue. You can buy merchandise from these venues online. To go a step further, if you had purchased tickets for a show or festival, (and if you are in a position to do so), considering not asking for ticket refunds.Ticket income not only goes back to the artists, but also into the paychecks of every crewmember involved in making a show happen.

Speaking on the Rona chaos, Mia Berrin from Pom Pom Squad brings up an important question: “There’s less and less room for developing artists in media, so how are we going to grow?” It is vital to support all artists in this time, especially upcoming artists hustling tirelessly on the come up. Tune in to their livestreams, buy their merch, support their side hustles. We are lucky to live in an age of technological advancement that allows us show support with the click of a button. Though some of these tips may seem obvious, they make the world of a difference.

Congratulations! You are now equipped with the various ways to support artists. Whether you plan to quarantine and chill with someone, or remain socially isolated, let the voice of your favorite artists keep you company and get you through this strange time we’re in.

#Support Artists #Merch #Bandcamp

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biofunmy · 5 years

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‘Stuber’ Stalls, Dealing Another Setback to Comedies and Disney’s Fox

LOS ANGELES — “Stuber” stalled at the box office over the weekend, accentuating a problem with movies coming off the 20th Century Fox assembly line: They aren’t very good.

“Stuber,” an R-rated buddy flick starring Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista that cost about $25 million to make, also raised new questions about the theatrical viability of modestly budgeted comedies in the Netflix age. North American moviegoers have given a cold shoulder to one such comedy after another this summer, including “Late Night,” “Long Shot,” “The Hustle,” “Shaft,” “Poms” and “Booksmart.”

As usual, franchises dominated multiplex marquees over the weekend. The No. 1 movie was “Spider-Man: Far From Home” (Sony Pictures), which collected about $45.3 million, for a 13-day domestic total of $274.5 million ($847 million worldwide). “Toy Story 4” (Disney-Pixar) was second, generating about $20.7 million in ticket sales, for a four-week global total of $771.1 million, according to Comscore.

Among new wide releases, “Crawl” (Paramount) did the best, capitalizing on surprisingly strong reviews. A horror movie about alligators on the loose during a hurricane, “Crawl” took in roughly $12 million, enough for third place. Paramount spent $13.5 million to make the R-rated movie, which the studio supported with a shrewd marketing campaign that positioned the film as a frothy summertime diversion.

“Stuber” arrived in fourth place. It collected $8 million.

Distributed by Disney, which took over the Fox movie factory in March, “Stuber” had a marketing campaign that cost at least $30 million. Disney aggressively went after men, releasing trailers during WrestleMania and the N.B.A. Finals. Disney-owned ESPN was a marketing partner. The film’s crass tagline: “Saving the day takes a pair.”

“Stuber,” about an Uber driver named Stu who picks up a detective, received largely negative reviews, according to the criticism-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy, called it “an extremely weak entry.”

[Read our “Stuber” review.]

The previous Fox film released by Disney was the superhero movie “Dark Phoenix,” which collapsed under withering reviews last month. It cost an estimated $350 million to make and market worldwide and took in about $250 million, roughly half of which goes to theater owners.

Another Fox film, “Woman in the Window,” starring Amy Adams as an agoraphobic psychologist who witnesses a crime, was pulled from Disney’s 2019 release schedule last week and sent for reshoots. Instead of being released in October as planned, the movie will now arrive sometime next year.

Disney declined to comment on Fox’s output. Insiders say they have high hopes for “Ford v Ferrari,” a Fox bio-drama starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale that is scheduled for November release, among other films. Next up on the Disney-Fox roster is the drama “The Art of Racing in the Rain,” a dog-focused movie adapted from the 2008 novel of the same name.

To be fair to “Stuber,” even critically acclaimed comedies like “Booksmart” and “Late Night” have fizzled at the box office in recent months — and ticket sales for comedies and romantic comedies have been on a steady slide for the past decade, according to a recent analysis by The Hollywood Reporter. In 2009, comedies grossed $2.5 billion at the domestic box office; last year, the genre generated only $1 billion.

Some studio executives point to original comedies on Netflix, which make it easy for those looking for laughs to skip theaters. The relentless focus on big-budget franchise films has made it hard for comedies to find any multiplex oxygen. There has also been a melding of genres: Marvel movies and the coming “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” showcase a great deal of comedy along with the action.

But there are exceptions. “Yesterday” (Universal), a quirky romantic comedy with a Beatles soundtrack, has now taken in more than $48 million in North America, including $6.8 million over the weekend. “Yesterday” could collect as much as $150 million worldwide by the end of its run, box-office analysts say — not bad for a film that cost $26 million to make.

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Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools

It's a cool Friday night in early September and the Dorsey Dons have taken the field at Jackie Robinson Stadium, a well-manicured track and field adjacent to their campus in South Los Angeles. Stray palm trees pierce the skyline. Green pom-poms shimmer under the stadium lights. A DJ with a multi-colored disco ball on his booth has set up shop by the track near the 40-yard-line and blares songs like "Bodak Yellow" and "Niggas In Paris."

Early in the first quarter, Dorsey's 16-year-old running back is handed the ball behind the line of scrimmage. He bounces left, then strafes right and bursts through a hole before plowing into—and pushing back—a pile of four defenders. His name is Jojuan Collins, and this is what he does. It's why he had five scholarship offers, including ones from Oklahoma and Georgia, to his name before ever competing in a full varsity game.

Jojuan only began lifting weights this spring and yet his figure resembles that of a Navy SEAL. Veins snake through his forearms, while his calves better resemble those of Dorsey's offensive linemen than his fellow skill position players. He is still two years away from his high school graduation but that hasn't stopped his coaches from postulating that Collins will one day become the most sought-after football recruit in America.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Dorsey's opponent in this game is Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, a formidable private school in Los Angeles's South Bay region. Less than a decade ago, this matchup would have been heavily tilted in the Dons' favor. For decades, no program west of the Mississippi gave its student-athletes a better shot at playing professional football than Dorsey. Tonight, they are the underdogs. Dorsey is among the inner city public schools in Los Angeles that have had their talent cannibalized by private schools from as far north as the San Fernando Valley to as far south as Orange County.

Many observers point to Serra as the high school that changed everything. Tonight's game, then, is about more than the two teams on the field. It is the way things are now versus the way things used to be. It is also a perfect showcase for Jojuan's amplified blend of strength and explosiveness—traits that should be an either-or proposition but which he somehow makes an "and."

At first, it appears that with Jojuan in their corner, Dorsey can go the distance. Early in the first quarter, Serra jumps ahead 7-0, only for Dorsey to respond in kind with a 40-yard touchdown pass. Then the levee breaks. Serra pours on 21 unanswered points in the second quarter, then 16 more in the second half. The Dorsey line is stymied. Drives are snuffed out before they can ever begin. The Dons lose 44-7. The next week, Dorsey will fall to another private school powerhouse, St. John Bosco, 69-14.

By all accounts, Jojuan should be playing for one of those wealthy schools. In fact, he spent his freshman year at Santa Ana's Mater Dei High School, one of California's most established and financially blessed football programs. But Dorsey is his neighborhood school. It is exactly where Jojuan wants to be.

"[This is] where I should have come in the first place," Jojuan says. "This is my home. This is where I started."

Is Jojuan Collins part of a new generation of talented kids spurning the advances of big money football programs to stay home, or the last of a dying breed?

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Little about Dorsey High School announces itself as one of America's great incubators of NFL talent.

Start with how they train. For much of this past summer, Dorsey's practice field was an unusable checkerboard of too-high tufts and vacant squares of dirt.

"Like a receding hairline on an old person—a patch of grass here and nothing there," says running backs coach Stafon Johnson. "We don't even have lines out there…[We tell the players] 'Go 15 yards!' 'Well, coach, where the hell is 15 yards?'"

Then there's the weight room. The ceiling tiles are water damaged or missing entirely, with rusted steel beams peeking through the gaps. Some of the light tube filaments overhead flicker in and out. Others are burned out entirely. It's been this way for a while now. Thanks to budgetary crises on both the state level as well as in the Los Angeles Unified School District, there's nothing anyone can really do about it.

That grime, however, is juxtaposed with a parade of white banners—a couple dozen at least—each embossed with an NFL shield, the color-coded name of a Dorsey football alumnus, and the NFL franchise for which he once played. Keyshawn Johnson's banner is on the wall opposite the entrance. He's joined by league stalwarts like Na'il Diggs, Dennis Northcutt, Rahim Moore, Sharmon Shah—who led the NFL in rushing touchdowns for the 1997 season playing under the name Karim Abdul-Jabbar—and current Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson, to name a few. That's not counting the part-timers, either, like John Ross, the ninth overall pick in this year's NFL Draft and a Dorsey Don for his first two years of high school. There are more banners than available wall space, a byproduct of Dorsey producing more NFL players than all but two high schools in America.

"They've had some legendary players go through that program," says Greg Biggins, a national analyst for CBS Sports and 247Sports.com who has covered high school football in Southern California for more than 20 years. "It is Los Angeles football."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

In many ways, it is Los Angeles itself. To the west is Culver City, a one-time sleepy suburb that has recently blossomed into a chic boomtown. A few miles north is Mid-City, a highly diverse neighborhood favored by millennials. Due south is Baldwin Hills, an affluent, traditionally African-American enclave. And east is the University of Southern California, as well as some of the most gang-riddled streets in the city.

"Dorsey is right here in the middle," says defensive line coach Jovon Hayes. "It's like a melting pot of everybody."

A healthy chunk of the football team hails from the east side. Many are the sons of single parents. Most struggle economically. To them, Dorsey football is less an activity than a society, a place for belonging. Those affiliated with the program refer to themselves as the "Dorsey Dons Posse"—DDP for short—and their ranks span generations. The school's coaches are tacticians, the way they'd be everywhere else, but also fulfill a great number of functions that fall outside the job description.

"Sometimes, you have to be more than a coach," says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey's defensive backs coach, who by day is a building inspector for the Los Angeles Fire Department. "Sometimes you're the father. You're the big brother. You're the uncle. You're the confidant. You're the counselor, without a PhD."

It's why all but one member of the coaching staff is a Dorsey alumnus, despite only one being a school employee. Officially speaking, a handful are in line for stipends, around $1,500 or so apiece for the season. They usually burn through that cash to subsidize equipment costs or buy dinners for hungry players, which effectively means they work for free. Even Hayes, the only coach employed full time by the school, also teaches history and economics during the day, and works the night shift at a group home for special needs children to make ends meet.

"If this wasn't my alma mater, I wouldn't be here," says Charles Mincy, the team's head coach. A ten-year NFL veteran with his own banner on the wall, he took over the program in 2016 and pads his income with the occasional substitute teaching gig. "I came back around to help because I didn't want the program to go into the dumps."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Which is a very real concern. As recently as a decade ago, public schools like Dorsey retained an inordinately high percentage of the best talent in Los Angeles. It had been that way for generations, nearly ever since their governing body, the City Section, was established by the California Interscholastic Federation in 1936 following a dispute between Los Angeles public schools and the other members of the Southern Section, the oldest and largest athletic body in Southern California.

The result was that high school sports in the area became, in effect, Los Angeles versus everybody. In a region where the actual city of Los Angeles is dwarfed by the sprawl surrounding it, that means David vs. Goliath. At present date, the City Section has 70 high schools that field 11-man football teams, none of which are private, compared to the Southern Section's 396 member schools, some of which are among the wealthiest institutions in the state.

The City Section punched above its weight and by the 1980s, three of its schools became synonymous with the best talent: Dorsey, Carson High School in Carson, and Banning High School in Wilmington. Thirty years later, Banning battles irrelevance. Carson hasn't produced a top prospect since 2012. Dorsey is in far better shape, comparatively, but the production of NFL banners has slowed to a crawl. The blue chippers in their backyards began to suit up elsewhere—not for other City Section rivals, but Southern Section outfits recruiting several zip codes away from their campuses.

Hayes, who played at Arizona from 2006 through 2011, recalls being in college and noticing schools that were once blips on Dorsey's radar were beginning to crush the Dons on Friday nights. "Dorsey lost to who? They're horrible!" he'd think while checking box scores. His former teammates wondered the same thing. Then, on a visit home, he popped into the coaches' office. That's when he learned things had changed for good.

"They started letting us know that private schools are coming in and getting kids that normally would have come to Dorsey," he says. "[The coaches] were like, "'[Kids] aren't in city schools anymore.'"

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

The first time I ever asked Jojuan Collins a question, his answer stretched on for nearly 15 uninterrupted minutes.

He sat in on a bench in Dorsey's weight room and, twirling a neon orange fidget spinner, meandered from Pop Warner football to his report card, school uniforms to religion. He sometimes talks this way, in long amiable strolls through and around the topic at hand.

There is an unusual lightness to him, the sort that would not seem to reconcile with a 16-year-old who runs so violently on the football field that a defender once slinked out of his way to avoid tackling him. He grew up in the Jungles, the once-infamously hardscrabble projects portrayed in the Denzel Washington movie Training Day. He was short until he turned 11 years old, and he was bullied in school. Then, seemingly overnight, he bloomed into a physical marvel, and so he was challenged to fights by teenagers who wanted to look tough.

Yet those closest to him never worry about whether South Los Angeles might harden him. Instead, they're worried about how gentle and trusting Jojuan can be.

"He has a very soft heart underneath all the muscles," says Joe Jenkins, Collins's grandfather. "His heart is made out of glass."

He sings tenor in the choir and his favorite pastime since the age of 12 is composing love songs with his older sister.

"You don't write with your brain," he says. "You write with your heart. Take out your heart and write with it."

Football was something of a happy accident. Tony Beavers, a family friend whom Collins affectionately calls his "Uncle Tone," is a Pop Warner coach and had tried for years to coax Jojuan into picking up a ball. It never stuck; his nephew preferred to skateboard and play Call of Duty.

That changed on January 8, 2011. Jojuan was ten-years-old and over at Beavers's house during the NFL playoffs. Seattle was playing New Orleans, and he feigned comprehension for the sake of impressing his uncle.

"I was like, 'Who are these people? Seahawks, I'm guessing?' Because it said Seahawks on the jersey. 'I'm going to act like I know who this is,'" he remembers thinking. "I had no idea what a score meant."

His attention waxed and waned until late in the fourth quarter, when Seattle's Marshawn Lynch took a handoff 67 yards for a touchdown. This was the famous "Beast Mode" run, the most iconic moment of the running back's career. Jojuan was entranced.

"I kept rewinding and [playing it back]," he says. "They were chasing me around the house trying to get the controller."

Sitting in the Dorsey weight room six years later, he breaks down the run's components from memory with impressive accuracy, right down to the model of gloves Lynch wore that afternoon in the Superdome.

"I've watched that game so many times, I know it like the back of my hand," he says.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It wasn't long until he put on a jersey for the first time. Naturally, he chose 24 as his number, in honor of Lynch. At age 13, he was starring for the Inland Empire Ducks, one of the Southern California's premier Pop Warner teams, as both a running back and a linebacker. He was already pushing six feet tall and 200 pounds, and his high metabolism blessed him with the muscle definition of athletes well beyond his years. A nickname was born: "Man Child." Ferocious hits became his trademark.

"I'm talking about you've got to describe those hits with words like 'jarred,'" laughs Jadili Damu Johnson, a Dorsey assistant and Pop Warner coach who coached against Jojuan. "Ugly. Nasty."

Two years later, Jojuan says his preferred position depends on the day. "When I'm happy, running back," he says. "When I'm pretty pissed off, linebacker." But deep down, his heart lies on offense. And while he lives to emulate Lynch, every coach interviewed for this story believes Jojuan better compares to Adrian Peterson, the most physically gifted running back of his generation.

"He runs like he's the biggest kid on the playground," says Stevenson. "It's like a 'man amongst boys'-type deal."

Like everyone else who saw Jojuan play Pop Warner, the Dorsey coaches realized that Collins was special. While players from nearly every position are represented in the ring of NFL banners, running back was always the school's glamour position. Stafon Johnson, once a 5-foot-11, 225-pound jackhammer, parlayed his talents at Dorsey into a full scholarship at USC and a three-year NFL career with the Tennessee Titans before he returned to coach running backs at his alma mater.

"The natural power, the natural speed—stuff you can't teach," Johnson says. "He understands he's a [physical] specimen and he can do certain things, but I don't think he understands how good he could be."

The Dorsey coaching staff does. For the previous two seasons, the star of the program was a defensive end named Kayvon Thibodeaux, who transferred in midway through his freshman year from Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, one of the city's foremost private school powerhouses. It only took a handful of games for everyone to label Thibodeaux a program-changing talent. After less than a calendar year, he was named the top-ranked player in the class of 2019. His impact was made even more significant by the circumstances of his arrival: he'd left the neighborhood for a private school, like most prospects of his ilk now do, but then he returned.

Until, that is, Thibodeaux transferred again in May to Oaks Christian, a private school powerhouse located in Westlake Village. No one at Dorsey saw it coming.

But around the time Thibodeaux bowed out, Jojuan—an old Pop Warner rival of Thibodeaux's—arrived. Now he is primed to pick up where Thibodeaux left off, a throwback to an era where the best talent in the inner city played where they came from. It's not just the backstories that are similar, either.

"Big-time, big-time guy," Biggins says. "Everything is there for him to be a superstar."

Says Stevenson, "When it's all said and done, Jojuan will be the number one player in the nation."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It's hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the balance of power began to shift away from inner city. But the most commonly accepted flash point occurred in 2009, with the emergence of a wide receiver named Robert Woods.

Woods was arguably the most dynamic player the region had seen in years, an eventual All-American at USC who later became a second-round NFL draft pick and today suits up for the Los Angeles Rams. He also grew up right around the corner from Carson High School, where it was assumed he'd one day play.

Instead, he enrolled at Serra, then a nondescript private school in Gardena. Woods had family ties to the school—his older sister, Olivia, was two grade levels ahead of him—but it wasn't long before he was joined by a staggering amount of the city's top talent. Marqise Lee, another USC All-American and NFL second-round pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars, came in from Inglewood. Paul Richardson, now of the Seattle Seahawks, transferred in as a senior. On and on it went, until Serra became the de facto school of choice for the best players in the city.

An overwhelming amount of success followed: Serra went 15-0 in 2009 to win their first of two state championships in four years. From 2007 through 2013, the Cavaliers posted a combined record of 87-10. Their reach even extended nationally. Adoree' Jackson, yet another USC All-American and a first-round draft pick in this year's NFL Draft, moved all the way from East St. Louis to attend the school.

"I think with the success of Serra, the private schools started taking notice," Stevenson says. "All of these schools basically took a page out of their book: Tap into the inner city. You look at any successful private school program, they have at least five kids who are from the inner city on their roster, guaranteed."

Imitators bubbled up swiftly. St. John Bosco didn't post a winning season from 2005 through 2010. In 2013, they posted a perfect 16-0 record, won a state championship and graduated arguably the most star-studded senior class in state history by signing seven players to Pac-12 schools. They haven't won fewer than 12 games in a season since.

Chaminade, a private school in West Hills, hired a renowned City Section coach in 2009 and then went 47-9 from 2011 through 2014. Bishop Mora Salesian, in Boyle Heights, lept from a 2-8 doormat to three straight double-digit winning seasons. Traditional powers like Mater Dei and Oaks Christian added reinforcements.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"I call it, 'The private school year," says Junie Rivero, Dorsey's special teams coach. "All of them always have their year where they're super-hot and everyone wants to go to those schools."

Private schools have some structural advantages: they can use tuition to raise capital, are not subjected to public school budgets, and can enroll students from anywhere. But the institutional benefits of playing in the resource-flush Southern Section also worked in their favor. Even a few Southern Section public schools like Corona's Centennial High School, Calabasas High School, and Long Beach Polytechnic High School began to entice inner city talent to move to their districts.

"It's just not a level playing field," Biggins says. "The Southern Section has so many built-in advantages… In terms of city coaches, there are five stipends [per team] versus 12 for Southern Section coaches… 12 guys and a full-time strength and conditioning program, year-round, versus these guys who don't even have a weight room. How do you compete with that?"

Those edges come into play long before those schools ever meet on Friday nights. They are spoken of and leveraged every time a player like Jojuan Collins emerges as a middle school prospect.

"You go to a local Pop Warner game and there's, I guess you could call them, 'Friends of the program'" Biggins continues. "Every school basically has a guy who is kind of the one who is able to sell your program, talk about and once you get the kid on campus for what they call a 'prospect day,' that's when the selling starts to take place."

If that sounds eerily similar to college football recruiting, that's because it is. "That world can get to money, quick," Damu Johnson says. "Now you're seeing, in eighth grade… is there some incentive given to get this guy we know is going to be the number one guy in college at some point?... It's an actual business."

The points of entry are volunteer youth football coaches. The inducement? Funnel the best players on your team in exchange for a full-time paying position with the program.

"It's always tied to a Pop Warner coach," Stevenson says. "In the inner city, the drug game has dried up. Rap game is drying up. What's the next-best hustle for someone without a job? Hustle kids."

For the players and parents on the receiving end of those pitches, the result is an ecosystem shaped by perception and unverifiable promises.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"Your high school decision is pretty much based off of what you think you know and not exactly what you know," says Isaiah Smalls, Dorsey's star tight end who has made a verbal commitment to play college at Oregon State. "You just know what you see. 'Oh, that kid is getting scholarships at that school, I want to go there. I want to go to that school.'"

Sometimes the reality is different once they arrive on campus. Playing-time promises aren't fulfilled, or the academic environment wasn't what they were expecting. Perhaps they don't fit in culturally among students with vastly different backgrounds and home lives. In other cases, the tuition stops being affordable for students who are only on partial aid. A transfer becomes the best option, which is where things get more complicated.

For years, the CIF charter forbade transfers for athletically-motivated reasons. Then, in April, a rule was revised to permit athletically-motivated transfers, theoretically paving the way for players like Jojuan to switch schools more easily.

But schools still have recourse to contest transfers, usually through claiming "undue influence"—that is, some illegal enticement to lure a player elsewhere. It's the sort of accusation that, wielded by a private school against a city school, would seem baseless.

Yet according to James G. Schwartz, a Bay Area attorney whose firm has handled CIF-related cases for more than 15 years, "the committee looks at transfers with a jaundiced eye." Appeals of blocked transfers, meanwhile, are extraordinarily difficult to win. In his time dealing with the CIF, Schwartz has seen everything from appellate panels composed of members who did not understand the charter to rules that went completely unenforced. The letter of the law, then, matters far less than who is enforcing it and how inclined they are to hammer a point home.

"Whether or not...after 15 or 20 years, they're going to change their mindset, I don't know," Schwartz says.

The endgame dramatically favors the first school where a player enrolls—which, in Los Angeles, increasingly means somewhere in the Southern Section. Consequently, Biggins says, "I feel like it's easier for kids to leave [the inner city] than come in, which again goes with [it] not [being] a level playing field."

The costs are not just borne out on the field.

"For some of these kids from the inner city, let's be honest: This is their only ticket to get into a college," Stevenson says. "It's the only ticket." Constricting their freedom of movement, or eligibility thereafter, jeopardizes that. The system has yet to correct itself. Dorsey estimates they had five incoming transfers contested in the past calendar year alone.

"The playing field is like politics," Stevenson says. "It's never going to be even for the guy who puts on his work boots every day versus the guy who puts on his wingtips every day."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

By the time Jojuan finished eighth grade, he had established himself as one of the most sought-after middle school prospects. The legend of "Man Child" had spread.

"When you look like a man already, then people are going to know who you are whether you've taken a snap or not," Biggins says.

Consequently, Jackie Jenkins had no shortage of private schools interested in Jojuan, many of which offered significant financial aid to defray expenses.

She saw Mater Dei, a private Catholic school in Santa Ana with annual tuition cost of $16,050—the number drops to $14,650 for Catholic students—as the best opportunity. Founded in 1950, few schools in Southern California have married academics and athletics so successfully. Every year, Mater Dei places alumni in colleges throughout the country, to say nothing of their healthy representation in the University of California system, USC, and Stanford.

The football team, meanwhile, has produced two Heisman Trophy winners and, as of this writing, is the number one-ranked team in the country. Its star wide receiver, Amon-Ra St. Brown, is regarded as one of the two best high school seniors in the country at his position. Its star quarterback, J.T. Daniels, rivals Kayvon Thibodeaux as the best high school junior at any position.

It seemed to be the best of all worlds, a private education with the type of football program that could nurture Jojuan's talent enough to punch his ticket to any college he wanted to go to.

Jojuan was excited, and bewildered. For all his prowess on the field, he says it took until high school for him to understand exactly what he could do. The prospect of being able to attend a school like this, all the way in Orange County, seemed unbelievable in the truest sense of the word.

"This high school does all this stuff and they want me to come here?" he says, recalling his mindset at the time. "Me? Out of all these kids?"

His mother was warier. A year earlier, she had Jojuan repeat his eighth-grade year. His grades were flagging and she wasn't comfortable sending him to high school. "If you bring their report card with D's on it and C's, that's hold-back material for me," she says. "He wasn't doing what he was supposed to do."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Denverly Grant, a friend of Jojuan's uncle Tony and the mom of a Pop Warner teammate, offered to take him in and homeschool him alongside her own children for the next year. With Grant, his grades began to creep upwards. Still, the prospect of thrusting him back into a regular environment at such a competitive school concerned Jackie. She wondered whether Mater Dei was the right fit. She also wondered how she, an in-home care nurse and a single mother to three children, could ever turn it down.

"When you are living in low-budget or whatever, when someone comes to you and tells you that your son can go here, what are you going to do?" Jackie Jenkins says. "Are you going to say, 'Hell no?' You're not going to say that… I felt like that was a chance of a lifetime. I wanted my son to be involved in that."

And so he went. On the field, things went well. Jojuan thrived as the star running back on Mater Dei's freshman team, and made a brief cameo on varsity to end the season. His physique and skillset already manifested enough for the first wave of scholarship offers to roll in. A larger role beckoned.

He came to appreciate the school's diversity. Perhaps his favorite aspect was the social environment, which was unlike anything he experienced.

"I was always one of those shy kids and I started opening up," he says. "I'm going to different neighborhoods, [hanging with] people I've never met before and I'm trusting them. My life and everything, it was just amazing, because I used to go around and see, 'This is what this is like. This is what this is like.'"

Jackie understood that while maintaining his grades in a public school environment had been challenging enough for her son, the rigors of Mater Dei would place even greater demands on Jojuan. It would also be difficult for her to watch over him. The campus was a long drive away from the family's apartment and she was working long hours.

She gained comfort in the knowledge that there were multiple coaches from Jojuan's Pop Warner team who either coached at Mater Dei or had children there. She claims she made repeated requests to the Mater Dei coaching staff asking that if her son's grades were suffering, they bench him so he could have extra time to focus on his studies. She trusted them to keep a mindful eye on her only son.

"I thought we were a big family," she says.

However, she alleges, Mater Dei staffers would often minimize the degree to which Jojuan was struggling academically, and even went so far as to tell her that benching him would be tantamount to a forfeit. Jackie claims that it took until nearly the end of the semester for her to learn that Jojuan was failing nearly all of his classes.

Citing California's Right to Privacy laws as well as school policy, a Mater Dei representative declined to address specific questions about Jojuan Collins, instead providing VICE Sports with a statement that read in part:

"We treat all of our students with the same caring and compassion regardless of their athletic ability, while also striving to include and provide every student with a space and facilities that allow them to reach their fullest potential both on and off the field. While we are extremely proud of our rich athletic tradition at Mater Dei, we hold our students to a higher standard both academically and personally. The student in question was a freshman and per CIF rules all freshmen are eligible to play football at the start of the season. We provided [Collins] with the maximum opportunities to receive academic guidance and assistance provided to any MD student."

For his part, Jojuan accepts that, regardless of the time commitment that football represented, at least some of the responsibility for his low grades falls upon him. "I tried to pull my grades up," he says. "I wasn't able to. I made some bad decisions."

With finals looming, Jackie decided to withdraw Jojuan from Mater Dei in December. It meant forfeiting the entire semester's worth of credits, something she believes was fait accompli with how low his GPA already was. "At this point, what the heck would a final do for you?" she says.

Almost immediately, she received offers from other private schools interested in Jojuan's talents. She claims some went as far as to offer to relocate her, as well admit Jojuan's younger sister. Jackie wasn't interested.

"It's like, you know what? I've had enough," she says. "My thirst was already quenched. I didn't want anything else to do with a private school."

This time, Jackie opted to enroll him at Dorsey, just a few minutes down the road. It would take months for him to be declared eligible at Dorsey. But when the season began in August, Jojuan was decked out in his new green and white #24 jersey.

He says he has no hard feelings towards anyone at Mater Dei. His family, on the other hand, still feels misled.

"Simply because it was a private school, I just thought that he had a better shot at education," Joe Jenkins, Jojuan's grandfather, says. "I can only say that Mater Dei disappoints me. The reason they disappoint me was I had a child who is very good in football and it ended up Mater Dei giving me the impression that he was better at football than he was learning. I think it should have been the other way around… All they want is football out of you. They don't really want to work with you. They just want football."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jojuan ended the Serra game averaging six yards per carry. It was not enough. This is the new order of things. It's what's supposed to happen now that the private schools have won.

"The City Section is dying," Stevenson says. "The well is getting dry because everyone's getting pulled out."

Financially, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The most sweeping legislative change capable of leveling the playing field—a mandate that students play for the high school in their most immediate neighborhood—is impossible. There's no telling whether there's enough documented impropriety to investigate Pop Warner recruiting and school transfers, or whether such a probe would amount to anything.

So, as is too often the case in areas without resources, the undue burden of survival falls on individuals to succeed where the system has failed. For Dorsey, that means it's up to the DDP to keep them afloat.

"As long as the dudes right here, in this room here [stay], we're going to be alright," says Mincy, the Dons' head coach. "As long as we've got those community people holding this thing down, we're going to be OK. But once they go... I'm trying to find ways to get these dudes compensated for their time just so it doesn't blow up."

"How long can you do it with your money?" Stevenson asks. "How much can you do with less resources? How much can you tell a parent, 'We're going to provide X, Y, and Z for your kid,' and you go get your bank account statement and you're like, 'Shit, I'm behind on X-amount of bills because I did this?'"

He doesn't have an answer. But he doesn't see himself anywhere else. "I can't preach about kids leaving the area and I leave also," Stevenson says. He knows, however, that the same doesn't necessarily apply in return.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It has only been six months since Kayvon Thibodeaux left. Who's to say Jojuan Collins won't do the same?

"At the end of the day, you always have it in the back of your mind," Stevenson admits.

Jojuan says his loyalties lie with Dorsey. He has seen the other side of things and believes that what he needs was in his backyard all along. If that makes him the start of something bigger, so be it. For now, he's just like any other 16-year-old, taking comfort in finally being back home.

"I'm able to walk in my neighborhood and get that feeling like, 'This is where I started. This is where it all went down, and this is where I'm going to end my high school [career]," he says.

As of this writing, Jojuan has as many touchdowns (11) as the Dons' second- and third-placed players combined. His grades have rebounded. There is work to be done, still, but his mother believes that there is no place better equipped to support him than Dorsey.

"All we can provide is a family atmosphere," Stevenson says.

Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 7 years

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Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools

It’s a cool Friday night in early September and the Dorsey Dons have taken the field at Jackie Robinson Stadium, a well-manicured track and field adjacent to their campus in South Los Angeles. Stray palm trees pierce the skyline. Green pom-poms shimmer under the stadium lights. A DJ with a multi-colored disco ball on his booth has set up shop by the track near the 40-yard-line and blares songs like “Bodak Yellow” and “Niggas In Paris.”

Early in the first quarter, Dorsey’s 16-year-old running back is handed the ball behind the line of scrimmage. He bounces left, then strafes right and bursts through a hole before plowing into—and pushing back—a pile of four defenders. His name is Jojuan Collins, and this is what he does. It’s why he had five scholarship offers, including ones from Oklahoma and Georgia, to his name before ever competing in a full varsity game.

Jojuan only began lifting weights this spring and yet his figure resembles that of a Navy SEAL. Veins snake through his forearms, while his calves better resemble those of Dorsey’s offensive linemen than his fellow skill position players. He is still two years away from his high school graduation but that hasn’t stopped his coaches from postulating that Collins will one day become the most sought-after football recruit in America.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Dorsey’s opponent in this game is Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, a formidable private school in Los Angeles’s South Bay region. Less than a decade ago, this matchup would have been heavily tilted in the Dons’ favor. For decades, no program west of the Mississippi gave its student-athletes a better shot at playing professional football than Dorsey. Tonight, they are the underdogs. Dorsey is among the inner city public schools in Los Angeles that have had their talent cannibalized by private schools from as far north as the San Fernando Valley to as far south as Orange County.

Many observers point to Serra as the high school that changed everything. Tonight’s game, then, is about more than the two teams on the field. It is the way things are now versus the way things used to be. It is also a perfect showcase for Jojuan’s amplified blend of strength and explosiveness—traits that should be an either-or proposition but which he somehow makes an “and.”

By all accounts, Jojuan should be playing for one of those wealthy schools. In fact, he spent his freshman year at Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High School, one of California’s most established and financially blessed football programs. But Dorsey is his neighborhood school. It is exactly where Jojuan wants to be.

“[This is] where I should have come in the first place,” Jojuan says. “This is my home. This is where I started.”

Is Jojuan Collins part of a new generation of talented kids spurning the advances of big money football programs to stay home, or the last of a dying breed?

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Little about Dorsey High School announces itself as one of America’s great incubators of NFL talent.

Start with how they train. For much of this past summer, Dorsey’s practice field was an unusable checkerboard of too-high tufts and vacant squares of dirt.

“Like a receding hairline on an old person—a patch of grass here and nothing there,” says running backs coach Stafon Johnson. “We don’t even have lines out there…[We tell the players] ‘Go 15 yards!’ ‘Well, coach, where the hell is 15 yards?'”

Then there’s the weight room. The ceiling tiles are water damaged or missing entirely, with rusted steel beams peeking through the gaps. Some of the light tube filaments overhead flicker in and out. Others are burned out entirely. It’s been this way for a while now. Thanks to budgetary crises on both the state level as well as in the Los Angeles Unified School District, there’s nothing anyone can really do about it.

That grime, however, is juxtaposed with a parade of white banners—a couple dozen at least—each embossed with an NFL shield, the color-coded name of a Dorsey football alumnus, and the NFL franchise for which he once played. Keyshawn Johnson’s banner is on the wall opposite the entrance. He’s joined by league stalwarts like Na’il Diggs, Dennis Northcutt, Rahim Moore, Sharmon Shah—who led the NFL in rushing touchdowns for the 1997 season playing under the name Karim Abdul-Jabbar—and current Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson, to name a few. That’s not counting the part-timers, either, like John Ross, the ninth overall pick in this year’s NFL Draft and a Dorsey Don for his first two years of high school. There are more banners than available wall space, a byproduct of Dorsey producing more NFL players than all but two high schools in America.

“They’ve had some legendary players go through that program,” says Greg Biggins, a national analyst for CBS Sports and 247Sports.com who has covered high school football in Southern California for more than 20 years. “It is Los Angeles football.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

“Dorsey is right here in the middle,” says defensive line coach Jovon Hayes. “It’s like a melting pot of everybody.”

A healthy chunk of the football team hails from the east side. Many are the sons of single parents. Most struggle economically. To them, Dorsey football is less an activity than a society, a place for belonging. Those affiliated with the program refer to themselves as the “Dorsey Dons Posse”—DDP for short—and their ranks span generations. The school’s coaches are tacticians, the way they’d be everywhere else, but also fulfill a great number of functions that fall outside the job description.

“Sometimes, you have to be more than a coach,” says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey’s defensive backs coach, who by day is a building inspector for the Los Angeles Fire Department. “Sometimes you’re the father. You’re the big brother. You’re the uncle. You’re the confidant. You’re the counselor, without a PhD.”

It’s why all but one member of the coaching staff is a Dorsey alumnus, despite only one being a school employee. Officially speaking, a handful are in line for stipends, around $1,500 or so apiece for the season. They usually burn through that cash to subsidize equipment costs or buy dinners for hungry players, which effectively means they work for free. Even Hayes, the only coach employed full time by the school, also teaches history and economics during the day, and works the night shift at a group home for special needs children to make ends meet.

“If this wasn’t my alma mater, I wouldn’t be here,” says Charles Mincy, the team’s head coach. A ten-year NFL veteran with his own banner on the wall, he took over the program in 2016 and pads his income with the occasional substitute teaching gig. “I came back around to help because I didn’t want the program to go into the dumps.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

The result was that high school sports in the area became, in effect, Los Angeles versus everybody. In a region where the actual city of Los Angeles is dwarfed by the sprawl surrounding it, that means David vs. Goliath. At present date, the City Section has 70 high schools that field 11-man football teams, none of which are private, compared to the Southern Section’s 396 member schools, some of which are among the wealthiest institutions in the state.

The City Section punched above its weight and by the 1980s, three of its schools became synonymous with the best talent: Dorsey, Carson High School in Carson, and Banning High School in Wilmington. Thirty years later, Banning battles irrelevance. Carson hasn’t produced a top prospect since 2012. Dorsey is in far better shape, comparatively, but the production of NFL banners has slowed to a crawl. The blue chippers in their backyards began to suit up elsewhere—not for other City Section rivals, but Southern Section outfits recruiting several zip codes away from their campuses.

Hayes, who played at Arizona from 2006 through 2011, recalls being in college and noticing schools that were once blips on Dorsey’s radar were beginning to crush the Dons on Friday nights. “Dorsey lost to who? They’re horrible!” he’d think while checking box scores. His former teammates wondered the same thing. Then, on a visit home, he popped into the coaches’ office. That’s when he learned things had changed for good.

“They started letting us know that private schools are coming in and getting kids that normally would have come to Dorsey,” he says. “[The coaches] were like, “‘[Kids] aren’t in city schools anymore.'”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

The first time I ever asked Jojuan Collins a question, his answer stretched on for nearly 15 uninterrupted minutes.

He sat in on a bench in Dorsey’s weight room and, twirling a neon orange fidget spinner, meandered from Pop Warner football to his report card, school uniforms to religion. He sometimes talks this way, in long amiable strolls through and around the topic at hand.

Yet those closest to him never worry about whether South Los Angeles might harden him. Instead, they’re worried about how gentle and trusting Jojuan can be.

“He has a very soft heart underneath all the muscles,” says Joe Jenkins, Collins’s grandfather. “His heart is made out of glass.”

He sings tenor in the choir and his favorite pastime since the age of 12 is composing love songs with his older sister.

“You don’t write with your brain,” he says. “You write with your heart. Take out your heart and write with it.”

Football was something of a happy accident. Tony Beavers, a family friend whom Collins affectionately calls his “Uncle Tone,” is a Pop Warner coach and had tried for years to coax Jojuan into picking up a ball. It never stuck; his nephew preferred to skateboard and play Call of Duty.

That changed on January 8, 2011. Jojuan was ten-years-old and over at Beavers’s house during the NFL playoffs. Seattle was playing New Orleans, and he feigned comprehension for the sake of impressing his uncle.

“I was like, ‘Who are these people? Seahawks, I’m guessing?’ Because it said Seahawks on the jersey. ‘I’m going to act like I know who this is,'” he remembers thinking. “I had no idea what a score meant.”

His attention waxed and waned until late in the fourth quarter, when Seattle’s Marshawn Lynch took a handoff 67 yards for a touchdown. This was the famous “Beast Mode” run, the most iconic moment of the running back’s career. Jojuan was entranced.

“I kept rewinding and [playing it back],” he says. “They were chasing me around the house trying to get the controller.”

Sitting in the Dorsey weight room six years later, he breaks down the run’s components from memory with impressive accuracy, right down to the model of gloves Lynch wore that afternoon in the Superdome.

“I’ve watched that game so many times, I know it like the back of my hand,” he says.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It wasn’t long until he put on a jersey for the first time. Naturally, he chose 24 as his number, in honor of Lynch. At age 13, he was starring for the Inland Empire Ducks, one of the Southern California’s premier Pop Warner teams, as both a running back and a linebacker. He was already pushing six feet tall and 200 pounds, and his high metabolism blessed him with the muscle definition of athletes well beyond his years. A nickname was born: “Man Child.” Ferocious hits became his trademark.

“I’m talking about you’ve got to describe those hits with words like ‘jarred,'” laughs Jadili Damu Johnson, a Dorsey assistant and Pop Warner coach who coached against Jojuan. “Ugly. Nasty.”

Two years later, Jojuan says his preferred position depends on the day. “When I’m happy, running back,” he says. “When I’m pretty pissed off, linebacker.” But deep down, his heart lies on offense. And while he lives to emulate Lynch, every coach interviewed for this story believes Jojuan better compares to Adrian Peterson, the most physically gifted running back of his generation.

“He runs like he’s the biggest kid on the playground,” says Stevenson. “It’s like a ‘man amongst boys’-type deal.”

Like everyone else who saw Jojuan play Pop Warner, the Dorsey coaches realized that Collins was special. While players from nearly every position are represented in the ring of NFL banners, running back was always the school’s glamour position. Stafon Johnson, once a 5-foot-11, 225-pound jackhammer, parlayed his talents at Dorsey into a full scholarship at USC and a three-year NFL career with the Tennessee Titans before he returned to coach running backs at his alma mater.

“The natural power, the natural speed—stuff you can’t teach,” Johnson says. “He understands he’s a [physical] specimen and he can do certain things, but I don’t think he understands how good he could be.”

The Dorsey coaching staff does. For the previous two seasons, the star of the program was a defensive end named Kayvon Thibodeaux, who transferred in midway through his freshman year from Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, one of the city’s foremost private school powerhouses. It only took a handful of games for everyone to label Thibodeaux a program-changing talent. After less than a calendar year, he was named the top-ranked player in the class of 2019. His impact was made even more significant by the circumstances of his arrival: he’d left the neighborhood for a private school, like most prospects of his ilk now do, but then he returned.

Until, that is, Thibodeaux transferred again in May to Oaks Christian, a private school powerhouse located in Westlake Village. No one at Dorsey saw it coming.

But around the time Thibodeaux bowed out, Jojuan—an old Pop Warner rival of Thibodeaux’s—arrived. Now he is primed to pick up where Thibodeaux left off, a throwback to an era where the best talent in the inner city played where they came from. It’s not just the backstories that are similar, either.

“Big-time, big-time guy,” Biggins says. “Everything is there for him to be a superstar.”

Says Stevenson, “When it’s all said and done, Jojuan will be the number one player in the nation.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the balance of power began to shift away from inner city. But the most commonly accepted flash point occurred in 2009, with the emergence of a wide receiver named Robert Woods.

Instead, he enrolled at Serra, then a nondescript private school in Gardena. Woods had family ties to the school—his older sister, Olivia, was two grade levels ahead of him—but it wasn’t long before he was joined by a staggering amount of the city’s top talent. Marqise Lee, another USC All-American and NFL second-round pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars, came in from Inglewood. Paul Richardson, now of the Seattle Seahawks, transferred in as a senior. On and on it went, until Serra became the de facto school of choice for the best players in the city.

An overwhelming amount of success followed: Serra went 15-0 in 2009 to win their first of two state championships in four years. From 2007 through 2013, the Cavaliers posted a combined record of 87-10. Their reach even extended nationally. Adoree’ Jackson, yet another USC All-American and a first-round draft pick in this year’s NFL Draft, moved all the way from East St. Louis to attend the school.

“I think with the success of Serra, the private schools started taking notice,” Stevenson says. “All of these schools basically took a page out of their book: Tap into the inner city. You look at any successful private school program, they have at least five kids who are from the inner city on their roster, guaranteed.”

Imitators bubbled up swiftly. St. John Bosco didn’t post a winning season from 2005 through 2010. In 2013, they posted a perfect 16-0 record, won a state championship and graduated arguably the most star-studded senior class in state history by signing seven players to Pac-12 schools. They haven’t won fewer than 12 games in a season since.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

“I call it, ‘The private school year,” says Junie Rivero, Dorsey’s special teams coach. “All of them always have their year where they’re super-hot and everyone wants to go to those schools.”

Private schools have some structural advantages: they can use tuition to raise capital, are not subjected to public school budgets, and can enroll students from anywhere. But the institutional benefits of playing in the resource-flush Southern Section also worked in their favor. Even a few Southern Section public schools like Corona’s Centennial High School, Calabasas High School, and Long Beach Polytechnic High School began to entice inner city talent to move to their districts.

“It’s just not a level playing field,” Biggins says. “The Southern Section has so many built-in advantages… In terms of city coaches, there are five stipends [per team] versus 12 for Southern Section coaches… 12 guys and a full-time strength and conditioning program, year-round, versus these guys who don’t even have a weight room. How do you compete with that?”

Those edges come into play long before those schools ever meet on Friday nights. They are spoken of and leveraged every time a player like Jojuan Collins emerges as a middle school prospect.

“You go to a local Pop Warner game and there’s, I guess you could call them, ‘Friends of the program'” Biggins continues. “Every school basically has a guy who is kind of the one who is able to sell your program, talk about and once you get the kid on campus for what they call a ‘prospect day,’ that’s when the selling starts to take place.”

If that sounds eerily similar to college football recruiting, that’s because it is. “That world can get to money, quick,” Damu Johnson says. “Now you’re seeing, in eighth grade… is there some incentive given to get this guy we know is going to be the number one guy in college at some point?… It’s an actual business.”

The points of entry are volunteer youth football coaches. The inducement? Funnel the best players on your team in exchange for a full-time paying position with the program.

“It’s always tied to a Pop Warner coach,” Stevenson says. “In the inner city, the drug game has dried up. Rap game is drying up. What’s the next-best hustle for someone without a job? Hustle kids.”

For the players and parents on the receiving end of those pitches, the result is an ecosystem shaped by perception and unverifiable promises.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

“Your high school decision is pretty much based off of what you think you know and not exactly what you know,” says Isaiah Smalls, Dorsey’s star tight end who has made a verbal commitment to play college at Oregon State. “You just know what you see. ‘Oh, that kid is getting scholarships at that school, I want to go there. I want to go to that school.'”

Sometimes the reality is different once they arrive on campus. Playing-time promises aren’t fulfilled, or the academic environment wasn’t what they were expecting. Perhaps they don’t fit in culturally among students with vastly different backgrounds and home lives. In other cases, the tuition stops being affordable for students who are only on partial aid. A transfer becomes the best option, which is where things get more complicated.

But schools still have recourse to contest transfers, usually through claiming “undue influence”—that is, some illegal enticement to lure a player elsewhere. It’s the sort of accusation that, wielded by a private school against a city school, would seem baseless.

Yet according to James G. Schwartz, a Bay Area attorney whose firm has handled CIF-related cases for more than 15 years, “the committee looks at transfers with a jaundiced eye.” Appeals of blocked transfers, meanwhile, are extraordinarily difficult to win. In his time dealing with the CIF, Schwartz has seen everything from appellate panels composed of members who did not understand the charter to rules that went completely unenforced. The letter of the law, then, matters far less than who is enforcing it and how inclined they are to hammer a point home.

“Whether or not…after 15 or 20 years, they’re going to change their mindset, I don’t know,” Schwartz says.

The endgame dramatically favors the first school where a player enrolls—which, in Los Angeles, increasingly means somewhere in the Southern Section. Consequently, Biggins says, “I feel like it’s easier for kids to leave [the inner city] than come in, which again goes with [it] not [being] a level playing field.”

The costs are not just borne out on the field.

“For some of these kids from the inner city, let’s be honest: This is their only ticket to get into a college,” Stevenson says. “It’s the only ticket.” Constricting their freedom of movement, or eligibility thereafter, jeopardizes that. The system has yet to correct itself. Dorsey estimates they had five incoming transfers contested in the past calendar year alone.

“The playing field is like politics,” Stevenson says. “It’s never going to be even for the guy who puts on his work boots every day versus the guy who puts on his wingtips every day.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

By the time Jojuan finished eighth grade, he had established himself as one of the most sought-after middle school prospects. The legend of “Man Child” had spread.

“When you look like a man already, then people are going to know who you are whether you’ve taken a snap or not,” Biggins says.

Consequently, Jackie Jenkins had no shortage of private schools interested in Jojuan, many of which offered significant financial aid to defray expenses.

It seemed to be the best of all worlds, a private education with the type of football program that could nurture Jojuan’s talent enough to punch his ticket to any college he wanted to go to.

“This high school does all this stuff and they want me to come here?” he says, recalling his mindset at the time. “Me? Out of all these kids?”

His mother was warier. A year earlier, she had Jojuan repeat his eighth-grade year. His grades were flagging and she wasn’t comfortable sending him to high school. “If you bring their report card with D’s on it and C’s, that’s hold-back material for me,” she says. “He wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Denverly Grant, a friend of Jojuan’s uncle Tony and the mom of a Pop Warner teammate, offered to take him in and homeschool him alongside her own children for the next year. With Grant, his grades began to creep upwards. Still, the prospect of thrusting him back into a regular environment at such a competitive school concerned Jackie. She wondered whether Mater Dei was the right fit. She also wondered how she, an in-home care nurse and a single mother to three children, could ever turn it down.

“When you are living in low-budget or whatever, when someone comes to you and tells you that your son can go here, what are you going to do?” Jackie Jenkins says. “Are you going to say, ‘Hell no?’ You’re not going to say that… I felt like that was a chance of a lifetime. I wanted my son to be involved in that.”

And so he went. On the field, things went well. Jojuan thrived as the star running back on Mater Dei’s freshman team, and made a brief cameo on varsity to end the season. His physique and skillset already manifested enough for the first wave of scholarship offers to roll in. A larger role beckoned.

He came to appreciate the school’s diversity. Perhaps his favorite aspect was the social environment, which was unlike anything he experienced.

“I was always one of those shy kids and I started opening up,” he says. “I’m going to different neighborhoods, [hanging with] people I’ve never met before and I’m trusting them. My life and everything, it was just amazing, because I used to go around and see, ‘This is what this is like. This is what this is like.'”

She gained comfort in the knowledge that there were multiple coaches from Jojuan’s Pop Warner team who either coached at Mater Dei or had children there. She claims she made repeated requests to the Mater Dei coaching staff asking that if her son’s grades were suffering, they bench him so he could have extra time to focus on his studies. She trusted them to keep a mindful eye on her only son.

“I thought we were a big family,” she says.

Citing California’s Right to Privacy laws as well as school policy, a Mater Dei representative declined to address specific questions about Jojuan Collins, instead providing VICE Sports with a statement that read in part:

“We treat all of our students with the same caring and compassion regardless of their athletic ability, while also striving to include and provide every student with a space and facilities that allow them to reach their fullest potential both on and off the field. While we are extremely proud of our rich athletic tradition at Mater Dei, we hold our students to a higher standard both academically and personally. The student in question was a freshman and per CIF rules all freshmen are eligible to play football at the start of the season. We provided [Collins] with the maximum opportunities to receive academic guidance and assistance provided to any MD student.”

For his part, Jojuan accepts that, regardless of the time commitment that football represented, at least some of the responsibility for his low grades falls upon him. “I tried to pull my grades up,” he says. “I wasn’t able to. I made some bad decisions.”

With finals looming, Jackie decided to withdraw Jojuan from Mater Dei in December. It meant forfeiting the entire semester’s worth of credits, something she believes was fait accompli with how low his GPA already was. “At this point, what the heck would a final do for you?” she says.

Almost immediately, she received offers from other private schools interested in Jojuan’s talents. She claims some went as far as to offer to relocate her, as well admit Jojuan’s younger sister. Jackie wasn’t interested.

“It’s like, you know what? I’ve had enough,” she says. “My thirst was already quenched. I didn’t want anything else to do with a private school.”

He says he has no hard feelings towards anyone at Mater Dei. His family, on the other hand, still feels misled.

“Simply because it was a private school, I just thought that he had a better shot at education,” Joe Jenkins, Jojuan’s grandfather, says. “I can only say that Mater Dei disappoints me. The reason they disappoint me was I had a child who is very good in football and it ended up Mater Dei giving me the impression that he was better at football than he was learning. I think it should have been the other way around… All they want is football out of you. They don’t really want to work with you. They just want football.”

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jojuan ended the Serra game averaging six yards per carry. It was not enough. This is the new order of things. It’s what’s supposed to happen now that the private schools have won.

“The City Section is dying,” Stevenson says. “The well is getting dry because everyone’s getting pulled out.”

Financially, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The most sweeping legislative change capable of leveling the playing field—a mandate that students play for the high school in their most immediate neighborhood—is impossible. There’s no telling whether there’s enough documented impropriety to investigate Pop Warner recruiting and school transfers, or whether such a probe would amount to anything.

So, as is too often the case in areas without resources, the undue burden of survival falls on individuals to succeed where the system has failed. For Dorsey, that means it’s up to the DDP to keep them afloat.

“As long as the dudes right here, in this room here [stay], we’re going to be alright,” says Mincy, the Dons’ head coach. “As long as we’ve got those community people holding this thing down, we’re going to be OK. But once they go… I’m trying to find ways to get these dudes compensated for their time just so it doesn’t blow up.”

“How long can you do it with your money?” Stevenson asks. “How much can you do with less resources? How much can you tell a parent, ‘We’re going to provide X, Y, and Z for your kid,’ and you go get your bank account statement and you’re like, ‘Shit, I’m behind on X-amount of bills because I did this?'”

He doesn’t have an answer. But he doesn’t see himself anywhere else. “I can’t preach about kids leaving the area and I leave also,” Stevenson says. He knows, however, that the same doesn’t necessarily apply in return.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It has only been six months since Kayvon Thibodeaux left. Who’s to say Jojuan Collins won’t do the same?

“At the end of the day, you always have it in the back of your mind,” Stevenson admits.

Jojuan says his loyalties lie with Dorsey. He has seen the other side of things and believes that what he needs was in his backyard all along. If that makes him the start of something bigger, so be it. For now, he’s just like any other 16-year-old, taking comfort in finally being back home.

“I’m able to walk in my neighborhood and get that feeling like, ‘This is where I started. This is where it all went down, and this is where I’m going to end my high school [career],” he says.

As of this writing, Jojuan has as many touchdowns (11) as the Dons’ second- and third-placed players combined. His grades have rebounded. There is work to be done, still, but his mother believes that there is no place better equipped to support him than Dorsey.

“All we can provide is a family atmosphere,” Stevenson says.

Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

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asialogistics · 8 years

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Automobility LA™ Announces Its 2017 Advisory Board

Executives from Audi, General Motors, Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and Time Inc. Join Board of the Auto-Tech Industry's Only Trade Show

LOS ANGELES, March 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Los Angeles Auto Show (LA Auto Show®) today announced the appointment of four new members to its AutoMobility LA Advisory Board. Partha Goswami, Manager of Technology Insights at General Motors; Anupam "Pom" Malhotra, Director of Connected Vehicles at Audi of America; Seleta Reynolds, General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation; and Alex Roy, President of Europe By Car and Editor-at-Large for Time Inc.'s The Drive join key executives and thought leaders from top companies in both the automotive and technology industries. Board members of AutoMobility LA, the convergence of LA Auto Show's Connected Car Expo® and its Press & Trade Days, will help shape the show's overall programming, including speakers, panels and competitions.

Alongside four-year veteran conference director, Andy Gryc, the advisory board will set the strategic direction and conference agenda for AutoMobility LA, which will be held November 27-30, 2017 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Additionally, members of the board will be instrumental in guiding thought leadership presentations taking place throughout AutoMobility LA and ensuring the speakers and topics delve into the most pressing issues shaping the future of transportation today.

"As the new automotive industry continues its rapid evolution, we are excited to have some of the most prominent minds in the auto-tech space to help shape the 2017 show," said Lisa Kaz, President and CEO of the LA Auto Show and AutoMobility LA. "With guidance and input from these experts, we look forward to assembling this year's lineup of speakers who will address new technologies transforming the automotive ecosystem and provide insight into its latest innovations."

Members of the 2017 AutoMobility LA Advisory Board include:

Bryan Biniak, Entrepreneur in Residence, Nokia Growth Partners Bryan Biniak is an EIR at Nokia Growth Partners, where he serves as an investor in growth stage virtual reality, augmented reality, connected vehicle and IoT companies. Biniak previously served as General Manager of DX at Microsoft Corporation. He also served as Global Vice President at Nokia Corporation leading its worldwide application and developer ecosystem and store for its feature phones and smart devices.

John Ellis, Lead, Ellis & Associates John Ellis leads Ellis & Associates, a global management consultancy focused on embedded software and software strategy for the IoT with a concentration in transportation and autonomous movement. Formerly, Ellis was the Global Technologist of Ford Motor Company's connected car business unit. While there, he was involved in the specification, design and initial development of Sync Gen 3, next generation Sync services (Ford's connected car+cloud service) as well as SmartDeviceLink, an API system for integrating mobile devices into the car and the genesis for Apple's Carplay and Google's Android Auto.

Justin Fishkin, Chief Strategy Officer, Local Motors Justin Fishkin is Chief Strategy Officer of Local Motors. He marries a lifelong dedication to sustainability and making a difference in the world with a background in finance and investing. Prior to joining Local Motors, he was the Senior Portfolio Manager of Carbon War Room, where he focused on incubating and scaling profitable solutions to climate change. He began his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and later became an investor.

Partha Goswami, Manager of Technology Insights, General Motors Partha Goswami has over 24 years of experience in the automotive industry, with a background spanning product development, technology planning and a variety of business assignments including strategic planning and brand strategy. He has worked on various facets of technology strategy for the last eight years. Currently, as Manager of Technology Insights within GM's market research group, he is responsible for identifying technology trends, exploring future implications and cascading insights to stakeholders within the company.

Derek Kan, General Manager, Lyft Derek Kan is the General Manager of Lyft and was recently nominated for the Board of Directors of AMTRAK. Previously, he was Director of Strategy at Genapsys, a DNA sequencing startup. From 2012 to 2014, he worked at Bain & Company. Kan also served as an Advisor at Elliott Management. Previously, he was a Policy Advisor to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the Chief Economist for the Senate Republican Policy Committee and served as a Presidential Management Fellow at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Roger Lanctot, Associate Director, Global Automotive Practice, Strategy Analytics As Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics, Roger Lanctot has a powerful voice in the definition of future trends in automotive safety, powertrain and infotainment systems. He draws on 25 years of experience in the technology industry as an analyst, journalist and consultant. Lanctot has conducted and participated in major industry studies, created new research products and services, and advised clients on strategy and competitive issues throughout his career.

Anupam "Pom" Malhotra, Director, Connected Vehicles at Audi of America Anupam "Pom" Malhotra is the Director for Connected Vehicles at Audi of America and is responsible for the business and operational growth of the Audi connect service and development of the company's digitalization portfolio for connected cars. Pom joined Audi in 2010 from General Motors where he was head of location based services for the company's OnStar brand. In his more than 20 years in the automotive industry, Pom has focused his efforts at the intersection of business and technology and is currently helping realize Audi's vision of the future of mobility.

Manuela Papadopol, Director, Business Development and Communications, Elektrobit Manuela Papadopol is responsible for business development and global communications for Elektrobit. In her role, she identifies, articulates and oversees strategic partnerships for Elektrobit in the automotive and technology industries. She is an active member of Women in Automotive Technology, an organization created to connect, educate and drive the future of the automotive industry. Papadopol also holds a patent in voice-activated acquisition of non-local content. She was named a 2016 Woman Worth Watching by Diversity Journal and featured in Connected World Magazine's "Women of IoT Marketing" 2016.

Seleta Reynolds, General Manager, Los Angeles Department of Transportation Seleta Reynolds is General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation appointed by the Administration of Mayor Eric Garcetti. Reynolds is responsible for implementing Great Streets for Los Angeles, a plan to reduce traffic fatalities, double the number of people riding bikes, and expand access to integrated transportation choices for Angelenos and the region. Reynolds has over 18 years of transportation experience throughout the United States.

Alex Roy, President of Europe By Car, Editor-at-Large for Time Inc.'s The Drive Alex Roy is currently President of Europe By Car, Editor-at-Large for Autonomy/Mobility at Time Inc.'s The Drive, guest host of /DRIVE on NBC Sports, contributor to Jalopnik and Road & Track, and host of the Autonocast car tech podcast. Roy is also author of "The Driver" and Executive Producer and star of "32 Hours, 7 Minutes."

Danny Shapiro, Senior Director of Automotive, NVIDIA Danny Shapiro is Senior Director of NVIDIA's Automotive Business Unit, focusing on artificial intelligence solutions for self-driving cars and in-vehicle co-pilots. Shapiro holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He also serves on the Advisory Boards for the Connected Car Council and the NVIDIA Foundation, which focuses on computational solutions for cancer research.

Conference Director:

Andy Gryc, Co-Founder, CX3 Marketing Andy Gryc is the co-founder of CX3 Marketing, a company that provides technology-savvy marketing through strategic, tactical and content-creation services to a wide range of clients in the automotive space. His reputation in the industry is rooted in hands-on experience in the automotive and embedded trenches – software architecture and engineering, technical sales and product marketing – for well over two decades at companies like QNX, OnStar and HP. With a solid reputation for making complex technology easy to understand and for bridging technical and non-technical stakeholders, Gryc was the winner of the "Top Car Tech Celeb, Analyst, or Advocate" by Auto Connected Car News, 2015.

About the Los Angeles Auto Show and AutoMobility LA

Founded in 1907, the Los Angeles Auto Show (LA Auto Show®) is the first major North American auto show of the season each year. In 2016, the show's Press & Trade Days merged with the Connected Car Expo (CCE) to become AutoMobility LATM, the industry's first trade show converging the technology and automotive industries to launch new products and technologies and to discuss the most pressing issues surrounding the future of transportation and mobility. AutoMobility LA 2017 will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center Nov. 27-30, with manufacturer vehicle debuts intermixed. LA Auto Show 2017 will be open to the public Dec. 1-10. AutoMobility LA is where the new auto industry gets business done, unveils groundbreaking new products and makes strategic announcements in front of media and industry professionals from around the globe. LA Auto Show is endorsed by the Greater L.A. New Car Dealer Association and is operated by ANSA Productions. To receive the latest show news and information, follow LA Auto Show on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LAAutoShow or via Facebook at http://ift.tt/2bNfmD9 and sign up for alerts at http://ift.tt/tO2Lyt. For more information about AutoMobility LA, please visit http://ift.tt/1VYQnk3.

Media Contact: Sanaz Marbley/Brian Alexander JMPR Public Relations (818) 992-4353 [email protected] [email protected]

Read this news on PR Newswire Asia website: Automobility LA™ Announces Its 2017 Advisory Board

#Logistics & Transportation

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reportsjournal · 5 years

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Key participants include BASF SE, Dowdupont, LG Chem Ltd., Asahi Kasei Corporation, Mitsubishi Engineering-Plastics Corporation, Polyplastics Co. Ltd, Royal DSM, Trinseo, Evonik Industries AG, LANXESS.

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Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS)

Nylons

Polyamides (PA)

Polybutylene Terephthalate (PBT)

Polycarbonates (PC)

Polyethers

Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET)

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Polyoxymethylene (POM)

Polyphenylenes

Polysulphone (PSU)

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)

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Applications of Plastic Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2016-2026)

Packaging

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Machinery

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E-mail: [email protected]

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autobizupdate · 8 years

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Automobility LA™ Announces Its 2017 Advisory Board

Executives from Audi, General Motors, Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and Time Inc. Join Board of the Auto-Tech Industry's Only Trade Show

Members of the 2017 AutoMobility LA Advisory Board include:

Conference Director:

About the Los Angeles Auto Show and AutoMobility LA

Media Contact: Sanaz Marbley/Brian Alexander JMPR Public Relations (818) 992-4353 [email protected] [email protected]

Read this news on PR Newswire Asia website: Automobility LA™ Announces Its 2017 Advisory Board

#Auto

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thisissmblog-blog · 8 years

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No Holiday, No Problem !

Salam, sahabat jauh yang sebentar lagi menjumpai langit Jakarta, Ibu Ketua, Baiq Mega Hikmah Septa Mala. Semoga hidupmu juga senantiasa bernaung dibawah lindungan-Nya dan berkah mengalir mengiringi kesibukanmu. Maafkan juga, karena akupun tak bisa konsisten mendampingi SMblog. Pertama, selamat atas kesuksesannya sebagai Organizing Committee Warna Komunikasi dan juga kesuksesannya dalam mengetuai teman-teman HIMIKOM Universitas Mataram. Wah, setelah di jurusan, mau jadi ketua di mana lagi Meg ? BEM kah ? PII kah, atau di tempat lain ? kayaknya hidupmu emang ditakdirkan untuk memimpin deh, hehe. Sama sepertimu, aku sebenarnya juga punya banyak cerita yang mau dikisahkan, sayang semuanya hanya berlalu tanpa sempat diabadikan dalam tulisan. Alasannya pun masih sama seperti yang lalu-lalu; S.I.B.U.K. Tapi, sebagai gantinya, yang berlalu itu akan coba kurangkum menjadi “Memoar Kesibukan Sakti” wkwkwkwk. Kali ini spekulasinya dipercantik sedikit biar kamu mau baca :v

Momentum pergantian dan awal tahun kemarin bisa dibilang puncak kesibukanku di tahun 2016. Di awal hingga pertengahan Desember kemarin aku sempat hectic dengan beberapa aktivitas. Di awali dengan ajakan Bu Ida untuk terlibat sebagai tim peneliti di salah satu project penelitian ketika memberikan asistensi mata kuliah dasar-dasar logika. Penelitian ini adalah project pembuatan rencana strategis pengembangan perempuan di sektor informal dari Kementrian Pemberdayaan Perempuan dan Perlindungan Anak RI. Dan kebetulan tim kami mendapat tanggung jawab untuk meneliti di sektor konveksi. Alhamdulilah, banyak pengalaman dan pengetahuan baru yang bisa kudapatkan karena ibu Ida selaku ketua tim berani mempercayakan tugas-tugas yang menurutku krusial seperti halnya indepth interview, mencari dan menganalisis jurnal tentang konveksi di Indonesia, sampai mengolah raw data penelitian. Ditambah lagi, dalam penelitian ini hanya aku yang statusnya masih sebagai mahasiswa. Bisa bekerja sama dengan dosen-dosen yang khasanah keilmuan risetnya sudah dalam was really a great chance. Oh iya, karena penelitian ini juga, wawasanku tentang pekerja wanita di sektor informal lumayan bertambah. Gara-gara penelitian ini juga aku baru tahu kalau ternyata Lombok Timur itu adalah salah satu penyuplai tenaga kerja wanita terbanyak di Indonesia loh.

Lanjut. Tepat setelah konsinyering penelitian berakhir, salah satu temanku dari Bulukumba, Nurwahidah, ngajakin ngumpul-ngumpul. Ternyata undangan ngumpul-ngumpul ini bukan tanpa maksud, setelah makan-makan selesai, Ida mengutarakan niatannya untuk menjadi ketua Ikatan Kekeuargaan Mahasiswa Pelajar Sulawesi Selatan Cabang Jakarta (IKAMI-SS) dan memintaku untuk membentuk tim pemenangan. Jadi ingat masa-masa Pemilu Raya, hehe. Alhamdulillah Ida berhasil terpilih sebagai ketua dengan perolehan suara yang tipis mengungguli calon lainnya.

APA KABAR MAGANG ?

Masalah magang, kemarin sudah kupasrahkan. Oh ya, di kisah sebelumnya aku udah nyeritain tentang ASTRA kan? Kabar dari ASTRA lumayan mengecewakan Meg, hehe. Beberapa pekan sebelumnya pihak ASTRA sudah mengonfirmasi kalau aku belum bisa magang dulu di sana, tapi yang nerima teleponnya teman kontrakanku, Andi. Alasannya, katanya cuma bilang “karena sesuatu dan lain hal”. Andi sempat memintaku untuk mengonfirmasi secara personal, tapi sudah kupasrahkan, Inshaa Allah, ini bagian dari rencana Allah.

Beberapa hari sebelum pergantian tahun, tepatnya tanggal 29 Desember, aku coba apply ke beberapa perusahaan yang menyediakan lowongan magang, tanpa mempertimbangkan lagi profil perusahaannya, asalkan lowongannya untuk jurusan ilmu komunikasi. Diluar dugaan, ada perusahaan yang sudah mengonfirmasi dalam waktu yang sangat singkat. Dibandingkan dengan perusahaan lain yang kadang harus menunggu minimal dua minggu, bahkan hampir sebulan, yang ini gak lebih dua jam sudah ada kabar, dan ternyata konfirmasinya berupa approval, it means sudah langsung diterima dan gak usah pake interview lagi.

FYI, awalnya aku gak tahu ini perusahaan apa, info perusahaan yang diupdate di Instagram lewat akun Magang Id pun sama sekali ga nyantumin identitas dan profil perusahaannya, Cuma ada #lowonganjakarta di captionnya. Wahhh, ini perusahaan apa ya ? jangan-jangan perusahaan gelap, aku sempat mikir kayak gitu hehe

“Selamat malam, ini Andre, yang buka lowongan analyst. Anda kami terima untuk magang di tempat kami, oleh karena itu kami mau mengundang untuk first meeting pada hari jumat 30 Des jam 8 pagi. Tempatnya di perpustakaan riset Bank Indonesia, Gedung B. Lt. 2, Bank Indonesia, Thamrin, Jakarta Pusat. Terima kasih.”

Karena sedang di pom bensin dan buru-buru mau ngikutin muscab IKAMI Cabang Depok di Sawangan, aku cuma balas “baik. Terima kasih atas informasinya. Sampai ketemu jumat besok.” Setelah itu baru sadar, kalau aku lupa nanyain ini dari perusahaan apa -_-“

Alhamdulillah, I’m officially Interns. Siap menimbah ilmu dan pengalaman baru di Bank Indonesia. Jobdesc ku selama di sini sebagai Analyst interns di unit BI Institute. BI Institute itu unit dari BI yang konsen ke arah pengembangan pendidikan, dan tanggungjawabku adalah membuat materi presentasi sesuai dengan topik yang diminta. Oh iya, boss ku di sini namanya Pak Farid Aulia, beliau adalah kepala Divis Academy Leadership and General Management. Kalau BI Institute diibaratkan sebagai kampus, maka Pak Farid ini adalah Dekan di Fakultas ALGM-nya. Awalnya agak di sayangkan, karena gak bisa magang sebagai staff komunikasi, berhubung karena dept. komunikasinya sudah penuh diisi sama anak magang yang lain, tapi beginilah hidup, tak harus selalu seperti yang kita harapka, sebab Allah yang Maha mengetahui yang terbaik untuk kita, tetap wajib bersyukur dan menyerahkan kembali segala sesuatu kepada-Nya.

Alhamdulillah, boss ku juga tergolong baik dan peduli dengan kami, mahasiswa yang magang di sini. Enak diajakin diskusi masalah apapun, beliau bahkan bilang gini “kita harus fair, saya membutuhkan tenaga dan pemikiran kalian selama di sini, dan saya juga senang membantu kalau ada mahasiswa yang butuh bantuan.” Yup, sebelum-sebelumnya, banyak mahasiswa yang pernah ditolong oleh Pak Farid, ada yang dibimbing untuk bisa lulus tes PCPM (seleksi masuk BI jalur management training), ada yang sudah di angkat jadi honorer, bahkan Pak Farid juga sangat bersedia untuk memberikan Letter of Recommendation untuk mahasiswa-mahasiswa pejuang beasiswa luar negeri, berhubung juga beliau adalah lulusan luar negeri (Magister dan doctoral di Perancis). Selain itu, beliau juga bisa di ajak kompromi, waktu aku minta tanggungjawab yang berhubungan dengan komunikasi dan nawarin branding strategy buat BI Institute, Alhamdulillah beliau mau mempertimbangkan walaupun sampai sekarang belum ada konfirmasi, hehe.

Hal-hal lain yang juga aku senangi dari magang di sini adalah :

1.Ruang kerjaku di perpustakaan, banyak majalah-majalah yang bisa dibaca

2.Tuntutan kerjanya gak terlalu rigid dan padat alias bisa santai-santai walaupun agak menjurus gabut, hehe

3. Gampang izin (izinnya udah berkali-kali tapi ga pernah sekalipun ditanya alasan izinnya karena apa -_-), bisa magang sambil beraktifitas dan menyelesaikan tanggung jawab lain di luar tanpa harus merasa berat

4. Ada kajian rutin tiap ba’da dzuhur di Baitul Ihsan (masjidnya BI). Aku sebelumnya udah pernah cerita kan tentang Baitul Ihsan ? masjid langganan anak LDK buat mabit, kajian, dan sering jadi assembly point untuk aktivis sebelum demonstrasi di wilayah medan merdeka dan sekitarnya. Yup, jadinya sekarang makin akrab sama Baitul Ihsan.

Btw, Februari itu awal batch baru buat kebanyakan perusahaan di sini buat buka lowongan magang. Pilihan untuk magang di sini emang worth it sih buat mahasiswa komunikasi, mau di kementrian/institusi negara, perusahaan komersil, stasiun tv, PR Consultant, production house, semuanya ada. Tahu gak, Peldy ama Heni juga magang di sini loh, mereka di Metro TV.

Sekarang lagi libur semester yah? ciee, yang akhirnya punya banyak waktu untuk keluarga. Manfaatin sebaik-baiknya sebelum jadi ke Jakarta yah, jangan sampai pas liburannya udah lewat baru nyesel. Kayak aku sekarang, yang udah fix gak bisa balik, dan liburan semesternya harus di perpustakaan BI -_-“

FYI, Jakarta akhir-akhir ini lagi ga menentu cuacanya, dikira kemarau tau-taunya sering hujan kurang lebih seminggu ini, alhasil sering kehujanan di motor, nanti jangan lupa bawa payung. Oh iya, di Mataram udah ada Go-Jek, Grab-Bike sama Uber belum sih ? Soalnya selama di sini, kamu bakal familiar sama abang-abang mereka wkwkwkwk. Tapi bagaimanapun nanti hasilnya, mau magangnya di sini ataupun di sana, tetap bersyukur, dua-duanya baik, asalkan tanggungjawab selama magang bisa dipenuhi dan dilaksanakan secara maksimal semuanya. Keuntungannya magang di sini cuma bisa mempelajari lebih banyak industri professional secara lebih mendalam lagi, soalnya semua akses ada di sini. Selebihnya, tergantung dari kompetensi yang kita miliki.

Sekian dulu ya meg, semoga bisa meyakinkan orang tuamu seyakin-yakinnya, buktiin kalau kamu Anak Komunikasi asli yang bisa dipercaya oleh siapapun wkwkwkwk. Terus, kalau punya rencana magang di tempat lain dan butuh referensi, silahkan berkabar, mungkin ada yang bisa aku bantu. Tetap semangat.

Selamat tanggal 30 !

Salam,

Dari balik jendela perpustakaan riset BI

Tengah Hari di Pengujung Januari 2017

#firsttarget #internstory #cerita biasa #amtrisakti

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flauntpage · 7 years

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Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"[This is] where I should have come in the first place," Jojuan says. "This is my home. This is where I started."

Is Jojuan Collins part of a new generation of talented kids spurning the advances of big money football programs to stay home, or the last of a dying breed?

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Little about Dorsey High School announces itself as one of America's great incubators of NFL talent.

Start with how they train. For much of this past summer, Dorsey's practice field was an unusable checkerboard of too-high tufts and vacant squares of dirt.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"Dorsey is right here in the middle," says defensive line coach Jovon Hayes. "It's like a melting pot of everybody."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

The first time I ever asked Jojuan Collins a question, his answer stretched on for nearly 15 uninterrupted minutes.

Yet those closest to him never worry about whether South Los Angeles might harden him. Instead, they're worried about how gentle and trusting Jojuan can be.

"He has a very soft heart underneath all the muscles," says Joe Jenkins, Collins's grandfather. "His heart is made out of glass."

He sings tenor in the choir and his favorite pastime since the age of 12 is composing love songs with his older sister.

"You don't write with your brain," he says. "You write with your heart. Take out your heart and write with it."

"I kept rewinding and [playing it back]," he says. "They were chasing me around the house trying to get the controller."

"I've watched that game so many times, I know it like the back of my hand," he says.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"I'm talking about you've got to describe those hits with words like 'jarred,'" laughs Jadili Damu Johnson, a Dorsey assistant and Pop Warner coach who coached against Jojuan. "Ugly. Nasty."

"He runs like he's the biggest kid on the playground," says Stevenson. "It's like a 'man amongst boys'-type deal."

Until, that is, Thibodeaux transferred again in May to Oaks Christian, a private school powerhouse located in Westlake Village. No one at Dorsey saw it coming.

"Big-time, big-time guy," Biggins says. "Everything is there for him to be a superstar."

Says Stevenson, "When it's all said and done, Jojuan will be the number one player in the nation."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"I call it, 'The private school year," says Junie Rivero, Dorsey's special teams coach. "All of them always have their year where they're super-hot and everyone wants to go to those schools."

Those edges come into play long before those schools ever meet on Friday nights. They are spoken of and leveraged every time a player like Jojuan Collins emerges as a middle school prospect.

The points of entry are volunteer youth football coaches. The inducement? Funnel the best players on your team in exchange for a full-time paying position with the program.

"It's always tied to a Pop Warner coach," Stevenson says. "In the inner city, the drug game has dried up. Rap game is drying up. What's the next-best hustle for someone without a job? Hustle kids."

For the players and parents on the receiving end of those pitches, the result is an ecosystem shaped by perception and unverifiable promises.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"Whether or not...after 15 or 20 years, they're going to change their mindset, I don't know," Schwartz says.

The costs are not just borne out on the field.

"The playing field is like politics," Stevenson says. "It's never going to be even for the guy who puts on his work boots every day versus the guy who puts on his wingtips every day."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

By the time Jojuan finished eighth grade, he had established himself as one of the most sought-after middle school prospects. The legend of "Man Child" had spread.

"When you look like a man already, then people are going to know who you are whether you've taken a snap or not," Biggins says.

Consequently, Jackie Jenkins had no shortage of private schools interested in Jojuan, many of which offered significant financial aid to defray expenses.

It seemed to be the best of all worlds, a private education with the type of football program that could nurture Jojuan's talent enough to punch his ticket to any college he wanted to go to.

"This high school does all this stuff and they want me to come here?" he says, recalling his mindset at the time. "Me? Out of all these kids?"

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

He came to appreciate the school's diversity. Perhaps his favorite aspect was the social environment, which was unlike anything he experienced.

"I thought we were a big family," she says.

"It's like, you know what? I've had enough," she says. "My thirst was already quenched. I didn't want anything else to do with a private school."

He says he has no hard feelings towards anyone at Mater Dei. His family, on the other hand, still feels misled.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jojuan ended the Serra game averaging six yards per carry. It was not enough. This is the new order of things. It's what's supposed to happen now that the private schools have won.

"The City Section is dying," Stevenson says. "The well is getting dry because everyone's getting pulled out."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It has only been six months since Kayvon Thibodeaux left. Who's to say Jojuan Collins won't do the same?

"At the end of the day, you always have it in the back of your mind," Stevenson admits.

"I'm able to walk in my neighborhood and get that feeling like, 'This is where I started. This is where it all went down, and this is where I'm going to end my high school [career]," he says.

"All we can provide is a family atmosphere," Stevenson says.

Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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flauntpage · 7 years

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Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"[This is] where I should have come in the first place," Jojuan says. "This is my home. This is where I started."

Is Jojuan Collins part of a new generation of talented kids spurning the advances of big money football programs to stay home, or the last of a dying breed?

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Little about Dorsey High School announces itself as one of America's great incubators of NFL talent.

Start with how they train. For much of this past summer, Dorsey's practice field was an unusable checkerboard of too-high tufts and vacant squares of dirt.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"Dorsey is right here in the middle," says defensive line coach Jovon Hayes. "It's like a melting pot of everybody."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

The first time I ever asked Jojuan Collins a question, his answer stretched on for nearly 15 uninterrupted minutes.

Yet those closest to him never worry about whether South Los Angeles might harden him. Instead, they're worried about how gentle and trusting Jojuan can be.

"He has a very soft heart underneath all the muscles," says Joe Jenkins, Collins's grandfather. "His heart is made out of glass."

He sings tenor in the choir and his favorite pastime since the age of 12 is composing love songs with his older sister.

"You don't write with your brain," he says. "You write with your heart. Take out your heart and write with it."

"I kept rewinding and [playing it back]," he says. "They were chasing me around the house trying to get the controller."

"I've watched that game so many times, I know it like the back of my hand," he says.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"I'm talking about you've got to describe those hits with words like 'jarred,'" laughs Jadili Damu Johnson, a Dorsey assistant and Pop Warner coach who coached against Jojuan. "Ugly. Nasty."

"He runs like he's the biggest kid on the playground," says Stevenson. "It's like a 'man amongst boys'-type deal."

Until, that is, Thibodeaux transferred again in May to Oaks Christian, a private school powerhouse located in Westlake Village. No one at Dorsey saw it coming.

"Big-time, big-time guy," Biggins says. "Everything is there for him to be a superstar."

Says Stevenson, "When it's all said and done, Jojuan will be the number one player in the nation."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"I call it, 'The private school year," says Junie Rivero, Dorsey's special teams coach. "All of them always have their year where they're super-hot and everyone wants to go to those schools."

Those edges come into play long before those schools ever meet on Friday nights. They are spoken of and leveraged every time a player like Jojuan Collins emerges as a middle school prospect.

The points of entry are volunteer youth football coaches. The inducement? Funnel the best players on your team in exchange for a full-time paying position with the program.

"It's always tied to a Pop Warner coach," Stevenson says. "In the inner city, the drug game has dried up. Rap game is drying up. What's the next-best hustle for someone without a job? Hustle kids."

For the players and parents on the receiving end of those pitches, the result is an ecosystem shaped by perception and unverifiable promises.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

"Whether or not...after 15 or 20 years, they're going to change their mindset, I don't know," Schwartz says.

The costs are not just borne out on the field.

"The playing field is like politics," Stevenson says. "It's never going to be even for the guy who puts on his work boots every day versus the guy who puts on his wingtips every day."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

By the time Jojuan finished eighth grade, he had established himself as one of the most sought-after middle school prospects. The legend of "Man Child" had spread.

"When you look like a man already, then people are going to know who you are whether you've taken a snap or not," Biggins says.

Consequently, Jackie Jenkins had no shortage of private schools interested in Jojuan, many of which offered significant financial aid to defray expenses.

It seemed to be the best of all worlds, a private education with the type of football program that could nurture Jojuan's talent enough to punch his ticket to any college he wanted to go to.

"This high school does all this stuff and they want me to come here?" he says, recalling his mindset at the time. "Me? Out of all these kids?"

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

He came to appreciate the school's diversity. Perhaps his favorite aspect was the social environment, which was unlike anything he experienced.

"I thought we were a big family," she says.

"It's like, you know what? I've had enough," she says. "My thirst was already quenched. I didn't want anything else to do with a private school."

He says he has no hard feelings towards anyone at Mater Dei. His family, on the other hand, still feels misled.

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

Jojuan ended the Serra game averaging six yards per carry. It was not enough. This is the new order of things. It's what's supposed to happen now that the private schools have won.

"The City Section is dying," Stevenson says. "The well is getting dry because everyone's getting pulled out."

Demian Becerra/Holy Mountain

It has only been six months since Kayvon Thibodeaux left. Who's to say Jojuan Collins won't do the same?

"At the end of the day, you always have it in the back of your mind," Stevenson admits.

"I'm able to walk in my neighborhood and get that feeling like, 'This is where I started. This is where it all went down, and this is where I'm going to end my high school [career]," he says.

"All we can provide is a family atmosphere," Stevenson says.

Jojuan Collins Carries the Football Hopes of L.A.’s Public Schools published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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