HOUSTON (AP) - Jeff Van Gundy navigates the campus of Pro-Vision Academy like it was Toyota Center.
The Houston Chronicle reports he scoots past single-file middle school students in uniforms. He eavesdrops on a biology class softly playing gospel music in the background. He savors bitter mesclun greens at the urban aquaponics farm.
Exiting the one-story brick building, he points to a beaten trail that encircles a shabby grass field. He imagines the new football and track stadium.
"That's my job: to get them one," the former Houston Rockets coach says on a recent visit.
Lost kids restore their purpose at Pro-Vision, a charter school in Houston's distressed Sunnyside neighborhood. Van Gundy, 55, a bona fide NBA celebrity and national broadcaster for ABC and ESPN, considers himself one of them.
Van Gundy made a name for himself coaching gritty New York Knicks teams in the 1990s. His schlubby looks belied his feisty leadership. During a melee between the Knicks and the Miami Heat, Van Gundy, like a toddler crawling among grown men, clung to the leg of 6-10 Miami center Alonzo Mourning.
He followed the memorable run in New York with four years of shortcomings that are hard to forget in Houston. Three times he could not propel the Rockets past the first round of the playoffs. His Game 7 loss at home in 2007 forecast his firing.
After 18 consecutive years steering millionaire athletes, he spent the next two rudderless, worried about having to uproot the daughters he raised in Texas. His youngest, Grayson, was born in Houston. He was a coach without a team. A man without a cause.
Then he met Pro-Vision's founder, a visionary, charismatic former NFL cornerback named Roynell Young, who recruited Van Gundy to the school's board and convinced him that Houston was not only home, but the place he could feel victorious again.
"I was just coming off being let go by the Rockets - but, man, it snapped me to attention," Van Gundy says. "The school is like seven miles from where I live, and it's like 7 million miles from my experiences. Pro-Vision helped me with my transition to what was next."
Discreetly tucked into one of Houston's most dangerous neighborhoods, Pro-Vision is a port of discipline and character development. Of 339 students, 95 percent receive free or reduced lunch and 77 percent identify as at-risk, according to the school.
Now occupying its own 21-acre campus, the school, which was all-boys until 2014, takes students who are two years behind in subjects, test poorly by state standards, consider college a nearly miraculous achievement, and turns most into striving graduates.
It began in 1990, when Young pulled his red Toyota Land Cruiser up to a basketball court at the corner of Gessner Road and Bellfort Avenue, behind Welch Middle School. Two years retired from the Philadelphia Eagles, the Pro-Bowl defensive back was fed up with drive-by homicides and corner boys enlisting in the drug war. He drove around Acres Homes, Third Ward and Sunnyside, trying to intercept the sources blighting black communities.
"What I saw was disturbing," he said. "We saw kids like in the wild getting ready to plan their hunt."
The median annual income in Sunnyside is less than $24,000. In 70 percent of the homes with children under 18, the father does not live with the family, according to HPD and Census data. In 2016, the neighborhood ranked fifth in reported crimes per capita out of approximately 70 HPD beats.
Very few people walk away from sports motivated to do something better. Young, now 59, started out selling insurance in Houston. He hated it.
Then he began spending Saturdays playing pickup with teenagers on the southwest side with Mike Anderson, a 6-8 former TSU basketball player. The kids suspected the men in their 30s were undercover cops. Young and Anderson earned their trust by wagering pizza-they won, so they got to take the kids out to eat.
"They were asking us questions that we thought our own fathers should be asking us," recalled Kenneth Patrick. "What do you want to do in the future? How do you feel about what's going on in the city?"
Young identified the fatherlessness, the lack of mentorship in the area.
"Human beings need relationships with each other, but they also need relationships with something bigger than themselves," Young said. "Young people find it in joining gangs because that gives them power, that gives them relevance. I learned this from a gang leader."
A 17-year-old with a red bandanna around his face once had spotted Young cruising and sat him down for a chat.
"We're going to always win," the gangster said.
"That never left me," Young recalled. "Hence the magic of Pro-Vision: we became a gang."
Around 100 more teens, ages 11 to 16, flocked to the Welch courts after a month. Still muscular in retirement, Young emerged as a captivating orator with actions to turn his rhetoric into results.
Unexpectedly, Young told the boys he was done playing games and buying pizza.
He had rented a storefront, less than 200 square feet, in a strip mall across the street from Welch. He said that whoever wanted to become better men should follow him. He was too nervous to look back. He said he negotiated with a higher power that if 25 kids followed, then he was meant to do this.
His hand shook so much that he could not insert the key. When he unlocked the storefront, he turned around and saw about 70 eager youngsters.
"That was the start of Pro-Vision," he said.
The Houston Independent School District partnered with his storefront in 1995, making it an official educational program. (Pro-Vision left HISD to become a charter in 2013.)
By 2008, Young had purchased his 21 acres and cleared the land for a campus that would contrast with Sunnyside. Cattle no longer roam along Wilmington Street, but the remaining junkyards and woodlands reveal the withering bones of a bleak neighborhood.
"You'd think you're in a Third World country when you walk down that street," Young said.
Van Gundy first heard about Pro-Vision from Kim, his wife of 27 years, who attended the campus ground breaking. But the dodgy stretch off Interstate 610 was out of sight and out of Van Gundy's mind.
"I didn't think community-based as a coach," Van Gundy said. "What an opportunity I missed. I had such a platform."
The Rockets fired Van Gundy over the phone on a Friday afternoon.
"2:17 p.m.," Van Gundy remembers.
The call was short.
"I knew what was coming," he recalled.
In the Game 7 loss, the Rockets were ahead late, but when point guard Rafer Alston slipped on the Toyota Center court, so did the lead. Again, the brief marriage of swingman Tracy McGrady and center Yao Ming - both destined for the Hall of Fame in 2017 - was squandered.
After Van Gundy hung up the phone, he sat on a bed and reimagined Game 7: he would have refocused the team by calling a timeout after an offensive rebound; he would have won; he would have kept coaching.
Ten years have passed and his failure in Houston still hangs on him like a sweat-soaked jersey.
"That you didn't get it done, that never leaves you," he said. "Never."
He has not coached since.
"The pain of coaching is not the losing, to me. It's not even losing a job. It's the pain of letting down your players and the staff."
His days had been consumed by training, traveling and scouting. When the Rockets cut him loose, he cleansed himself of the mania but craved the meaning of a coach's life. Without game tape and his players, he watched countless hours of "Law & Order" and prepared for a marathon a year out. He never had time for breakfast. Now he filled up on scrambled eggs quesadillas and chocolate chip pancakes at Buffalo Grille. There still were several vacant hours left in the day.
He began his announcing gig after getting fired. His candid insights, quirky asides and cantankerous rants made him a natural at charming viewers. But yammering from the sideline could not replace stomping on the hardwood. He came from a coaching family. His father coached college ball. His older brother, Stan, another NBA character for his profane honesty, is the coach and president of the Detroit Pistons.
"Coaches have a sickness, you know?" Kim says. "And Jeff, that's all he knows."
On his first visit to Pro-Vision's new 30,000-square-foot school in 2008, Van Gundy left his manicured suburb and headed south on Cullen Drive. He passed a dilapidated "Welcome to Sunnyside" mural painted across a condemned property, a dollar store, a pawnshop, a discount liquor mart, a payday lender and several fast food drive-thrus. He turned on Wilmington Street and watched the city's blighted southeast tableau unveil a haven.
The immaculate campus did not have female students or its aquaponics farm then, but Van Gundy saw a systemic change in motion. Clean blue shirts tucked into khakis. Smiles on the faces of boys he had heard were problem children. Orderly migrations between classes. Adults commanding attention with their temperate voices.
"This was different," Van Gundy discovered. "The discipline was at a high level, but the volume at a low level."
The discipline of sports has shaped Pro-Vision's identity. Young, with his NFL pedigree, is complimented by André Credit, his principal, a former quarterback for Alcorn State who backed up NFL MVP Steve McNair. Rather than Mr. or Ms., students address teachers as "Coach."
"I love that," Van Gundy would say later. "'Coach' is actually a higher term for respect. You don't call a teacher 'Teacher.'"
Young greeted Van Gundy in a conference room in which the sole decoration was one of Young's jerseys, framed. Van Gundy grew up an Oakland Raiders fan and was excited to ask Young about defending legendary wide receiver Cliff Branch in the 1980 Super Bowl.
It turned out the jersey was window dressing.
"It was the anti-shrine to his athletic career," Van Gundy says. "He wasn't interested at all in talking sports."
As Young talked instead about his commitment to resolving urban decay, Van Gundy realized he was being vetted as a good fit.
The seriousness wound up captivating Van Gundy. After less than an hour, he forgot about football and felt a burgeoning conviction for helping kids.
He walked away wanting to emulate Young.
"This is his life purpose," Van Gundy says. "People make too little of the transition from everyday active participation with a team to no team. No place to go. I was impressed with how he seemed to have no problems with this transition and no regrets about being away from the game."
Young required one more meeting before adding Van Gundy to the board of directors.
Van Gundy knew his basketball celebrity could drum up donations for the school's future. But beyond that, he remembers thinking at the time: "I don't know what a board member does."
Van Gundy had no trouble selling the school. Young's philosophy gave him a powerful pitch: Pro-Vision remedies the issues facing black youth by "grooming" them, as Young puts it. The school's curriculum evolved from his initial endeavor with teen boys, which now is called the Manhood Development Program. (The SHE program for girls is in the works.)
Dozens of young males exercise together and deliver meals to an elderly home. Group talks address how to communicate with adults and respect women.
"It's like Pro-Vision is an extension of your parents," said Patrick, 40, one of Young's original mentees in 1990, who has become the head of the program. "But we don't just speak it. We attack you with it. We hit you with it. We don't let you forget..Think about what that does for a single mom that doesn't have that male figure at home?"
"You have a whole room full of young men that are lost because they never had a man looking out for them," Patrick said. "Why black men don't stick around is it's an ugly cycle."
Mike Feinberg, the co-found of the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, charter school network, said Young was "a visionary" because of a recent push to teach children character strength.
"As we've evolved from focusing on getting kids to pass the state tests, realizing that's not the right bar," Feinberg said. Rather than test scores, the focus should be "on getting kids to and from college, on getting them careers and for them to have choice-filled lives."
Still, Pro-Vision students struggle academically, with passing rates of 50 percent or below on every section of the 2016 State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness. Only 17 percent of seventh-graders passed the math portion, the school's worst showing. In 2016, they were required to submit an improvement plan to the Texas Education Agency for low academic performance.
Pro-Vision officials promised "impressive double-digit student performance gains" this academic year.
Deon'ta Lagway, a smiley junior and lanky basketball player, had stopped attending school before he enrolled at Pro-Vision.
"I didn't really think school would help me," he said. "That's what I was used to seeing."
He was rude when he arrived. Being told where to go and to tuck in his shirt irritated him.
He turned inward and raged outward last year, when his girlfriend died in a car crash. Teachers swaddled him with counseling.
"They all help me," he said. "Since I've been coming, my grades have been better."
On his recent visit, Van Gundy proceeded with his tour, popping into a tiny room of six flight simulators used in an aviation class. He explained how the vocational study, along with another in criminal justice, prepare teens for collegiate courses.
He has helped raise $5.4 million of a $9.75 capital campaign for a new 40,000-square-foot high school building and athletic complex set to open in 2019.
Credit, the school's principal, caught up with the celebrity coach and they admired college acceptance letters adorning a hallway.
"These were the same students that were almost expelled from their schools," Credit says. "Some of these students didn't have any hope of going to college, so subliminal messaging is key."
The school makes self-belief a tenet.
"Our goal is to take that C student and make him the best C student he can be," Credit says.
In the Class of 2017, 17 students withdrew and 40 will graduate Saturday.
After lunch, Van Gundy bounded for the aquaponics farm, his favorite spot. Rows of lacinato kale lead to six silos. Inside, two 1,500-gallon fish tanks with tilapia funnel waste into several plant beds that store 80-100 pounds of produce.
Head farmer Jeremy Peaches graduated from Pro-Vision in 2007 and applied his agricultural degree from Texas Prairie View A&M to design the operation. Young almost had expelled him for hawking CDs in the parking lot. Now, Peaches teaches kids from the neighborhood, a notorious food desert, where produce is grown.
"They thought it came from Fiesta Mart, and that's it," he said.
Beside a chicken coop, Van Gundy spotted a silver Chevy Traverse that his family had donated so the farm could supply towering stalks of basil to Carrabba's Italian Grill on Kirby Drive and lettuce mixes, including endive and frisée, to Benjy's restaurants. Pro-Vision is working on packaging for the H-E-B grocery store chain.
"The silver bullet!" Van Gundy exclaimed.
Minutes later, he wanted to see the apiary. "Do we still have the honey?" he asked.
He uses "we" often in discussing the neighborhood, the school and the sprawling city he once thought wanted nothing to do with him.
Van Gundy said he never could leave the game the way Young did. He loves announcing. He embraces being a fan. He cannot replace coaching. But expanding awareness, fundraising, and education in Sunnyside presents an invigorating opportunity.
The school recently acquired more surrounding land for a total of 45 acres. Young wants the campus to become a hub for schooling, community outreach programs, health services and public housing.
This is Van Gundy's challenge. "Hopefully the only great thing about being fired was the awakening that I could do, and I should've done it then," he says. "There's so much we need."
The silver bullet will not do.
"When we start going to H-E-B," he says between nibbles on butter lettuce, "we're going to have to get a refrigerator truck."
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Information from: Houston Chronicle, http://www.houstonchronicle.com