Project FLEX helps incarcerated youth in northern Illinois find better paths through sports at NIU

DeKALB – Five years ago, Northern Illinois University graduates helped pilot a program to empower incarcerated youth to find better pathways through sports.

Now, the program has expanded into facilities in Chicago and Warrenville in DuPage County, and some who’ve gone through Project FLEX – which stands for fitness, leadership, experience – are heralding its efforts to improve their future.

Diasee Scott, 24, of Chicago said that before he joined Project FLEX, he considered himself a troublemaker at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, where he was incarcerated. Scott said he initially didn’t do anything inside except sleep, eat and work out, counting the days until the end of his sentence. When he started Project FLEX, however, he began to think about the future.

“That was another day out of my time, but then, when you get into the program, now they ask you what you want to do before I go outside,” Scott said. “This is an experience, so I feel like it helped me very much.”

The project was the topic of a panel held Feb. 16 at NIU’s Holmes Student Center, which brought some program graduates, staff and two young people incarcerated to DeKalb to talk about their experiences.

The panel discussion, titled “Beyond the Ball: Reimagining the Role of Sport in Juvenile Justice,” focused on how Project FLEX has leveraged the power of sports to help incarcerated youth in Illinois.

The program sees 10 NIU graduate students regularly visit youth centers and work and offer sports programming such as basketball, pickleball and boxing, sometimes on NIU’s campus. The graduates meet with incarcerated youth in each of the three facilities between three and five days a week to engage with them and build positive relationships.

A musician and studio engineer with ambitions of owning his own studio someday, Scott was one of the early beneficiaries of the program that started five years ago through the initiative of two NIU professors.

In 2018, Jenn Jacobs, associate professor of sport and exercise psychology, and Zach Wahl-Alexander, associate professor of physical education and teacher education, said they wanted to find a way to aid youth in the transition from incarceration back to life outside.

According to the Project FLEX website, 93% of incarcerated youth in Illinois return to an internment facility within five years of the end of their original sentence.

“We believe juvenile facilities are not equipped to provide holistic programming that creates pathways out of the prison pipeline,” according to the website.

Jacobs said they understood incarcerated youth often are released and can struggle with separating themselves from the systemic and societal problems that may have contributed to landing them behind bars.

The professor duo began cold calling northern Illinois youth centers to see how they could help. When they asked what programs the St. Charles Youth Center was running for youth transitioning out of the facility, they said they were told no such programs existed.

Wahl-Alexander, who has worked with incarcerated women through a University of Alabama graduate program, and Jacobs, who used to work with gang-affiliated youth in the South and West Sides of Chicago, were not deterred.

“So they really had no extracurricular programs at that time,” Jacobs said. “So we sat in a room and put our heads together and figured out what sport it would be, what we bring as expertise, and then we would incorporate life skills into all the programs.”

In its infancy, Project FLEX brought in another person to help grow the program. St. Anthony Lloyd, director of leisure time activity at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, works directly with Project FLEX and NIU graduate students who visit the facility’s youth to run programming.

Jacobs said Lloyd’s idea to include extracurricular opportunities for the facility’s youth – who also have opportunities for schooling, tutoring, employment and credit recovery through the centers – helped make Project FLEX what it is today.

Lloyd said the program offers opportunities for participants to engage in activities they might not have access to otherwise, and set ambitious goals for themselves.

“They’re coming in and building these friendships, these partnerships with these youth. They’re trying to give them an experience when they bring them to NIU, when they take them to play pickleball,” Lloyd said. “And, let’s be honest, ain’t no pickleball courts in the hoods. ... So they’re teaching them something that’s outside of their realm to give them that experience that they can learn from, and I think that’s powerful.”

With only five youth centers across the state, Jacobs said she hopes the program expands statewide by partnering with another university closer to the state’s two youth centers in Elburn and Joliet.

Lloyd attributed at least some of Project FLEX’s success to the tenacity of the graduate students leading the program for the youth. He likened their efforts to what’s necessary to keep a garden in the city clean after the community continually litters on it.

“Well, eventually that trash builds up,” Lloyd said. “Everybody is walking around with trash in their garden, but the fact that you’re able to come back every day, continue to come back every day – some days you pick up a little bit of trash and throw it away, some people come back twice a week, some people come back once a week, some people come back once a month, but you continue to build and take trash off that garden, and before you know it, you see something beautiful. And that’s a reflection of what you see today.”