Post by Okwes on Jun 6, 2007 14:59:08 GMT -5
NATIVE AMERICANS IN SPORTS
Alvina Begay, 26, distance runner (Navajo): 2008 Olympic hopeful from Ganado, Ariz.; won 13 titles; graduated from Adams State (Colo.) College in 2003.
Nadia Begay, 21, basketball (Navajo): 5-9 senior guard for Boise State from Kirtland, N.M.; New Mexico state high school player of the year as a senior; not related to Alvina.
Notah Begay III, 34, pro golfer (Navajo-San Felipe-Isleta): Won four PGA Tour titles, last in 2000; earned $5.1 million; teammate of Tiger Woods at Stanford. Not related to Nadia or Alvina.
Brett Bucktooth, 23, pro lacrosse player (Onondaga): Rookie in 2006 for Boston Cannons of Major League Lacrosse; had 14 goals in seven games; attended Syracuse.
Mike Chavez, 23, basketball (Crow, Northern Cheyenne): 6-7 senior forward at Montana from Heart Butte, where he led Blackfeet Reservation teams to three state high school titles.
Mike Edwards, 45, pro bowler (Cherokee): Joined PBA Tour in 1981; has one title (in 1994); became PBA's 33rd career millionaire in 2005-06.
Clint Harry, 26, professional rodeo (Pyramid Lake Paiute): Joined Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association in 2000; team roping (heeler); career earnings: $63,637.
Brandon Leslie, 29, distance runner (Navajo): Eight-time All-American at Adams State (Colo.) College; 10,000-meter outdoor champion in 2000 Division II; 2008 Olympic hopeful.
Kyle Lohse, 28, pro baseball (Nomlaki): Right-handed pitcher; went 5-10 with 5.83 ERA for Cincinnati Reds in 2006; 54-62 career record.
Kelvin Sampson, 51, Indiana University men's basketball coach (Lumbee): Also coached at Montana Tech, Washington State and Oklahoma; played baseball and basketball at North Carolina Pembroke.
Dudley Yazzie, 24, boxer (Navajo): 2008 Olympic hopeful in light heavyweight division from Chinle, Ariz.
NATIVE AMERICAN OLYMPIANS
Frank Pierce (Seneca): 1904, did not finish in marathon
Frank Mount Pleasant (Tuscarora): 1908, 6th in long jump, 6th in triple jump
Andrew Sockalexis (Penobscot): 1912, 4th in marathon
Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox/Potawatomi): 1912, gold medal in decathlon, gold medal in penthalon, 7th in long jump, 4th in high jump
Louis Tewanima (Hopi): 1908, 9th in marathon; 1912, silver medal in 10,000 meters, 16th in marathon
Clarence "Taffy" Abel (Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa): 1924, silver medal in hockey
Wilson "Buster" Charles Jr. (Oneida): 1932, 4th in decathlon
Ellison Myers "Tarzan" Brown (Narragansett): 1936, did not finish in marathon
Jesse "Cab" Renick (Choctaw): 1948, gold medal in basketball
Billy Mills (Sioux): 1964, gold medal in 10,000 meters, 14th in marathon
Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne): 1964, did not place after injuring knee in second round of judo
Henry Boucha (Ojibwa): 1972, silver medal in hockey
Naomi Lang (Karuk): 2002, 11th in ice dancing
Sources: Native American Sports Council, U.S. Olympic Committee Note: All athletes competed for the USA
By Greg Boeck, USA TODAY
TUBA CITY, Ariz. — Ryne Hemstreet's gold medal is displayed in the trophy case in his family's living room in this Navajo town of 8,225 near the northern Arizona border.
The aspiring 17-year-old baseball player, named after former Chicago Cubs great Ryne Sandberg, won it in Denver as a shortstop and pitcher for Arizona's 16-and-under Native American team in July's North American Indigenous Games, an Olympic-style event that attracted 7,200 athletes from the USA and Canada.
Hemstreet wants more. That's why, after his upcoming junior season at Greyhills Academy, a local tribal grant school where he carries a 3.7 grade-point average and ranks seventh in his class of 124, he will move to Phoenix. He'll live there with his older brother and play his senior year at a higher-profile high school in hope of attracting college scholarship offers.
He's aware of the long odds he and other Native American athletes face, even those who leave their reservation to improve their chances of being recruited. Compared with white Hispanics and black non-Hispanics, Native American athletes among the country's 562 federally recognized tribes — 341 in the lower 48 states — are more under-represented on NCAA teams.
"As a Native American, nobody takes you too seriously that you can play at that level," Hemstreet says. "It's my job to go out and get noticed."
For most Native Americans, that concept — standing out individually — is at odds with their culture, which promotes the principle of functioning as a group. That, says Ron Trosper, a Harvard-educated member of the Flathead tribe in Montana who is associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, hinders the advancement of Native American athletes, starting at the college level, where individual achievement is rewarded.
"It appears to be aggressive to many Native Americans to be individualistic in the college classroom," Trosper says. "And it's not rewarded. And it may not be rewarded on the playing fields to the extent it would be in the Native American community."
A high school dropout rate of 40.7% dead-ends the careers of most Native Americans. Those who do move on to college athletics "are typically not prepared," says Gene Keluche, a Wintu from Northern California and founder and chairman of the Native American Sports Council, whose mission is to identify elite athletes and provide assistance for development.
"Their coach's objective is to win state. Their counselor's objective is to put them through high school. They are not prepared to go beyond that, academically or culturally. And if they go, they often don't perform well and come home and get into a dysfunctional community where unemployment is 60% and drug use is high. They have no future and become a statistic."
Native American athletes face those hurdles and the highly competitive world of sports participation after high school.
Native American sports leaders are trying to address this but are doing so with largely disjointed efforts and sporadic financial support. Their goals — more college athletes and inclusion in the Olympics as a sovereign nation — are lofty but face an uphill climb, even with the 1990s explosion of a $22 billion Native American gaming industry operated by 223 tribes in 28 states. Those revenue, 55.5% of which are generated by 20 tribes, mostly have been aimed at addressing social issues — a poverty rate of 24.7%, rampant diabetes, alcohol abuse — that far overshadow sports.
The Seminole, Seneca and Fort McDowell Indian Reservation tribes contributed almost $400,000 to the North American Indigenous Games, which were largely financed by Utah's two host tribes, the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute. They donated $2 million, mostly from oil, gas and water rights payments. The $5.2 million event, however, produced a $500,000 shortfall.
A handful of tribes have used gaming dollars to plunge into sports ownership. However, even the Mohegans, who own the WNBA Connecticut Sun, and the Southern California Sycuan tribe and South Florida Seminoles, both of whom promote professional boxing, have directed limited money into sponsoring professional Native American athletes.
Ernie Stevens Jr., a Chickasaw from Oklahoma and chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, kicked off a campaign in April 2006 to raise $10 million for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Indian Country and the American Indian College Fund, but his target is "sports and fitness overall," not individual athletic advancement.
Golfer Notah Begay III, a Stanford graduate and the first Native American to win on the PGA Tour, says these efforts are not enough. "Until you see a consolidation of resources and communities between successful tribes that have the opportunity to make a difference," he says, "we're still going to struggle in the battle to get Native Americans on Division I playing fields."
Strong sports history
Begay is the biggest role model among aspiring Native American athletes, whose struggle to reach the elite level drips with irony. This is a culture that set up shop in sports long before the first baseball or basketball games were played in the 19th century. Native Americans, in partnership with their First Nations cousins in Canada, claim to have originally played in some form what are now 10 Olympic sports, including canoeing, kayaking, sledding and field hockey. Lacrosse is another Indian original.
In the 20th century, Jim Thorpe, a Potawatomi, won two Olympic gold medals, played professional baseball and football and became the first president of the league that would become the NFL. Billy Mills, a Sioux who came off the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, scored one of the biggest upsets in Olympic history when he won the 10,000 meters in 1964.
Mills says it's easy to identify the problem: "We're the freest country in the world, and we (Native Americans) live under quasi-apartheid. Indirectly, we're locked outside — and that's where all the issues come from."
Providing solutions isn't so easy.
Navajo distance runner Brandon Leslie is among several Native American 2008 Olympic hopefuls, but his battle for financial backing is typical of top-notch Indian athletes.
Maurice Smith, an advocate with the Native American Sports Council, which is a member of the United States Olympic Committee, says, "I can't raise a dollar for this kid because nobody believes in his passion and understands here's the next Billy Mills."
Leslie left a reservation in Gallup, N.M., and became an NCAA Division II All-American and the 2000 Division II 10,000-meters champion at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo. His best time in the event is 28:36.52, and he competed in the 2004 U.S. Olympic trials.
Smith says Native American athletes don't lack drive or talent. "The perspiration is there. The commitment is there. We need to continue to be resilient and provide more opportunities."
Healthy sports participation — and a fanatic following for basketball — vibrates on most reservations coast-to-coast but not beyond. That could change if the Native American Olympic Steering Committee's bid for Olympic inclusion succeeds. Bid organizers want International Olympic Committee recognition as a sovereign nation, which would allow Native Americans and First Nations athletes in Canada to compete in the Games as their own North American Indigenous team. However, Jeff Howard, a USOC spokesman, told The (Portland) Oregonian last winter that the USOC is recognized by the IOC as the "steward" for the Olympic movement in the U.S. "And only one entity within a nation can have that distinction."
Harder road for women
Hemstreet may never benefit from this quest. But he has one of his own — getting an opportunity to play baseball in college, if not beyond. It's an enormous challenge, even 110 years after Louis Francis Sockalexis, a Penobscot, became what many historians believe is the first Native American to play major league baseball. (He played three years, all for the Cleveland Spiders.)
Hemstreet's coach, Shawn Deschenie, has put baseball on the local map since taking over the program at Greyhills Academy in 1999, but, as at most Native America high schools, basketball is the No. 1 sport here. The boys team was state runner-up in its class in 2005 and plays in a gym recently renovated for $112,000.
The school's nine sports teams operate on a shoestring budget funded by a $25,000 federal grant, ticket revenue and fundraisers, but the athletics department is by no means destitute. Among several buses, the school owns one with a VCR and TV for trips as much as 3½ hours away.
Baseball was a natural for Hemstreet. His father, Jonathan, became a loyal Cubs fan once cable TV arrived on the reservation in the 1980s. Jonathan Hemstreet, 45, is a civil engineer who doubles as Deschenie's volunteer assistant coach.
Ryne's brother, Kyle, 26, also is an assistant coach and teacher at Greyhills who left the reservation and played college baseball at Kansas Wesleyan. Ryne calls Kyle his role model.
There aren't many athletic role models on Native American reservations, male or female. Female athletes have an even more difficult mountain to climb.
"You are a minority within a minority," says Cara Currie-Hall, a Montana Cree who is the most influential woman in Native American sports as a board member of World Indigenous Nations Sports, founder of the North American Indigenous Games. "For Native American women in sports, it's not very good."
The road for both sexes is fraught with athletic speed bumps, if not academic or alcoholic dead-ends. At Greyhills, less than 5% of the graduating seniors go to college, acting principal Marie Morales says.
"We have students who have done well at high school competition," she says, "and you'd think that would be the gateway to higher education. But for some reason, the life is only up to high school."
That's the rap on Native American athletes from college coaches and professional scouts. "They're very timid, shy and not real comfortable out of their element," says Yavapai (Junior) College baseball coach Sky Smeltzer, who has had six Native Americans play for his school in Prescott, Ariz. "The hardest thing for them is being away from the reservation and comfort zone they have there."
Begay, who got an economics degree at Stanford, says, "An investment in a Native American athlete might not be the wisest choice."
He returned to his tribal community outside Albuquerque and started a foundation in 2005 to heighten awareness of diabetes and promote a healthy lifestyle. He also started a soccer program.
"It's my job," Begay says, "to make sure those who come after me can stand on my shoulders and see farther and reach higher. We need to see more kids in Division I and more graduating."
Getting the word out
It's all about exposure, Deschenie says. Only one college recruiter (from Haskell Indian Nations University, an NAIA school in Lawrence, Kan.) has ever visited Tuba City, he says, so he takes his top players to the recruiters. Last summer he took six players to a Yavapai baseball camp and coached the 16-and-under team in Denver.
Hemstreet is proud of the gold medal the team won. So is his close-knit family. He shares a room with his 11-year-old sister, Tara. Kyle lives a couple of miles away. Annette, their mother, teaches health and physical education at Greyhills and coaches cross country. And Ryne's paternal grandparents live across the street.
They all come to watch him play, but that will change next season if he moves to Phoenix. Ryne, who also plays for two traveling teams out of Payson, Ariz., doesn't expect smooth sailing, but he says, "It's a better chance to be seen. This is what I've always dreamed of."
They are dreams with a price tag too stiff for many Native Americans. Even for those who succeed. Kyle's modest success, his father says, isn't something you brag about on the reservation.
"We try to low-key it," he says. "When you're part of the Navajo Nation, it seems like us Indian people, we don't want people getting too high up here. As soon as somebody sees somebody up here, they try to bring them down."
Alvina Begay, 26, distance runner (Navajo): 2008 Olympic hopeful from Ganado, Ariz.; won 13 titles; graduated from Adams State (Colo.) College in 2003.
Nadia Begay, 21, basketball (Navajo): 5-9 senior guard for Boise State from Kirtland, N.M.; New Mexico state high school player of the year as a senior; not related to Alvina.
Notah Begay III, 34, pro golfer (Navajo-San Felipe-Isleta): Won four PGA Tour titles, last in 2000; earned $5.1 million; teammate of Tiger Woods at Stanford. Not related to Nadia or Alvina.
Brett Bucktooth, 23, pro lacrosse player (Onondaga): Rookie in 2006 for Boston Cannons of Major League Lacrosse; had 14 goals in seven games; attended Syracuse.
Mike Chavez, 23, basketball (Crow, Northern Cheyenne): 6-7 senior forward at Montana from Heart Butte, where he led Blackfeet Reservation teams to three state high school titles.
Mike Edwards, 45, pro bowler (Cherokee): Joined PBA Tour in 1981; has one title (in 1994); became PBA's 33rd career millionaire in 2005-06.
Clint Harry, 26, professional rodeo (Pyramid Lake Paiute): Joined Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association in 2000; team roping (heeler); career earnings: $63,637.
Brandon Leslie, 29, distance runner (Navajo): Eight-time All-American at Adams State (Colo.) College; 10,000-meter outdoor champion in 2000 Division II; 2008 Olympic hopeful.
Kyle Lohse, 28, pro baseball (Nomlaki): Right-handed pitcher; went 5-10 with 5.83 ERA for Cincinnati Reds in 2006; 54-62 career record.
Kelvin Sampson, 51, Indiana University men's basketball coach (Lumbee): Also coached at Montana Tech, Washington State and Oklahoma; played baseball and basketball at North Carolina Pembroke.
Dudley Yazzie, 24, boxer (Navajo): 2008 Olympic hopeful in light heavyweight division from Chinle, Ariz.
NATIVE AMERICAN OLYMPIANS
Frank Pierce (Seneca): 1904, did not finish in marathon
Frank Mount Pleasant (Tuscarora): 1908, 6th in long jump, 6th in triple jump
Andrew Sockalexis (Penobscot): 1912, 4th in marathon
Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox/Potawatomi): 1912, gold medal in decathlon, gold medal in penthalon, 7th in long jump, 4th in high jump
Louis Tewanima (Hopi): 1908, 9th in marathon; 1912, silver medal in 10,000 meters, 16th in marathon
Clarence "Taffy" Abel (Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa): 1924, silver medal in hockey
Wilson "Buster" Charles Jr. (Oneida): 1932, 4th in decathlon
Ellison Myers "Tarzan" Brown (Narragansett): 1936, did not finish in marathon
Jesse "Cab" Renick (Choctaw): 1948, gold medal in basketball
Billy Mills (Sioux): 1964, gold medal in 10,000 meters, 14th in marathon
Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne): 1964, did not place after injuring knee in second round of judo
Henry Boucha (Ojibwa): 1972, silver medal in hockey
Naomi Lang (Karuk): 2002, 11th in ice dancing
Sources: Native American Sports Council, U.S. Olympic Committee Note: All athletes competed for the USA
By Greg Boeck, USA TODAY
TUBA CITY, Ariz. — Ryne Hemstreet's gold medal is displayed in the trophy case in his family's living room in this Navajo town of 8,225 near the northern Arizona border.
The aspiring 17-year-old baseball player, named after former Chicago Cubs great Ryne Sandberg, won it in Denver as a shortstop and pitcher for Arizona's 16-and-under Native American team in July's North American Indigenous Games, an Olympic-style event that attracted 7,200 athletes from the USA and Canada.
Hemstreet wants more. That's why, after his upcoming junior season at Greyhills Academy, a local tribal grant school where he carries a 3.7 grade-point average and ranks seventh in his class of 124, he will move to Phoenix. He'll live there with his older brother and play his senior year at a higher-profile high school in hope of attracting college scholarship offers.
He's aware of the long odds he and other Native American athletes face, even those who leave their reservation to improve their chances of being recruited. Compared with white Hispanics and black non-Hispanics, Native American athletes among the country's 562 federally recognized tribes — 341 in the lower 48 states — are more under-represented on NCAA teams.
"As a Native American, nobody takes you too seriously that you can play at that level," Hemstreet says. "It's my job to go out and get noticed."
For most Native Americans, that concept — standing out individually — is at odds with their culture, which promotes the principle of functioning as a group. That, says Ron Trosper, a Harvard-educated member of the Flathead tribe in Montana who is associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, hinders the advancement of Native American athletes, starting at the college level, where individual achievement is rewarded.
"It appears to be aggressive to many Native Americans to be individualistic in the college classroom," Trosper says. "And it's not rewarded. And it may not be rewarded on the playing fields to the extent it would be in the Native American community."
A high school dropout rate of 40.7% dead-ends the careers of most Native Americans. Those who do move on to college athletics "are typically not prepared," says Gene Keluche, a Wintu from Northern California and founder and chairman of the Native American Sports Council, whose mission is to identify elite athletes and provide assistance for development.
"Their coach's objective is to win state. Their counselor's objective is to put them through high school. They are not prepared to go beyond that, academically or culturally. And if they go, they often don't perform well and come home and get into a dysfunctional community where unemployment is 60% and drug use is high. They have no future and become a statistic."
Native American athletes face those hurdles and the highly competitive world of sports participation after high school.
Native American sports leaders are trying to address this but are doing so with largely disjointed efforts and sporadic financial support. Their goals — more college athletes and inclusion in the Olympics as a sovereign nation — are lofty but face an uphill climb, even with the 1990s explosion of a $22 billion Native American gaming industry operated by 223 tribes in 28 states. Those revenue, 55.5% of which are generated by 20 tribes, mostly have been aimed at addressing social issues — a poverty rate of 24.7%, rampant diabetes, alcohol abuse — that far overshadow sports.
The Seminole, Seneca and Fort McDowell Indian Reservation tribes contributed almost $400,000 to the North American Indigenous Games, which were largely financed by Utah's two host tribes, the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute. They donated $2 million, mostly from oil, gas and water rights payments. The $5.2 million event, however, produced a $500,000 shortfall.
A handful of tribes have used gaming dollars to plunge into sports ownership. However, even the Mohegans, who own the WNBA Connecticut Sun, and the Southern California Sycuan tribe and South Florida Seminoles, both of whom promote professional boxing, have directed limited money into sponsoring professional Native American athletes.
Ernie Stevens Jr., a Chickasaw from Oklahoma and chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, kicked off a campaign in April 2006 to raise $10 million for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Indian Country and the American Indian College Fund, but his target is "sports and fitness overall," not individual athletic advancement.
Golfer Notah Begay III, a Stanford graduate and the first Native American to win on the PGA Tour, says these efforts are not enough. "Until you see a consolidation of resources and communities between successful tribes that have the opportunity to make a difference," he says, "we're still going to struggle in the battle to get Native Americans on Division I playing fields."
Strong sports history
Begay is the biggest role model among aspiring Native American athletes, whose struggle to reach the elite level drips with irony. This is a culture that set up shop in sports long before the first baseball or basketball games were played in the 19th century. Native Americans, in partnership with their First Nations cousins in Canada, claim to have originally played in some form what are now 10 Olympic sports, including canoeing, kayaking, sledding and field hockey. Lacrosse is another Indian original.
In the 20th century, Jim Thorpe, a Potawatomi, won two Olympic gold medals, played professional baseball and football and became the first president of the league that would become the NFL. Billy Mills, a Sioux who came off the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, scored one of the biggest upsets in Olympic history when he won the 10,000 meters in 1964.
Mills says it's easy to identify the problem: "We're the freest country in the world, and we (Native Americans) live under quasi-apartheid. Indirectly, we're locked outside — and that's where all the issues come from."
Providing solutions isn't so easy.
Navajo distance runner Brandon Leslie is among several Native American 2008 Olympic hopefuls, but his battle for financial backing is typical of top-notch Indian athletes.
Maurice Smith, an advocate with the Native American Sports Council, which is a member of the United States Olympic Committee, says, "I can't raise a dollar for this kid because nobody believes in his passion and understands here's the next Billy Mills."
Leslie left a reservation in Gallup, N.M., and became an NCAA Division II All-American and the 2000 Division II 10,000-meters champion at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo. His best time in the event is 28:36.52, and he competed in the 2004 U.S. Olympic trials.
Smith says Native American athletes don't lack drive or talent. "The perspiration is there. The commitment is there. We need to continue to be resilient and provide more opportunities."
Healthy sports participation — and a fanatic following for basketball — vibrates on most reservations coast-to-coast but not beyond. That could change if the Native American Olympic Steering Committee's bid for Olympic inclusion succeeds. Bid organizers want International Olympic Committee recognition as a sovereign nation, which would allow Native Americans and First Nations athletes in Canada to compete in the Games as their own North American Indigenous team. However, Jeff Howard, a USOC spokesman, told The (Portland) Oregonian last winter that the USOC is recognized by the IOC as the "steward" for the Olympic movement in the U.S. "And only one entity within a nation can have that distinction."
Harder road for women
Hemstreet may never benefit from this quest. But he has one of his own — getting an opportunity to play baseball in college, if not beyond. It's an enormous challenge, even 110 years after Louis Francis Sockalexis, a Penobscot, became what many historians believe is the first Native American to play major league baseball. (He played three years, all for the Cleveland Spiders.)
Hemstreet's coach, Shawn Deschenie, has put baseball on the local map since taking over the program at Greyhills Academy in 1999, but, as at most Native America high schools, basketball is the No. 1 sport here. The boys team was state runner-up in its class in 2005 and plays in a gym recently renovated for $112,000.
The school's nine sports teams operate on a shoestring budget funded by a $25,000 federal grant, ticket revenue and fundraisers, but the athletics department is by no means destitute. Among several buses, the school owns one with a VCR and TV for trips as much as 3½ hours away.
Baseball was a natural for Hemstreet. His father, Jonathan, became a loyal Cubs fan once cable TV arrived on the reservation in the 1980s. Jonathan Hemstreet, 45, is a civil engineer who doubles as Deschenie's volunteer assistant coach.
Ryne's brother, Kyle, 26, also is an assistant coach and teacher at Greyhills who left the reservation and played college baseball at Kansas Wesleyan. Ryne calls Kyle his role model.
There aren't many athletic role models on Native American reservations, male or female. Female athletes have an even more difficult mountain to climb.
"You are a minority within a minority," says Cara Currie-Hall, a Montana Cree who is the most influential woman in Native American sports as a board member of World Indigenous Nations Sports, founder of the North American Indigenous Games. "For Native American women in sports, it's not very good."
The road for both sexes is fraught with athletic speed bumps, if not academic or alcoholic dead-ends. At Greyhills, less than 5% of the graduating seniors go to college, acting principal Marie Morales says.
"We have students who have done well at high school competition," she says, "and you'd think that would be the gateway to higher education. But for some reason, the life is only up to high school."
That's the rap on Native American athletes from college coaches and professional scouts. "They're very timid, shy and not real comfortable out of their element," says Yavapai (Junior) College baseball coach Sky Smeltzer, who has had six Native Americans play for his school in Prescott, Ariz. "The hardest thing for them is being away from the reservation and comfort zone they have there."
Begay, who got an economics degree at Stanford, says, "An investment in a Native American athlete might not be the wisest choice."
He returned to his tribal community outside Albuquerque and started a foundation in 2005 to heighten awareness of diabetes and promote a healthy lifestyle. He also started a soccer program.
"It's my job," Begay says, "to make sure those who come after me can stand on my shoulders and see farther and reach higher. We need to see more kids in Division I and more graduating."
Getting the word out
It's all about exposure, Deschenie says. Only one college recruiter (from Haskell Indian Nations University, an NAIA school in Lawrence, Kan.) has ever visited Tuba City, he says, so he takes his top players to the recruiters. Last summer he took six players to a Yavapai baseball camp and coached the 16-and-under team in Denver.
Hemstreet is proud of the gold medal the team won. So is his close-knit family. He shares a room with his 11-year-old sister, Tara. Kyle lives a couple of miles away. Annette, their mother, teaches health and physical education at Greyhills and coaches cross country. And Ryne's paternal grandparents live across the street.
They all come to watch him play, but that will change next season if he moves to Phoenix. Ryne, who also plays for two traveling teams out of Payson, Ariz., doesn't expect smooth sailing, but he says, "It's a better chance to be seen. This is what I've always dreamed of."
They are dreams with a price tag too stiff for many Native Americans. Even for those who succeed. Kyle's modest success, his father says, isn't something you brag about on the reservation.
"We try to low-key it," he says. "When you're part of the Navajo Nation, it seems like us Indian people, we don't want people getting too high up here. As soon as somebody sees somebody up here, they try to bring them down."