These Hoop Dreams come true

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By David Elfin

Alecia Winters seemed destined to be another victim of the District's downtrodden neighborhoods.

Her drug-addicted mother had long ago abandoned her. Her father's drinking was leading him toward an early grave. With her older siblings building their own lives or in jail, Alecia was often home alone with no one to push her to attain a better future.

School was for hanging out with friends, not learning, and Alecia skipped more classes than she attended her first two years at H.D. Woodson High School.

"If I didn't know the work, I didn't do it," she recalled.

But instead of becoming another statistic, Alecia got a jarring glimpse of her mother on the street and tried to turn her life around.

This month, Alecia will graduate on the honor roll. And with a big boost from the Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund, she will attend Allegany College in Cumberland, Md., this fall.

"I figured, with my grades from ninth grade, that I wouldn't be able to go to college, but Hoop Dreams taught me that some colleges would still accept me," said Alecia, one of 83 Hoop Dreams scholars in the class of 2009 who recently were honored at the Capitol.

Alecia is one of 1,000 children from Wards 7 and 8, most of whom are the first in their families to go to college, to whom Hoop Dreams has provided scholarships since its creation in 1996 by Susie Kay, then a government teacher at Woodson.

The event started as a one-day charity basketball tournament.

"Susie had a dream and a vision that these children needed help, and she sacrificed her personal life to make sure that help has been available,"said Dennis Stolkey, a fund board member and senior vice president of information technology company EDS. "There aren't a lot of people that have dedicated themselves unselfishly to such a cause."