Football program transfers top in state A once low-level program transformed into a top transferring school for athletes

Kashish Nizami Roundup Reporter

After sending 24 players to Division 1 schools and 12 more to other four-year universities, Pierce College’s football program has reached a new height of success in transferring students to the next level.

According to head coach Efrain Martinez, when he first came to Pierce, its football program was rated the worst program in Southern California for junior colleges.

“There was a 10-year period when our school didn’t win a game. We didn’t have a good weight room; we didn’t have the utilities; we weren’t winning,” Martinez said. “The key was to treat kids differently. What kids want is that opportunity to come in and then to get out.”

To treat his players differently, Martinez said that he does not focus solely on winning, but instead tries to help them move forward with their careers by paying more attention to academics, as opposed to rival schools.

“[I’ve seen players be] put into basket-weaving classes that don’t transfer over to four-year schools, and so they can’t go anywhere after that,” Martinez said, shaking his head. “That’s something that we’re just not going to do here.”

Although almost half of Pierce’s football team is comprised of out-of-state students, the college does not recruit outside of its designated recruiting area, which is any area that touches the border of the 818 area code, according to Director of Athletics Bob Lofrano.

“We can’t recruit out-ofstate,” Lofrano said. “The first contact has to come from the student; we can’t even recruit, for example, [players from] San Diego.”

Because of this, Lofrano explained that out-of-state players join the program by word-of-mouth, or coming across a link on the Internet.

“Once one [player] comes in, somebody else comes in [because the first] will go back and say, ‘Hey, I had a good experience; I was able to transfer,” Lofrano said. “That’s one of the things the football team tries to do—is to encourage the transfers.”

And that’s what happened between two out-of-state players—Gerald Bowman, now a defensive player at USC and Jaelen Strong, a starting widereceiver at Arizona State University— from Philadelphia, who successfully transferred to Division 1 schools through Pierce’s football program.

“I was in high school when Gerald Bowman was out there at Pierce [and] he’s from Philly as well,” Strong said.

“When I talked to him I knew I didn’t have the grades to go straight from high school, so that’s when he [encouraged] me to come to Pierce.”

However, out-of-state athletes do not necessarily get financial help, and while in-state students pay $46 per unit, out-of-state students must pay $250 per unit.

“There’s no help financially. There are no scholarships available for them [here],” Martinez said. “What they do get is financial aid, and then many of them will get student loans because many of them are just trying to follow that dream that they’re trying to pursue and keep alive. “

“Some players on the team had jobs,” Strong said. “So they were fulltime students with jobs and going to practice every day.”

But Strong described that the trials he and some of his peers had to face in order to reach their goals of receiving scholarships to attend universities were far from a fairytale.

“You know, it’s a lot harder than people may see because they’re on the outside looking in. When you’re in the shoes, you’ve got to do everything,” Strong said. “You’re worried about paying your rent, worried about making it to class on time, public transportation, you’re worried about just going to