Second Chances in Montréal-Nord
Second Chances in Montréal-Nord
Jude-Alain Mathieu fights to get young people back in school, believing in them until they can believe in themselves.
Jude-Alain Mathieu has coached rich kids and he’s coached kids who show up to practice hungry.
They’re basically the same. They bring out the best in us but test our patience, one minute they’re bursting with life and the next they need to be picked up off the ground. Rich or poor, kids will always be kids.
Mathieu says it’s not the players themselves that were different so much as the worlds they went back to once the game is over.
“At private school, when practice was done, there’d be a row of cars waiting for the children,” says Mathieu, a football coach in Montreal’s North End. “When I coached at Henri-Bourassa High School, I would watch the kids leave and I knew the corners they’d be walking past. I know there’s trouble on those corners.
“There’s dudes hanging out there before practice and after we’re gone, hours later. You walk by those guys six, seven times a week and the temptation is there. Every time you pass them, there’s a new opportunity to make a bad choice. And nobody’s perfect, it takes determination to not get caught up in that.”
Eight years ago, Mathieu brought a successful football program back to École Secondaire Henri-Bourassa in Montréal-Nord. The public school didn’t have a field and most of his players had never laced up a pair of cleats before. But Mathieu and his staff knew that with a bit of love and the right coaching, they could be winners.
Within a few seasons, Mathieu was helping teenagers in one of Quebec’s poorest neighbourhoods play their way onto college football teams.
“With coach, I learned that I was good enough,” said Kevens Clercius, who begins his senior year with the University of Connecticut Huskies this fall. “Not only as a player but as a person. Right now, the goal is to play pro but one day I’d like to come back to Montréal-Nord and become a social worker. I want to give back to my community.”
An ordinary coach might look at success stories like Clercius’ and pat himself on the back.
And while Mathieu is proud of all his alumni, it’s the players who didn’t make it that inspired the next major step in his career.
“For every four players we sent to college, three wouldn’t make it to their second season,” Mathieu said. “Often it’s financial, their families can’t afford to have them in college, playing a sport full time. Sometimes it’s academics. Sometimes they hear the street calling and they’re pulled off the right path.”
Mathieu did something about it.
Two years ago, he started a football team composed mostly of kids who needed a second chance. The team, Les Loups de Montréal-Nord, is made up of young men aged 18 to 24, trying to play their way back to college ball or just have something direction in their lives during a confusing time.
Players on the squad have access to tutoring and other resources to help them finish high school and get into a college or vocational program. It’s part of a larger effort called Nos jeunes à coeur, which also helps fund basketball and flag football teams for young men and women in the North End.
It hasn’t been easy. They have a $40,000 a year budget from the city and their home base is a shipping container plopped next to the soccer field at Parc Saint Laurent. Mathieu has to cancel workouts when it rains because the team lifts weights outside, next to the shipping container.
“Even lifting weights in the grass, it’s better than what we used to have. Which was nothing.”
Vlamidir Villarson, a wide receiver on the Loups, says it’s a pain in the ass not having proper facilities but it’s manageable.
“You go to other boroughs, like Lachine or LaSalle, and they have professional facilities,” he said. “It’s something those kids might take for granted but it’s a big deal for us.”
Villarson is training with the team until he can rejoin the Université de Montréal Carabins — one of the best football programs in Quebec at one of its finest universities. He met Mathieu while playing on his team in high school and now he helps other young men find their way on and off the football field.
“Coach has created a network of young people who look out for each other. You have people who’ve made the mistake you’re about to make and they make sure you don’t,” said Ronyis Méus, who is also expected to play for the Carabins. “The people who didn’t make it or the ones fighting to get back in college, they’re not bitter. They’re the ones staying late to help you train harder, they’re the ones reminding you to hit the books when you don’t feel like it.
“There’s so much talent in the North End and so few resources. But we have solidarity and that’s something you can’t buy.”
Coach Mathieu connects with these kids because, not that long ago, he was one of them. The son of immigrants, Mathieu didn’t have the luxury of having parents who could attend his games but they worked tirelessly to make sure he could get a quality education.
“My dad worked in a textile mill, he’d leave the house at 4 p.m. and come back when we were all in bed,” Mathieu said. “My mom worked in a factory too. They weren’t the parents who coach their kids or show up to games but they scrimped and saved to send my sister and I to private school.
“When they lost their jobs, they couldn’t do the same for my little brother but my sister and I were old enough to start chipping in. A lot of these kids are under the same pressure to start contributing before they’re even adults.
“At one point, I had a conversation with my mother and I told her, ‘The only reason I made it to university was football. I don’t know that I would have stayed in school without it.’ I think that helped her understand why I spent so much time playing a game.”
That’s why Mathieu is all about second chances. Because while some of his former players have moved on to great things, he’s seen others hit rock bottom when they no longer had sport in their life.
“There’s one guy — and I’ve told him he’s welcome here — he wound up in prison after I coached him in high school,” Mathieu said. “We can’t create a culture of zero tolerance for mistakes. We need to be there for the ones who mess up because they need us so much more. They have potential, sometimes they just need someone to believe in them until they can believe in themselves.”
Beyond his duties as a coach, Mathieu works with schools in Laval and the North Shore, helping them integrate the children of immigrants into their new surroundings.
“He’s a great coach and an even better person,” said Will Prosper, a former candidate for mayor of Montréal-Nord who used to coach with Mathieu. “What he’s doing with youth in our community, you can't put a price on that.”
For too many young people in Montréal-Nord, their first interaction with the state is a police intervention.
While the borough has little in the way of sports facilities and social workers, a sizeable chunk of Montreal’s $700 million policing budget goes towards putting more patrols in parks and other areas where kids in the North End hang out. It isn’t all bad. Before Monday’s practice, two officers chatted with Mathieu and asked for help finding an elderly woman who went missing from her home.
But there’s a fair bit of tension too.
Police in Montreal stop Black youth at a rate four times higher than whites, according to their own statistics. Years ago, a commander with the department’s anti street gang task force, Groupe Éclipse, admitted they put surveillance teams on young men who hang out with “known gang members.” Given that — unlike when they investigate the Hells Angels or the mafia — police have a poor understanding of how to define membership in a street gang, it makes for a culture of overreach.
Groupe Éclipse just got a major boost in funding from the city and the Quebec government just kicked in millions more to create a new anti-gun task force that will concentrate its efforts in the city’s North and East End.
By contrast, Mayor Valérie Plante recently walked back a campaign promise from last year to build a sports complex in Montréal-Nord. As it stands, there’s just one such facility within a short distance from the borough but its shared between Montréal-Nord, Anjou, St-Léonard and Rivière-des-Prairies. That’s one sports centre for 300,000 people.
But beyond the access to proper equipment and a safe place to play, poverty is a huge deterrent for young people considering a future in college sports. Yves Dossous, who co-founded Nos jeunes à coeur, says most players in Montréal-Nord arrive at a point in their lives where they begin to feel guilty about being athletes.
“At 15 or 16 years old, you have kids who ask themselves ‘Do I have the right to play?’ When you’re living in poverty, you feel guilty playing a game instead of working and chipping in financially,” said Dossous, who grew up in the borough as well. “You feel like you need to take some weight off the family instead of going to practice three times a week. Because the benefit of chasing a scholarship or trying out for a college team isn’t immediately obvious. Most people don’t understand what a luxury it is for them to be able to play.”
As children constantly ran past the group screaming Monday, Mathieu worked with a young man from Togo who didn’t make the cut in college ball last season and a kid from Central America who used to play against the coach’s high school team.
“All is forgiven, he’s one of us now,” Mathieu said, slapping the kid on the back.
We tend to think of football coaches as angry white men with buzz cuts, screaming at their players like drill sergeants. But Mathieu was all smiles, rarely raising his voice beyond a conversational level.
“We started this thing five years ago on a hope and a prayer,” he said. “This year, aside from the city’s budget, we’re closing in on $300,000 in fundraising. People believe in this, people believe in these kids and that helps them believe in themselves. That’s all I want.”
Notre monde a besoin de plusieurs Jude-Alain Mathieu.