Last time we discussed Jake Klein, a Carey Business School Flexible MBA student and co-founder of Harlem Lacrosse, his company was being featured in a national advertising campaign by Dick’s Sporting Goods. One year later, Harlem Lacrosse is still in the headlines.
Klein’s non-profit aims to improve academic achievement of inner-city students in Harlem and in Baltimore under the auspices of the school’s lacrosse team, which the nonprofit creates, funds, and runs. Klein and his company were recently mentioned in a Baltimore Sun article about the Baltimore City Lacrosse & Leadership (BCLL) program. BCLL came to East Baltimore two years ago via Harlem Lacrosse & Leadership.
The article discusses how Baltimore City kids learned lacrosse and embraced a positive identity through the BCLL program.
After Klein moved back to Baltimore to apply to graduate school — he’s now close to completing a dual degree at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School — he ran into Josh Michael, Jenny’s brother, at a holiday party. Years earlier, he had asked Klein to consider bringing HLL to Commodore, where he taught and helped coach the boys lacrosse team.
A week later, Klein recalled, he was in principal Marc Martin’s office, spreading the gospel of HLL’s independently funded, school-based, year-round program. It was an easy sell.
“The fact that their outcomes and goals were less aligned around a lacrosse championship and more aligned around high school placement and following those kids and getting them into college and using those connections and ties,” Martin said, “I think that’s the easy thing that appeals.”
In an article on the Carey School website, Klein says that the hidden secret to the success of Harlem Lacrosse is that the nonprofit is not actually about lacrosse.
“The big secret is that all the gains were entirely educational,” Klein said. “On average, the special education kids had nearly 10 point GPA increases, and some of the other kids had five to six points in their core classes. The gains in the state test scores for the students in our program were some of the highest in the entire city. It was all of those kind of stats that the adults were in on, but as far as the kids knew, they were just playing on their school lacrosse team.”