Learning through lacrosse

Education doesn’t have to happen while sitting at a desk. For Tom Lewis, he sees learning happen every time a child picks up a lacrosse stick.

Lewis is the founder of Neighborhood Academy, a year-round program for fifth- and sixth-graders in different areas of Birmingham. At the Academy, students divide their time between extra tutoring in the classroom and learning the fundamentals of lacrosse on the field.

“Lacrosse is the hook. Education is what’s happening. Even on the lacrosse field, I’m educating,” Lewis said.

A Mountain Brook resident, Lewis has played lacrosse since his high school and college days. He was a lacrosse coach at the University of Alabama and also coached Mountain Brook High School’s boys team until 2011. He now coaches a girls lacrosse team in Mountain Brook, where his twin third grade daughters play, and is principal of InFocus LLC.

Since he came to Birmingham, Lewis said he has been committed to sharing the sport. He helped coach a youth league team in the 1990s, and in the past eight years has helped to create a Birmingham high school boys team, an under-13 team in western Birmingham and an under-15 team at Phillips Academy on 7th Avenue North.

“It’s hard for a lot of kids, once they touch a lacrosse stick, not to fall in love with the sport. It’s a great sport,” Lewis said.

Coaching led Lewis to tutoring members of those high school teams, especially as juniors prepared to take the ACT. There he found a great need for more math and reading education. Lewis remembered one student who entered his senior year of high school at a second grade reading level, and a year’s worth of hard work got him to a sixth grade level by graduation.

To influence students’ academics and character, Lewis realized that high school was too late in the game.

“If I want to have an impact on these kids’ lives and introduce lacrosse to them, I’ve got to start early. I’ve got to get them when they’re in fifth grade, sixth grade,” Lewis said. “There’s a real opportunity to speak and be heard with fifth and sixth graders that I don’t think you have if you go too young or too old.”

With the help of Leonard Gavin, a chaplain at Baptist Princeton Hospital and coach of the Birmingham under-13 team, Lewis came up with the idea for Neighborhood Academy. They started the program at the Ensley Recreation Center, and Lewis said the program received its nonprofit status in October 2014.

The Neighborhood Academy is 80 percent academics, 20 percent lacrosse. Students come two days a week during the school year or three days a week during the summer. Lewis and his volunteer teachers focus on math, geography and public speaking skills, then take the students out on the field to learn the basics of lacrosse. In the summer, Lewis said the Academy will also bring in people to speak about cooking, small engine repair, ethics and different career fields.

The program is free for the kids who participate, and Lewis said an important aspect is that the program is taught in recreational centers where kids are already hanging out in their free time. Neighborhood Academy has expanded to include a Fountain Heights location and a program at the YMCA near Phillips Academy.

In teaching at the Academy, Lewis has uncovered many educational needs. He recalls students who were unable to do basic addition or who thought Australia was a state on a U.S. map. When the Academy first started, Lewis had plans to expand the concept to other cities around the South, but he changed his mind after a few months of teaching.

“After about two months, I stepped back and said to myself – and this holds true today – ‘I’ve got a lifetime’s worth of work in the city of Birmingham, my home.’ So I’m going to stay focused here until I’m not needed, which will probably be a lifetime,” he said.

However, he’s also seen a lot of potential. In one of his most recent classes, three of the 11 students left at the end of the semester able to identify all 50 U.S. states, and the rest of the class had improved significantly. He has also worked with SAIL (Summer Adventures in Learning), a Birmingham program that tries to prevent learning loss during the summer.

“I’m very proud that in my first summer where I was tested, my kids, on average, gained over three months in math and over one month in reading even though we don’t focus on reading. So instead of my kids typically losing two months in math, they gained over three months in math. That is a net five-month impact. That’s a half [of] a school year,” Lewis said.

Whether they come to the Academy by choice or at the encouragement of a parent or recreation center director, Lewis said these students consistently want to better themselves.

“I think at the heart of it, they all want to be successful, they all want better. And the ones that come in my classroom are willing to put the time in. That’s telling for a fifth grader,” Lewis said. “It takes a village. It takes the school and the teachers there. It takes me, the Neighborhood Academy there, and it takes the parents.”

Besides academic success, Lewis said program graduates and former players in the other Birmingham lacrosse teams have a chance to “pay it forward” by teaching at Neighborhood Academy in high school and college. Lewis gets to watch members of those early teams grow up, sometimes with a lacrosse stick still in hand.

“I’m only with them fifth and sixth grade, but I see them again a lot of times on a lacrosse field and realize they’re in a better place now,” Lewis said. “I know for a fact, we’re changing that life.”

The boys’ varsity Birmingham team holds a signing day each year for its seniors, who attend schools all around the city. Every year, Lewis said a few players put on their college hat and accept scholarships to play college lacrosse.

“Lacrosse is an avenue for these kids to go to college and get a pretty good opportunity to earn scholarship money to go do that,” Lewis said.

Lewis is currently working with administrators at Huffman High School to create varsity boys and girls lacrosse teams. If successful, Huffman will be the first in Birmingham City Schools to field a team with all players attending the same school.

“My vision is that in five years, every Birmingham City high school — and there’s seven of them — fields a boys varsity lacrosse team and a girls varsity lacrosse team,” Lewis said.

Lewis also plans to keep expanding the Neighborhood Academy to reach more kids around Birmingham. He’s taught over 200 so far and has no plans to stop.

“We’re putting lacrosse sticks in their hands, but we’re also putting our arms around them,” Lewis said.