High-energy mentoring program uses sports to motivate young males
The commanding space that overlooks the intersection of York Road and Belvedere Avenue was once a department store showroom and then for three decades a pioneering women’s fitness center. Today it’s the “base camp” for Next One Up–a high-energy mentoring program that uses sports as a way to motivate young males and prepare them for life.
“We go into the underserved schools in Baltimore and recruit young men in sixth grade,” says Shel Simon, senior program director. “We stick with them all the way through college, and really even beyond that. It becomes a network for guys to tap into, for internships, for jobs, as they get older.”
The program, which started in 2009, is built around sports and features a gleaming, well-equipped gym. But NOU is much more than fun and games.
“While sports is the carrot that we use, we’re really focused on academics,” says Simon. “I’ve seen kids that go through high school who don’t perform as well academically but are delusional and thinking that they’re going to go to college and play a sport. It does not work like that. The day of the dumb jock is over.”
In addition to the gym, the facility has classrooms, a computer lab, a maker’s space with tools and 3-D printers, and a large common area with a pool table, a ping pong table and video game consoles. Framed jerseys of alumni who have gone on to play at the college level line one hallway while inspirational quotes can be found on walls throughout the facility.
Participants are exposed to a wide range of programming, including guest speakers and experiential learning trips that have included white-water rafting in Utah. There’s also a boxing class and a barber shop, which is operated by an NOU alumnus.
“You name it, we pretty much do it,” Simon says.
NOU’s impact can be measured in various ways, including hundreds of hours of academic enrichment and service learning as well as a 100% high school graduation rate. Not all students continue to college, and some of those that do enroll choose to emphasize academics and leave organized sports behind.
“We have two young men that are getting ready for the NFL draft in April, and we have some really cool stories of young men that have come through this program,” says Simon. But that’s not NOU’s main goal.
No matter what line of work they end up in,“we want these guys to be happy,” says Simon. “Building young men of character that will give back to this community–that’s really what we’re trying to do.
“I could care less if these guys all go to the NFL, and statistically they won’t,” he says. “We know that. It’s more about leadership, character building: building good men.”
When participants arrive after school or on the weekend, their first stop is the high-windowed common room, where they can relax for a moment, grab a snack and finish up their homework. Next stop is the gym.
“Typically we have a workout for them to perform on their own,” Simon says. “We like to get them in a mindset, getting them used to working out on their own and putting in extra work outside of the practices that they’re doing with their teams.”
“That’s a place where they can just come and just decompress,” says program director Juwan Kearson. “We try to work on the physical, but a big part is the mental side of things.”
There also are smaller spaces, called huddle rooms, for days when things aren’t going so well.
“These are for guys, if they have a long day, with issues, challenges they are facing,” Simon says. “They can pull coaches up and talk to us one on one. Or if they want to get away from the group and work on their homework privately, they can come down here. If they want to talk to someone on our mental health team, they can do that as well.”
“Baltimore is a really tough city to grow up in,” says Kearson. “Honestly, stuff that they see on a regular day–I think they’re just numb to it. They normalize a lot of stuff that really should not be normalized at that age. Having this space where they can get away from that is really important.”
NOU occupies the top floor of a building that opened as a Hochschild Kohn department store in 1948. In 1991 Lynne Brick, a nurse turned entrepreneur who founded a company called Brick Bodies, opened a women’s fitness center that operated there until 2020.
Before coming to Belvedere Square in 2023, NOU operated at various locations around town, most recently Gilman School. It continues to draw participants from all over the city but has become more focused on its immediate neighborhood.
“Since we’ve been here, we try to recruit more in the area,” says Simon. “We are looking at schools that are pretty close by, like Leith Walk, Walter P. Carter, Tunbridge and the Stadium School,” which is in Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello.
“We try to really connect with those schools that are in the area and let them know that we have resources for young men, though we are specifically looking for athletes,” he says.
“We’re not trying to cherrypick the young men that have all the opportunities in life,” says Simon. “We want to work with those guys that are the underdogs, whose families might be single moms or might have trauma behind them. Those are the guys that we’re looking for, but they have to have a certain level of grit and determination.”
Because they are former student-athletes themselves, Simon, Kearson and the other coaches in the program can speak with authority about what it takes to succeed. Both Simon and Kearson played varsity sports at St. Paul’s School. From there Simon went on to play football at Morgan State University while Kearson was an All-American soccer star at St. Mary’s College.
“I just want them to be prepared for any obstacle that comes in, and I feel like that’s just the biggest thing,” says Kearson. When participants start, “they only look at themselves as athletes. But you have to be more than that to really go places.”
To help the young men get ready, NOU puts them through mock interviews. “We want to get these guys ready for that moment when they’re sitting in front of their future employer, you know, sitting in front of a coach–how do you present yourself as a man?” Kearson says.
High school students also get the chance to spend a week on a college campus, learning what it’s like to be a scholar-athlete in a university setting. “The guys get paired up with a roommate for the week. So they sleep in the dorms. They eat in the cafeteria,” Simon says.
The days are “very structured” with workouts, classes and social activities. “It’s pretty cool to see them navigate a college campus and all of these things for a week,” he says.
NOU was started in 2009 by Matt Hanna, who captained the 2002 lacrosse team at Johns Hopkins University and later played professional lacrosse. He began the program while teaching and coaching at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in East Baltimore.
A key part of the program is building community and connection. Five alums currently serve on an advisory council and one serves on the board of directors. They are graduates of schools like Colgate, Loyola of Maryland and Morgan State.
The program is built around a mountain climbing analogy, which is why the Belvedere Square facility is called NOU’s base camp. The NOU name itself comes from a poem called “Pull the Next One Up,” which was written by Marc Kelly Smith, the man credited with inventing the competitive spoken-word events known as poetry slams.
The opening lines are: “When you get to the top of the mountain/Pull the next one up.
This article is part of the York Road Improvement District’s ongoing series spotlighting programs across the York Road corridor that empower and uplift local youth. You can read the first article in the series, featuring My Father’s Plan, here.