The New Yorker Radio Hour - Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Nearly seventy years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, our public schools effectively remain segregated. And, by some measures, New York City has the most segregated system in the country. For a group of high schools in Brooklyn, change has long seemed impossible. But now those schools are putting their hopes in an unlikely place: sports. The John Jay Educational Campus in Park Slope, Brooklyn, houses four public high schools. Three of them have a student body with a Black-and-Latino majority; the fourth is disproportionately white and Asian. For a decade, students from all four schools shared a cafeteria and a gym but played on two separate sports teams—sometimes even competing against one other. Last year, the athletics programs merged, and the hope is that this change will break down some of the divisions between students. Angelina Sharifi, a student who plays volleyball, said that a team has to mesh in order to win. “And meshing is, like, the best feeling ever—having a pass, set, swing, that fits perfectly with one another,” she said. “That kind of unspoken connection that comes with volleyball is super-satisfying for me. This is a story of how students and adults grapple with enduring inequities, and how the merger is playing out on the girls’ varsity volleyball team. “I want this to work. I really do,” the student Mariah Morgan said, “because it has the potential to be incredibly anti-racist.” This reporting originally aired as part of the podcast “Keeping Score,” a co-production of WNYC Studios and The Bell. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. My day starts at like 5.50, 6 o'clock. That's when I get up. And I'm out the house about like 7 and 10. Lauren Valmei lives in East New York, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. I would say it's mainly a black community. Lawrence High School is in Park Slope, another Brooklyn neighborhood, seven miles away. It's a whole, like, shift in demographic. It's like, I went from seeing, like, all black and brown people to predominantly white.

Her commute takes about an hour and a half. First she drops off her sister, then she jumps on the subway, then she takes a bus. And when she finally arrives in Park Slope, she sees a lot of fancy strollers and coffee shops. I just think these people must have, like, must have, like, a lot of money because these coffee shops are expensive. Lauren's school is based in a big brick building. And I'll go to the metal detectors. The building is the length of a full city block and it houses four schools, one on each floor.

I take my time and go up the stairs because my bag is very heavy because I got my computer in there and my charger. And I'm walking up those stairs and I take a break maybe on like the third floor and then walk up again. And when I get to my school, I'm really relieved. And I take like a little, not like a victory lap, but a little lap around the school just so I could like calm down, reset. New York City has the largest public school system in the United States with almost a million students. Two-thirds of them are black or Latino. Less than a third are white or Asian. By some measures it's the most segregated school system in the entire country. America's history of school segregation

is often a story of neighborhoods. But segregation can also play out within a single school building, and that's what this week's show is all about. Lauren's school is almost all people of color. A school on another floor of that building is nearly half white, and despite being in one building, students from different schools were actually discouraged from interacting with each other. But after a decade, students, parents, and even some administrators said it was finally time to come together to break down some of the racial barriers. And the way they were going to do it was by playing together through sports. And Lauren is one of those players.

Today we're going to spend the entire show following one sports team, a girls varsity volleyball team, on their quest for the city championship and something more. Alana Casanova Burgess, my colleague from WNYC Studios, spent the last year reporting this story alongside some student reporters, including some who were on the team. So it just ended, and they called my name. So I'm all the first very intense, because we literally, I really want to play.

I just want to be on the team, I don't know. This is Mariah Morgan, a junior. She's a setter on the girls' varsity volleyball team. But that's not her only extracurricular. She's also active on the campus council, a group of student leaders who represent the four separate schools that share this one building. And that council pressured the administrators of the four schools to combine the athletics programs last year.

I want this to work. I really do because it has the potential to be incredibly anti-racist. She's really feeling the stakes of this merger. I think the campuses have been separated for too long, and I think a more unified campus is probably a good thing. But there are moments where I'm going to be honest, I just don't know how we're going to make it work. But I believe in it. My family believes in it. I want other black and brown kids to believe in it, too. Mariah is also a reporter with The Bell. That's the student journalism nonprofit that I've been working with to tell this story. She and her peers have been looking into how the building goes.

got divided to begin with. It's really egregious what, you know, by having an environment like that, it's almost like you set these kids up to fail. To understand the challenges and the impact of last year's sports team merger, it's important to have some history of what's gone on in this school building. Let's rewind to the 1970s. Back then, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope was much more racially integrated, and so was the John Jay building. At that point, it was just one school, a single high school that filled all the

floors. In the 80s and 90s, the Department of Education was sending kids who had trouble at other schools to John Jay, and by the mid-90s, the school ranked first among New York City high schools in assaults, robberies, and drug-related incidents. Fewer than a third of students attended through their senior year. So, first question to start off would be, can and you introduce yourself to our audience? Sure. So my name is Glenda Hernandez. I'm actually a teacher.

I was a student at John Jay High School when it was one campus. Glenda went to John Jay in the mid-90s. It was really hard to be a student in that school. The bathrooms were terrible. The bathrooms were where most of the bullying happened. I did see a lot of fights in John, like a whole lot of fights. Jungle Jay.

They called the school Jungle Jay. You know, it was kind of rough. You think that calling the school Jungle Jay and a school that was mostly black and Latin and people of color had racial implications? I mean, when I think about it now, probably. The building's history has a lot of, quote, racial implications.

And Mariah is one in a long line of students to pick up on them. At one point, in 2001, John Jay High School was struggling so much that it got shut down. Some of the students sent elsewhere and reopened with a new administration. What came next in the early 2000s was the small schools movement, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg championed.

The idea, which was put into use across the country, was to split up big, unmanageable schools, like John Jay, and turned them into smaller schools with fewer students, so it would be easier for administrators to get a handle on things. Most importantly, We're going to begin giving parents and students a better, wider range of secondary school choices. In the John Jay building, that meant one big school was split into three.

I always described it to people as, like, you know, living in an apartment building, where, you know, everybody has their own apartment, but you share common spaces and your good neighbors, and you treat each other with respect and get along. Jill Bloomberg used to be the principal of Park Slope Collegiate, which is on on the fourth floor of the building. When she took on that job in 2004, the John Jay building was sort of falling apart. There was paint peeling off the walls.

There was water damage from the leaking roof that created crumbling walls and ceilings inside the classrooms. There was either no water in the drinking fountains or only hot water in the drinking fountains. There were rodents and the lockers didn't close. The bathrooms had not been renovated. It also seemed for decades. toilets didn't flush.

And then, in 2010, the Department of Education reached out with some news, something that would create a big shift. We want to bring in a fourth school. They wanted to add a new high school into the old John Jay building. Its name would be Millennium Brooklyn. It would be a sister school to a very prestigious and sought after one in Manhattan. Students would need to apply to get in. And if Jill and the other principals agree.

to add this fourth school, the DOE would do what they had been asking for for years. They'd renovate. When the DOE came in and said, it was this great news, we have all this money for the school, but we're only going to spend it on the building if Millennium moves in. Then I was furious with a well of past slights. At this point, in 2010, the three existing schools in John Jay altogether had a student body that was just 6% white. 50% were Latino, 36% were black. That's very different from who was expected to come in as millennium students. That sister school in Manhattan was more white,

more Asian, and often more affluent. Jill Bloomberg wasn't alone in pushing back. There were parents and teachers and students who also saw it as unfair. Here's a student from John Jay talking to WNYC at the time. There are going to be a lot of white and Asian students that are going to come into the school, and then they're going to get the money that we've always needed. He was reflecting a pretty widespread worry,

that they were going to be privileged and underserved kids in the same building, getting a different quality education, and the building would feel divided. Despite all that pushback from the community, a board appointed by the mayor approved the plan. Millennium would come into the building.

Renovations got underway. The water fountains were fixed, floors redone, roof repaired. The four schools would share common areas, like a library and a cafeteria. But not everything would be shared. The way I see it, sports, clubs, extracurriculars are the heart of a school. This is Veronica Vega. She's a teacher at PSC and she coaches volleyball. Up to this point, all the schools at John Jay had been playing together.

in one sports program. But when Millennium arrived in 2011, they brought their own program. So Coach Vega had to help figure out how they were going to share the gyms, the fields, the courts, with a bunch of new teams. It was bound to come to a head eventually.

One of the PE teachers and coaches came into my office, furious. Jill Bloomberg, the principal at the time. She said, we were supposed to have the gym now for our middle school volleyball program. and the Millennium Stunts team is working out there. I'm like, what's a stunts team? It's like competitive cheerleading.

They have fencing, they have ping pong, they have baseball, they have softball. They have 17 teams. Oh my God, they have like double the amount of sports that we have. And we've been in this building for the longest time. I was like, how did that happen? How is that possible? Like, how is that possible? So we're making a podcast about the John J. Campus,

following these recent efforts to really unite the campuses. I'm so happy that you all are doing this. Michael Williams graduated from Millennium Brooklyn in 2017. He remembers when he first learned about the discrepancies in the school sports programs. It was his senior year. When I saw the flyer, there were multiple people by the entrance of the building, just passing them out. The Park Slope Collegiate PTA had put this flyer together, explaining the team sports situation. At this point, Millennium had 17 sports teams, and the rest of the schools in the building, they just had nine.

And in big red, bold, underlying text, separate is not equal. Segregation is going on in the John Jay campus. Actually, it read separate is never equal, and that text was in black, but close enough. Quote, one building, one team, should be simple, right? The flyer made the case that the students being hurt by this imbalance were black and Latino kids who went to the three other schools. The flyer opened the floodgates. All this pain had been contained to separate floors,

and suddenly there was a conversation between them. Michael, who is black, heard that his school, Millennium Brooklyn, had a reputation for being privileged and snobby. He helped start the campus council, the student government group for all four schools. The one that Mariah, who plays volleyball, is also part of today. The sports teams, it was a very visible and very tangible manifestation of segregation. Former PSC principal, Jill Bloomberg.

And I think just this idea of, why can't kids play together? Like, really, like, what, why is this so hard? to do. You have to do things thoughtfully. This is Brian Friedman, the athletics director and baseball coach at Millennium. He spent seven years building their winning program. And from where he stood, merging the teams would be complicated. Let's say you had a full basketball roster of 15 at John Jay and a full basketball roster of 15 at Millennium.

You're not going to take 30 kids on a basketball team because if you are, 25, those kids are going to have a horrible experience. In other words, when only five players can be on the court, at any given time, what do you do with the rest? Plus, there were all the sports that Millennium dominated in and didn't even exist for the other students. So how would they ever stand a chance in tryouts against the Millennium Kids? And then the pandemic happened.

All sports stopped. But that, strangely, created an opportunity, according to Friedman. Everything is on hold anyway. Nobody's playing. Let's restructure, let's rebrand. At the same time, across the country, there was a new focus on anti-racism. Here in New York City, students, parents, and administrators

were taking a hard look at just how segregated the New York City public school system is. All that influenced the conversation around combining the sports programs. And so, after years of debate, it finally happened. The administrators finally decided to join all of the schools into one sports program, the John J. Jaguars. But that was just step one.

The big question was, would students from every school get an equal shot at playing on a team? That's Alana Casanova Burgess reporting that John J. Jaguars volleyball season begins after the break. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're spending the entire hour today in Brooklyn, New York, in one school building. It's a building that's home to four different high schools. The racial makeup of the student body at each school is quite different. For years, a rivalry existed within the building as students competed in sports teams against each other.

But that all changed last year. The sports teams merged, and the hope was that the merger would break down some of the segregation that had always existed between and among the schools. And that seemed like a win, but desegregating turned out to be a lot harder in practice than in theory. Here's WNYC's Alana Casanova Burgess, with the story of the girls' varsity volleyball team, the newly formed John J. Jaguars. This season begins.

It's September. The girls practice in the second floor gym. And the whole time, on the court, they look like a team. All 23 girls text every morning to decide what colored t-shirts to wear to practice, so they're coordinated. If someone doesn't have, for example, an orange one, someone else brings an extra. That doesn't sound like much,

but the four schools in this building are so separated that it's already more interaction than many of the students have ever had. And then, there's something about volleyball. Just the sisterhood that it brings, like just being on the core and working together to accomplish something. Angelina Sharifi,

the co-captain from Millennium Manhattan, which is also part of the Jaguars. She describes herself as ethnically Italian-Iranian. And like meshing is like the best feeling ever, like having a pass-set swing that's just like, you know, fits perfectly with one another. It's like that kind of unspoken connection that comes with volleyball is super satisfying for me. I've heard this from a lot of players that there's something special about this game.

In soccer or basketball, say, you're spending a lot of time engaging with players from another team. Everyone is running around. You can literally touch your opponents. But in volleyball, you're spending all your time on one side of the net, meshing, as Angie said, and becoming a unit. Truly, no Michael Jordans can get you there. Like, you truly are as strong as your weakest link. Coach Mike Salick looks like a taller coach Taylor from the TV show Friday Night Lights.

But with a Brooklyn accent that gets a little muffled by his mask, he grew up in the New York City public school system playing volleyball. then went on to compete professionally in Europe. And his coaching goes beyond drills. This is a team with a particular set of challenges. Yesterday I put a picture on the wall of them during our first scrimmage. And, you know, like, there's all of them sitting on the bleachers. And it was like, you know, the black students right next to each other.

And then it was all the Millennium Girls. So it's like this is not, we're not mixed yet, right? This is kind of a symbol of where we need to go. You know? There were setbacks even before tryouts, like a vaccine mandate for playing on team sports. That meant that some potential players weren't eligible, and those students tended to be kids of color.

In the end, 23 students ended up joining the team. And by the way, a team of 23 is roughly twice the size of a regular roster, which presented another challenge, making sure all girls get significant court time, despite vast differences in experience. And right away, girls who are new to the sport, right? So how do we make it equitable when people are coming to you with stark differences in the level of play?

Very different socioeconomic backgrounds. The socioeconomic aspect he's talking about is the influence of club volleyball. That's a private league that's some students compete in between seasons. It's expensive. Here's assistant coach Veronica Vega. You know, it's a cost.

It's thousands of dollars to play. Some clubs cost, you know, $10,000 to play a year. It's a real boost for the players who can participate. And these girls with club volleyball experience, they tend to be more white or Asian. And they also tend to get more playing time. I came into this thinking I'm going to coach this team like I coach. Like I coach my black and Latin teams that I've had in the past.

And, you know, beginning of the season, you focus on the first team to get them ready for the games. And the end of the season, you switch it and you try and work on the second team because the next year they're going to be your first team. A first team with most of the starters. It's not unusual for coaches of any sport to organize practice like this. The thought is that iron sharpens iron. You want your most skilled players to be playing with each other. making each other stronger.

At first, they called them the A and B teams. But that felt elitist, so they switched it to blue and gold. But same difference. And what was really stark was this. The high-skilled group barely had any dark-skinned girls. In other words, the split ended up having this racial dimension. And it hurt.

There's a morning after the tournament. It's 744. Lauren Valmei is a junior at PSC. She plays middle, and she's in the group of students helping us report this story. We heard from her at the very top of this episode. Yesterday we spent 10 hours at Cardozo High School, and if I have to say, for most of the black players, we did nothing yesterday. We kind of just all turned into cheerleaders, which is very much sad.

Why can't you let somebody else with a different school set? Come and try. It was like my stomach started to hurt. Mariah Morgan. We met her just after she'd made the team. She's also a junior at PSC. That's when I knew, like, I probably have to say something because this does not feel right.

This does not look right. And even the players who were starters could feel something was off. It was when Mariah mentioned that, like, she felt it was kind of unfair, when we had like an A&B team. Elaine Lee is a very tall sophomore from Millennium Manhattan. She's Chinese American. But like I felt for her so much because like the coach is named it like Golden Blue Team,

but we obviously all knew it was just an A&B team. So had you noticed it before Mariah called it out? Oh yeah, all the girls knew it. It's just Mariah, she was the brave one to like speak up about it. It was all feeling really heavy. Lauren and Mariah were thinking about handing in their jerseys in protest. So they went to coach Salick and they had a circle, which is a special mediated group discussion about a difficult subject.

Basically, I told him that to have the best skilled players only play with each other for most of the practice, those girls who are good are only just getting better. Like, it's not changing anything. We have already lost a lot of black and brown players because of the facts. destination mandate. So I told him, like, this is not the message you want to send. Like, how does that look? Salick says he took their suggestions to heart.

He started implementing them. And it even made him reconsider how he's been coaching all these years, dividing the players by skill instead of mixing them up. So I need for it. Like, it was hard for me to feel what they were feeling. You know, maybe for a long time as a coach, like the girls who were on the second team. Maybe I made them feel a certain type of way, too. You know what I mean?

And actually, the other players like the new strategy too. Take peppering, for example. It's a warm-up drill where players go through all the volleyball skills, like bumping, setting, and spiking. The ball goes back and forth without stopping. And when we do like warm-ups, we have pepper partners, which are coach assigned us, which I really like. And coach would match people up with different skill levels.

Sometimes Elaine, blue team, was paired up with Lauren, gold team. They both play metal. so in a way, they're competing over who gets court time. But mixing up practice like this made them really close. The mixed practices were improving the team dynamic. Lauren and Mariah were feeling better enough to stay. But when it came to games, the coaches were still struggling to define their priorities. During our league play, we're going to have a lot of different opportunities where we can put the mixed team in against certain teams, right?

Assistant Coach Vega. But they're going to be certain days or certain – tournaments or certain games where it's high stakes. And we talked about this in the circle where they're, you know, if we lose, it might jeopardize us winning a championship. You know, you put a girl in to fight racism and to be equitable. And then, you know, what if she makes mistakes? And then she feels like she's the reason we're losing.

And then she feels bad. You know, like it's like, you know, they have to be willing to do that, right? So, you know, it's challenging. Right? And now, you know, being less competitive feels like you're fighting racism more. It doesn't take away that desire to win a city championship, though. What does it feel like when you're on the court? I don't know. It feels like a rush of energy now. More, yeah.

Before it's kind of like down, like slow. Now it's kind of like I'm going for it. It's mid-October, and I catch up with Lauren after drills. Just people seem to be, I don't know, coordinated and, you know, keeping the ball up in the air forever. Yeah, we're definitely building more trust with each other. And I think everybody is working as a team, like a well-old machine. I mean, everybody's going to have a weakness. Like, I might not be great at passing, but I'm a great hitter or a blocker.

You just need to put them in. You need to give them a chance. After every point, whether they've scored one or given one up, the players come together for a second to pat each other on the back. Since they're all wearing masks, they look like mimes who are celebrating or consoling each other using these exaggerated gestures. Their body language is encouraging, even when someone makes a mistake, which is part of the purpose of after-school sports, to be encouraged no matter what. The Jaguars are understudy. And it's a home game. The Jaguars are undefeated, 3-0, gearing up for their first real test, a home game against one of their biggest rivals, the Brooklyn Tech engineers.

The first team to get to 25 points and outscore the other team by two wins the set. It's best two out of three. Set one. Tech started picking up points right away. They were up 10-0, and the gym felt tense. But suddenly, the Jaguars shook off their mirror. and found their groove, scoring point after point after point, to get to 25 and win the first match. And before the second one started, I asked Mariah and some of the other players,

are you going to get to play? Are you going to get to play? No. No. No. I don't know. No. No. We won't. No. That's not how it works. Why do you say that? When it comes to certain teams, like, Malika, how would you describe it? Malika Rice is a junior from Millennium Brooklyn. I mean, when we play teams that, like, we get a big lead on,

usually since our team is so big, we'll, like, try to get other players to go in. But when we're playing against teams like tech or bark science, which are really competitive and really good, we usually try to put our, like, quote-to-quote best players in, which is like understandable because it is a competitive league. But we get playing time in some games, and we get playing time in scrimmages and stuff like that. Yeah, it's a lot better than it was before when like we first started.

But it's a big team, so hard. I asked, do you want to be playing? I mean, I do, but I'm also scared of messing up and like making it worse for the team. But like I do want to play because I think that's the best way to learn is like actually being on the court and learning how to like deal with the nervousness that comes with playing.

One point in a time. The second set flies by and the Jaguars beat tech. And it wasn't just this game. At match after match, the Jaguars kept bringing home the wins. But what was happening on the court kept getting complicated by what was happening off it. So now I'm kind of just like, especially what happened yesterday, like I'm kind of just like super disconnected from it right now.

No. Like, I really don't want to play. What happened yesterday? Me and my friends, no, me and my volleyball team, I guess we're friends too. Me and, like, half of the girls there were. They were at an away game. This was at the end of October, and a group of the girls asked a security guard if they could use a bathroom. She looks at me. She gets just an attitude, and then she's like, you're not allowed to be in here unless you're kicking a ball, setting a ball, touching a ball, or spiking a ball. And then she looks to my other friends and then, like, in a completely different tone, the other girls, she's like, what do you guys want? And then

they're like, she's with us. Like, we're on the same team. I'm like, miss, like, we're literally on the same team. Like, can me please go to the bathroom? The security guard keeps giving them a hard time, specifically asking Mariah, the only dark-skinned black girl in the group for her name. The other girls tried to have her back. Because they were like

interjecting themselves in between and they were like, well, like, why does she need to show her ID? Like, no, we're not, she's not going to do that. We're not going to do that. And they were even like, what does she have against you? And it's like, she isn't, like, obviously, it's because I'm black. Coach Salick wanted to bring it to administrators, but Mariah wanted to drop it. I mean, like, I'm telling you because I know it's important to do. But, like, I already do a lot concerning, like, my race and, like, how it affects how I move,

specifically in volleyball. So I cannot escape it. But the season isn't over. In fact, the Jaguars are first seed in the league. undefeated. And they're about to face the ultimate test. The City Championship. And after that final game, the players grapple with what does winning actually mean? Our story today comes from WNYC Studios podcast, Keeping Score. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

This hour, we've been following the John J. Jaguars, a high school girls volleyball team in Brooklyn, New York, and they have been crushing it all season long, turning in win after win after win. Remember they like to set the ball over deep, right? We're ready for that? What it comes down to is whatever happens on our side of the court is what matters most. This is a story about volleyball,

but it's also the story of one team's attempt at integration within a New York City school building that's had a very complicated history with race, equity, and education. WNYC's Alana Kassanova Burgess followed the team through their fall season, and now she takes us to the climax of the year, the championship final. With every win comes the hope that this team will help integrate a divided school building.

So many people have come out for this final game that the security guards are turning people away. There are two sets of bleachers, with fans dressed in green on the Bronx science side and blue for John Jay. And they're full. There are parents and teachers and even a love. who have come out for this game.

I managed to grab a seat near the court, and I wait for the Jaguars. And I wait, and wait. They'd gotten stuck in rush hour traffic, and at game time, they still weren't there yet. So by the time they got into their uniforms and onto the court to warm up, they were already off to a rocky start.

Before the opening buzzer, the Jaguars do a breathing exercise, a collective roar to get their nerves out. The whole thing feels very, official. The game is streaming online and there's an announcer too. I was thinking like this is so much more than just volleyball for our campus. This is Callie Moore. She's co-captain of the Jaguars. The coaches have decided to go with a starting lineup of players who almost all play in club volleyball in addition to their

team John Jay. Club is that pricey private after-school league. The energy in the room is electric. Everyone is stomping and cheering. The teams line up, it's about to start its best two at a three. Set one. The Bronx Science Wolverines were stiff competition. But the Jaguars were ahead. The team was coordinated. Coach Mike Salick. My mindset was, we're about to get this. Jaguars win the first set, but it was close. 25 to 19. We just need to stay focused. We set, and we still haven't even played our best. That was my mindset. They huddle quickly for a pep talk, and then set two.

It seems like the Jaguars aren't meshing as much as I've seen them in other games. The players will run for a ball that's clearly going out, or they'll hit it out of bounds. They're making mistakes, and they look frustrated. We've never been under that kind of pressure. The tiredness was starting to get set in. Lauren Valme and the rest of the team are courtside, trying to motivate their six teammates in action. And so going into a second game, I was like, okay, we need to like build up the energy as much as possible. The Jaguars start to look totally out of sync.

We had the philosophy all season long that you can't get into a fight and express somebody not to push you back. And the Wolverines are pushing back. Hard. They start to pull ahead. We kind of all just fell apart a little. because they were just like going on a roll on us and we couldn't really get back from that. Before we know it, it's 11 to 5. Suddenly, coach is calling for timeouts, trying to cram as much direction as possible

into those 60-second huddles. You're saying things to individual people. You're saying things to the group. You're letting them have a chance to talk with each other. Set 2 is over. The Wolverines 25, Jaguars 16. It's best 2 out of 3. It's not over yet.

But the energy and the bleachers on the John Jay side has shifted from allation to dread. Final set. We just need to step it up, maybe make some changes. The fresh players hit the court with all the hustle and optimism they can muster. But they just can't turn it around. It was all coming down to like that one game. The Jaguars lose the third set, 25 to 16. And it's over.

And then there are a lot of tears. The players hold each other, sob openly. Outside, the team files onto the bus. Hey. How you doing? Still processing, but I'm all right. Yeah. I think everyone's still processing.

Yeah. Thanks so much, guys. The Jaguars finished the season in second place, undefeated until the very last game. But remember that they had another goal, to be a united team, At the beginning of the season, Coach Salick taped a photo up on the wall. It showed the players sitting on the bleachers, but only sitting with their own classmates, separated by school.

It was kind of eye-opening for me, too, because I'm also a person in that picture, only sitting next to my friends that are like me. Rebecca Joseph, she goes to Parks Slope Collegiate on the fourth floor. It was kind of everybody. Like, they stuck to their comfort zone. They stuck to the people that were like them. they stuck with people that were from their school. Did it get better by the end of the season? I would say it got better.

I wouldn't say it was 100%, but it did get better. There was more of a mixture. If they still took pictures towards the end, they would have saw everyone was talking to each other, everyone was sharing each other on. We weren't all, like, closed off. Everyone was, like, mingled and mixed. That was the case at the postseason celebration.

held in the John Jay Library. Everyone was hanging out together. The main event was a circle. One last chance to gather the team and talk frankly about how the season went. And this is the one place that's for team members only. So I turned the recorder off.

Lean on my community a lot to help me navigate this. A couple of days later, I asked Coach Salick what he'd be comfortable sharing. It felt a little bit kumbayage. You know, but that's like, natural to feel that at the end of a season where you were successful in winning. And, you know, the girls, a lot of them felt super tight and got super close.

You know, I think Mariah was very honest and said that, you know, it was challenging for her at times and for the other girls of color. And she didn't feel like it was a complete win when it came to the fighting racism part. I had planned on talking in that circle that day, but I almost wasn't going to because I felt like I would be seen as like a Debbie Downer or something. Mariah Morgan, she'd been outspoken all season. And I finally said, this season was not fun for me or my comrades. I'm not going to speak for them, but at least for me, it was really hard being like one of the darker skin black girls on the team. It was hard for us to do this.

Lauren Valmei spoke up too. And I was just kind of like saying how like draining it was to like be on the team at one point. And I think we made it clear that we don't want other kids to go through what we went through. Mariah says that after the circle, a couple of her teammates, mainly players from Millennium, came up to her and hugged her. And they were like, you know, that was so powerful. and like, I'm sorry and, you know, thank you for saying that. And I also really appreciated having their support, even if it was at the end, because it didn't make, like, me feel as alone as it did.

But people think the volleyball team is a really, really good example of what we should be doing. And it's like, I think that the volleyball team did better than the other teams. So that doesn't mean that we did great. But, you know, I hope that it will change. Yeah. A lot of your teammates. felt the team merger was good for them because they made friends from other schools. So it was also interesting for me to see, like, them talking about, you know, I think it went

well, I'm glad I got to make so many friends. And then my problems were just, you know, it was definitely a juxtaposition between how their season went and just how separate we are, even though we're on the same team, you know, the fact that we have such different retellings of how the season went. 23 players, 23 different opinions about how the merger went. In the circle, several of the girls said volleyball was just the beginning. Why couldn't there be a joint arts program, or a theater production for all the schools, or an all-school prom?

For his part, Coach Salick is still grappling with what winning means. Is it getting to the championships, or focusing on making this an equitable experience for everyone? I think I struggled with it throughout the whole season. season. Like winning and competing is like ingrained in me, right? In a capitalist society, greedily, I want to have both, but I don't think it's possible. I don't think it's possible yet. Before when my team won and it was mainly black and Latin, it was like an FU to the system because a black and Latin team in a largely white sport was winning. right? So winning meant like almost like fighting racism. Now, winning, you know, is not really that. It can be again one day, but it's not right now.

Up until now, the team had been focused on their corner of the merger, how the girls' varsity volleyball team had done in this first season of the integration. But the John Jay community was starting to look at the sports program as a whole. Turns out 85% of the students who participated were from the Millennium Schools. That's nearly 190. One of the other schools only had five student athletes. Another only had three. When I saw those numbers, I think I was slightly devastated by it. Again, Mariah.

The whole thing about what people were saying about, you know, black and line kids will get an opportunity. to things that they would never have had before, and then it's like, no. Some students told me they didn't feel welcome at tryouts or felt like they wouldn't want to compete with Millennium Kids. I asked Brian Friedman about how it came to be that Millennium so dominated the team rosters. He's the co-athletic director, based at Millennium Brooklyn.

He said recruiting students from all of the schools has been a big priority. Virtual in-person, done it. Standing on cafeteria table, say, who plays a sport? Come talk to me. says he keeps hearing the same thing. I walked into a fizzhead class yesterday. A kid was throwing himself Alley Ups and Duncan.

I was like, what grade are you in? 11th. Do you want to play basketball? No, I work. Do you want to talk to the coach and try to figure that out and try to find some sort of schedule it works? He's like, no, I'm not really interested. I just play for fun. Okay? Obviously, he tells me he works. It could be a million other things. That's only just one kid. So, yeah, that's a definite challenge.

Everyone is in agreement that the outcome here with such lopsided team rosters was not what they had in mind. but they don't agree about why. Anti-racism continues to be the driving force for the students who pushed for this merger in the first place, who shared how it made them feel to play separately and unequally under the same roof. They've continued to push.

They want to ensure that their fellow students aren't cut from teams. They want restorative justice training for coaches. They want a quota system, so every school is represented on every team. The demands can seem a bit extreme to the adults. Like these kids want all this enormous change to happen instantly. But the thing is that the students who really care about this don't have time to waste. High school is only four years long.

They want to see change while they still have the opportunity to benefit from it. Lauren Valmay is determined to see the good that came out of this merger's first season and to build on it. It's been hard, but she told me, she's proud of herself. I'm trying to be more optimistic these days. Because I think like if this world is so hard, I know that I cannot change everything,

but I know that if I keep looking at it as like I can change, at least this one thing that is going to maybe cause ripple effect and like sprout change other places, not only in athletics, but trying to. trying to push it further through the whole school. Yeah. WNYC's Alana Casanova Burgess reported our story. And it was adapted from the four-part series Keeping Score

from WNYC Studios and The Bell, a student journalism organization. To hear the full series, go to WNYC.org forward slash keeping score. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This episode was produced by Alana Casanova Burgess, Jessica Gould, Jenny Lawton, Karen Frillman, Emily Boutin, Wayne Schollmeister, Andrew Dunn, and me, Joe Plourd. With reporters from The Bell, Renica Jack, Mariah Morgan, Lauren Valmay, Norm Mousson, Tion Nelson, Jacob Mastizo, Taylor McGraw, and Mira Gordon. Fact Check by Natalie Mead. Music by Jared Paul with additional tracks by Hannes Brown and Isaac Jones. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.