ESPN RISE

PHILADELPHIA -- Practice would begin in three days, just as February was turning into March, so Frankford High baseball coach Juan Namnun felt compelled on a recent Friday afternoon to visit his team's home field.

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Ted Silary for ESPN RISE

Edwin Rohena came up big on Frankford's postseason run last season.

It is tucked into a residential neighborhood in the northeast part of town, across the street from the Pioneers' football stadium and a block or two from the school building itself. He looked out past the left-center-field fence, to a house on the far side of the thoroughfare running behind it, Pratt Street. The dwelling is probably 420 feet from home plate -- maybe more -- and Namnun assured a visitor that his two best players, pitcher/outfielder Edwin "Tito" Rohena and outfielder Wander Nunez, had already blasted their share of balls onto its rooftop in informal workouts.

Everyone's goals are similarly far-reaching. Namnun would like to build on last season, when his club went 20-3, earned its fifth Public League title in six seasons, won a state playoff game (a rarity for a Public League team) and was a hit away from advancing even further. Frankford started the 2009 season off hot, racking up three wins before losing to Archbishop Ryan (Philadelphia) 3-0 last week.

Nunez, new to the country from the Dominican Republic, is looking forward to June's draft. Ditto for Rohena, a product of a tough North Philly neighborhood who loves to hit.

Small wonder that Namnun seemed to be chomping at the bit, as he took one more look around the field.

"I can't wait," he said. "We'll be as good [as last year], if not a little better."

That they were as good as they were in 2008 could not have been a surprise to anyone in the city. Frankford, a school of 1,800 that has produced such athletes as former major league outfielder Bobby Higginson, Blair Thomas (once a star running back at Penn State, and the second overall pick in the 1990 NFL Draft) and current New Orleans Saints guard Jahri Evans, long ago took to calling itself the "Home of Champions."

But surely the Pioneers turned heads elsewhere.

"The Public League, unfortunately, I get the sense gets looked down upon by the rest of the state," Namnun said.

And not without reason. Before the Pioneers' 3-1 victory over Avon Grove in the first round of last year's Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) tournament, Public League schools had won exactly twice since they were added to the field in 2005. Both those victories were by Central, which reached the semifinals in '06.

Philadelphia teams did not so much as score a run in the '07 tournament, and the three clubs besides Frankford to make it last year were outscored 41-2.

The 31-year-old Namnun, a Frankford graduate (Class of '95) who pitched and played the outfield, understands better than most how difficult it is to assemble a competitive team of inner-city kids. How other sports are more attractive. How there are economic forces at work, too.

"It's a lot easier to find a basketball court," he said. "It's a lot easier when 10 guys can play with one ball. It's not easy to find a good baseball field. It's not easy to find a dozen gloves, good quality bats and catcher's gear."

As a result, there were times last year when his team, which is largely Hispanic, was not taken seriously.

"You see the looks," he said. "You see the stares. You hear the comments."

An early case in point came when the Pioneers traveled to Orlando, Fla., for spring training at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex. Their first game was against a highly rated team from down south.

"Openly, their coach said something [beforehand] along the lines of, 'Well, we'll try and keep it competitive, but if my boys get going, it may be tough,'" Namnun recalled. "I said, 'I appreciate the heads up.'"

Esteban "Shortie" Meletiche promptly went out and pitched a two-hitter, as Frankford won 7-0.

It was an auspicious debut for Namnun, who had served six years as an assistant to Bob Peffle, who coached the team with distinction for nearly two decades. Namnun had his share of anxiety over replacing his former coach. But his mentor gave him one piece of advice: "Don't try to be me."

And really, Namnun's background is not all that different from many of his players. Born in the Dominican, he and his family moved to New York City -- specifically, the Bronx -- when he was 6. There his father, Juan Sr., ran a small grocery store. But the elder Namnun, once a coach in the formidable winter league in his native land, never lost his love of baseball. Every Sunday he would close his shop down so he and his family could take in a game at Yankee Stadium, some five blocks away.

The Namnuns moved to Philadelphia three years later, and young Juan grew serious about the game as well. But when he was in middle school, holding fast to the pipe dream of one day being a major leaguer, one of his teachers reminded him that he needed to take care of business in the classroom, that he needed to have something to fall back on.

All of which came into play after high school, when he landed at Kutztown University, hoping to continue his baseball career. He suffered a hernia in a preseason workout, then a back injury and he was done for good. After transferring to West Chester University of Pennsylvania, he earned a degree in health and physical education, and later his master's in elementary education, as well as principalship. Now he teaches Spanish, health and physical education at Frankford, while working toward his third master's degree, in adult education.

"I can't be still," he said.

He tries to rev his players' engines as well.

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Ted Silary

Frankford is capitalizing on last year's success.

"My thing to them is, 'There's no reason for you not to be able to do it; I did it. … If I sat in the same chair -- literally, the same chair you're sitting in -- why can't you step in my shoes a couple years from now?'" he said.

Rohena is among those who have heeded that message, despite long odds against it. As he sat in Namnun's office one afternoon, wearing cornrows and the uniform every Frankford student is required to wear (blue collared shirt and khakis), the kid who answers to Tito -- his middle name -- talked candidly about growing up in a neighborhood where gunfire is a constant and there are "people being shot, innocent bystanders just minding their own business being shot."

"Nowadays, even cops are getting killed," Rohena said -- and indeed, several Philadelphia police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty in recent months.

His grandmother, Sara, raised him after his parents split up years ago. She's the one who kept him from straying, who kept him off the streets. She is, he said, "my heart."

"She's always on my back in a good way, a positive way," he said, "forcing me to do stuff that I don't want to do."

Sara first sent him to Frankford -- miles away from their neighborhood, and a world away in many respects -- because of its ROTC program. While Tito is no longer involved in that, he long ago fell into line with the school's rules, long ago began to toe the line academically.

"He's a special, special kid," Namnun said. "He's got great internal drive."

So much so that when Philadelphia's transit workers went on strike three winters ago, Rohena walked two hours, to and from school. And there would appear to be no danger of him blindly following the crowd; he is a Dallas Cowboys fan, something rare (and unpopular) in an Eagles-mad town.

His single-mindedness is trebled when it comes to baseball. Many is the night that Namnun sends him home with a bag of baseballs, so Rohena can hit off a tee and into a screen in his basement. And before a game one time, Namnun walked into the team's locker room, only to hear the thwack of the ball into a tarp; it was Rohena, naturally, who had repaired to the shower room, where he was hitting in his stocking feet.

"The only time I feel safe," Rohena said, "is when I'm on the diamond, just playing the game that I love."

Pitchers feel somewhat less so facing him. Rohena and Meletiche, now at Keystone College in northeastern Pennsylvania, wore opposing hurlers out last year (while themselves doing great work on the mound), as the Pioneers blew through the regular season. Then they spotted Central a 5-1 lead in the Public League championship game before storming back to win 15-5.

States were next. Rohena pitched a three-hitter against Avon Grove in that first-round game at La Salle University, which required an extra inning to decide. And in the bottom of the eighth he came up with a runner on, two outs and the score tied at 1-1.

"We play a game; we call our home runs," he said, smiling at the memory. "I was like, 'OK, it's time to start packing up. We're going to do something.' Next thing you know, I step up to the plate. It was a left-handed pitcher; he threw me a hanging slider. I opposite-fielded him, and it just went over."

The Pioneers faced Hempfield, a Lancaster County power, in the next round. Down 3-1 in the bottom of the seventh, they scored once, then loaded the bases with one out. Namnun still replays the screamer hit down the third-base line by his catcher, Robinson Rodriguez, which Hempfield third baseman Mark Merrifield turned into a forceout at the plate. He still thinks about the game (and season) ending one batter later.

But on balance, Namnun said, it was "probably the greatest year a coach could ever have."

The uptick continues. Nunez came to town last spring for a combine run by major league scouts at Frankford's field. While he could have signed as a free agent then, scouts thought he would benefit from a year in the states, so he moved in with an uncle living in Frankford's district, enrolled at the school and was cleared by the PIAA to play.

While he has assimilated to his new home in many ways -- owner of a leather Philadelphia Eagles jacket, he said he has grown to like American football "because there's a lot of violence" -- the transition was far from smooth.

There's the cold, for one thing, the language barrier for another; he speaks very little English.

"I wanted to go back," Nunez said through Namnun, who interpreted his Spanish. "My uncle told me to stick it out, give it a chance. Now I feel better."

Invited to the East Coast Showcase in Lakeland, Fla., late last summer, he impressed the scouts if not himself; he thought he should have run faster than 6.7 in the 60-yard dash. In the meantime, Rohena was among those who worked out for scouts in Los Angeles. And it was here that the guy who lives to hit found out that his pitching might take him the furthest; the scouts believe his fastball, currently clocked in the high 80s, can top out in the low 90s when his frame -- he goes 6-foot-3, 190 -- fills out.

So that's something to think about. But so too is college; it is, after all, high on Sara's wish list for her grandson. To that end Tito recently committed to LaSalle, which is close to home. But should he get drafted early enough, his hope is that he signs a contract lucrative enough to allow him to set aside money for school.

Either way, his ambitions are far-reaching. And he is not alone in that.

Gordie Jones is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania.