Costa lacrosse team joins sweatshirt project
Mira Costa junior Jason Jones (left) , founder of the Sweatshirt Project, and next to him the Costa junior varsity lacrosse team, including (l-r) Michael Stanley-Anderson, Tyler Chaplin, Zack Missioreck, Wesley Sumen, Jeremy Silva, David Kirby, Ryan Barba, Garrett Keefer, Hunter McGowan, Michael Whinfrey and Brady Currey. Jones and the team washed 60 loads of sweatshirts in three hours using over 20 washing machines and an assembly line approach. Photo by Amy Theilig
by Andrea Ruse
When Jason Jones started out, it was just him and his mom collecting a few hundred sweatshirts for needy families.
The following year, Fresh Brothers Pizza jumped in and boosted his annual collection to over 1,000 hoodies and pullovers. In December, the Bank of Manhattan named the Mira Costa junior their 2009 Outstanding Young Entrepreneur for his Sweatshirt Project. At a City Council meeting last Tuesday, Mayor Mitch Ward awarded Jones the Manhattan Beach Youth Recognition Award and a check for $3,300 toward college.
But perhaps most impressive is that Jones — and his sweatshirts — prompted a dozen 15-year-old boys to spend a chunk of their weekend doing laundry.
Two weeks ago Saturday, 12 of the Mira Costa Boys Junior Varsity Lacrosse team’s 25 players helped fluff and fold over 1,200 sweatshirts, which will be donated to South Bay families this Thanksgiving in what will be the third year of the growing project.
“We’re basically taking sweatshirts collected by one kid at school and washing them to be donated to families in need for wintertime,” said sophomore Wesley Sumen, who plays defense on the team.
The team met at Jones’ house at 9 a.m., loaded SUVs with close to 100 bags of sweatshirts, drove to Redondo Beach’s Clean Scene Laundromat and got to work. Nary a red sweatshirt got thrown in with a white one.
“The experience we had at the laundromat was the first time everything has come together,” Jones, 17, said. “It’s definitely cool to see how big it’s gotten. It started out with just my mom and me. Now it’s stretched to other students, parents and businesses.”
Two years ago, a left leg that was broken for the third time dashed Jones’ dreams of playing basketball at Costa. While rehabilitating, he decided he wanted to help people and started collecting sweatshirts abandoned to Lost and Found piles around the South Bay.
With the help of his mom, Jones collected 400 new and slightly used sweatshirts, which he donated to Hawthorne’s Richstone Family Center for the organization’s annual Thanksgiving feast.
“It felt great,” Jones said. “You get the real idea of how much a sweatshirt can mean to someone.”
Last Thanksgiving, Jones collected over 1,000 sweatshirts. Fresh Brothers Pizza owner Adam Goldberg was so impressed, he contacted Jones in December and asked to collaborate on a third sweatshirt collection, with the goal of 1,000 more sweatshirts by New Year’s Eve. The team exceeded their goal and the Jones’ have been storing 1,200 sweatshirts in their garage ever since.
Last month, lacrosse booster dad Marc Missioreck was looking for a meaningful community service project for the JV lacrosse team.
“My wife and I read the article about Jason,” he said. “We thought, ‘How cool would it be to take the boys not off to some homeless shelter far away, but if they saw what Jason — a classmate — started by himself right here in our own community, maybe some of them would get the idea to do something too or at least help Jason further his project.”
Jones decided the extra hands would be best put to work washing the sweatshirts before they go out this fall. He contacted representatives of the Bank of Manhattan, who donated $500 toward detergent and washer/dryer fees. Jones returned the $100 extra that was leftover.
“Laundry is not something I usually like to do but with the whole team it was fun messing around and knowing it’s going to South Bay families,” Sumen said. “It’s good knowing I helped families that I might see around town.”
“It was a little hard at first,” Jones said. “We had to organize ourselves, figure it out, get started and start an assembly line. After we organized, it went pretty smoothly.”
Last week, Jones was one of two winners among 50 applicants for the city’s Youth Recognition Award, a program started in 2004 by Ward to highlight two exceptional high school students — one from Manhattan Beach and one from an L.A. County urban school — who have made differences in their communities. Ward called Jones an “exemplary student and great representative of our community.”
“It’s great that he’s looking more at the bigger picture than himself,” Sumen said.
Missioreck hoped the experience will remind students they don’t have to travel far to help.
“Here’s a 15-year-old who did an amazing thing,” he said. “We don’t stop to think that there are people three miles away that don’t have sweatshirts. At the laundromat, Jason told us that a lot of recipients live a few miles away and all of a sudden it hit home that we’re really making a difference right here in our own community, not half way around the world. The people we’re helping live in Hawthorne and Lawndale and Gardena.” ER