Raul Altreche '06: Tragedy to Triumph (cont.)

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Consequently, school became almost unmanageable. Starting in the second grade, Altreche switched school systems over and over, sometimes missing six or seven months at a time. He found himself on the doorstep of junior high, barely able to read and feeling abandoned.

“I felt like everyone thought things weren’t going to happen for me,” he says, “and I felt like I was neglected a lot. I could understand that, and part of it was that I was the spitting image of my father, and my mother’s side of the family was raising me. I think that had a lot to do with it, especially with them blaming my father for what happened.”

Then, despite the turmoil that was overtaking his young life, he had an epiphany. Not yet 12 years old, Altreche looked around at his crumbling Bronx surroundings and decided he wanted something more, that he had something to prove. He was fed up and he was going to make something happen, and he started seeing things very differently.

He sought teachers who would help with his reading and found a junior-high guidance counselor who would help him through the high school application process. The counselor, in turn, found Altreche to be exceptionally bright and resourceful, despite his considerable lack of schooling, and thought he might qualify for a program called A Better Chance, which takes bright, motivated students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds and places them in educational environments that affirm and nurture their academic talent. A Better Chance involves several application processes, including one just to get into the program and another to gain acceptance at a member school. Altreche endured countless interviews and endless paperwork before finally receiving an invitation from Daniel Hand High School in Madison, Conn., a town of approximately 16,000 people, framed by Long Island Sound to the south and farms and woodlands to the north.

It may as well have been Mars.

“I didn’t think it was suburbia,” he says. “I thought it was super-suburbia. It was the boondocks to me. I had barely seen trees before. It was a huge fantasy world.”

Fresh off the bus from New York City, a world away from home and still coping with the shock of his new surroundings, Altreche moved into Daniel Hand’s A Better Chance house with six other students, two resident directors and a resident tutor. The students tended to household chores, earning $10 at the end of each week. Every Friday was “mop and clean,” and there were mandatory study hours from 6:45 to 10 p.m., with an 8:30 study break. He took to the extreme structure and challenging schoolwork almost immediately, becoming only the second freshman in the history of Daniel Hand’s ABC program to hold a 10.0 grade-point average, the equivalent of an A-. Fitting in with his mostly white, well-to-do classmates was a different story altogether.

“I remember sitting on a bench, and I got off on a rant like a cartoon character, and everyone looked at me like, ‘What are you saying, kid?’ I was frustrated that they couldn’t understand me. I learned just this past year that there’s actual research on this in linguistics. They call it code shifting. I was jumping from standard English to black English to Spanish and into a separate dialect called Spanglish. At the time, I didn’t know any better, but it was tough. I had a whole identity issue.”

ABC students were paired with host families, and Altreche spent every other weekend with the Mesas and their youngest son, Jack. Fernando Mesa, the family’s half-Cuban half-German father, was extremely sports oriented, as were the Mesa children, one of whom attended Northwestern University on a field-hockey scholarship and another who played lacrosse at the United States Naval Academy. Madison was a huge football town, and Jack was on the freshman team at Daniel Hand. Fernando Mesa told Altreche, “You’re playing football.” Altreche had never played a team sport in his life.

“I was 167 pounds, not very tall, and my fat percentage must have been around 27 percent. We were running a warm-up lap on the first day of practice, and I was the last kid behind the heavy, overweight kid in the back. When you’re that overweight, they clap you into the finish line, and I was wheezing and sweating and I could barely make it, but I had a major chip on my shoulder. As soon as you tell me I can’t do something, that’s when I throw it in your face and do it even better than you ever thought I could.”

Altreche fell in love with football and the warm feeling of a good collision. In the process, an amazing thing happened: his teammates and coaches fell in love with his spirit and enthusiasm. He’d accumulated tremendous pent-up anger over the years, and now he had the perfect outlet. Sports became his avenue for acceptance, and he couldn’t get enough. He tried wrestling in the winter and lacrosse in the spring, neither of which he’d ever heard of before coming to Daniel Hand. He soon shed his baby fat and morphed into a jock, and his friends and family back home couldn’t believe the transformation.

“I’d go back to New York City and the girls would see me and be like, ‘Raul, you look completely different. You look like you’ve been lifting.’ ”

His confidence soared. By sophomore year he was class president, and as a junior he was one of two students selected to represent Daniel Hand at American Legion Boys State, one of the most respected programs of government instruction for high school students.

Meanwhile, lacrosse became his sport of choice. During the third week of practice, freshman year, a teammate nominated Altreche for the backup goalie position, as the current second-stringer was afraid of the ball. Altreche had no clue how to play the position but threw himself in front of oncoming shots with reckless abandon.

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