"I've been there. I know what it is to feel like giving up."

But Mary Andrecolich-Diaz, reflecting on her youth, did not give up, and she's not about to start letting anyone else, either.

Andrecolich-Diaz is the activities director for the NYSP at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, winner of the most recent Silvio O. Conte Award for Excellence, the NYSP's highest honor.

Andrecolich-Diaz and Monroe's Athletics Director Bruce "Murph" Shapiro earned the award based on respect -- the respect their NYSP participants have for the program, and for themselves.

The success of the NYSP at Monroe has been a rollover success. More than 80 percent of the kids who enroll once enroll again and again. And once they finish, they're better for it. Andrecolich-Diaz said she's had athletics directors at colleges and universities tell her that her products are successful in undergraduate programs because they had such a well-rounded start in the NYSP.

That's a big advantage, and according to Andrecolich-Diaz, just another of the many reasons not to give up.

"I was an NYSP participant when I was little and it was quite different back then," she remembered. "They used to send buses to our neighborhood of economically disadvantaged kids and we'd go play. It certainly wasn't as organized as it is now. It was very small -- we thought it was a recreation program, somewhere that we'd go to be fed and play."

To be sure, NYSP has grown since then, in large part because of people like Andrecolich-Diaz.

"She's special," said Shapiro, who let Andrecolich-Diaz take over his role as activities director because he saw she had a vision for how the program could flourish. "When we started this years ago, the program was based heavily on teams competing against each other, but Mary had an idea to introduce a different incentive for success."

Andrecolich-Diaz, who is a teacher and house principal at Rochester's Jefferson Middle School, saw the bickering that competition produced and realized that it was too familiar to the kids' everyday lives in an economically disadvantaged dog-eat-dog world. At first, she changed the points scale around. Instead of teams receiving points for winning, she awarded more points for good sportsmanship and respectful behavior.

"So you could win, but if you were a poor sport you only got one point, whereas if you lost but had a good time you could get 10," she said.

And that worked relatively well, but Andrecolich-Diaz still felt something was amiss.

"We noticed that our younger kids didn't know how to play together very well," she said. "They were coming from 'whoever-gets-it-first' type backgrounds and they didn't know how to be together. So we developed a program called 'cooperative games.' "Cooperative games are those that focus on teamwork and respect more than winning. And that's all that the 10-year-olds do for the 25-day program -- they cooperate and respect one another.

"We have a contract from day one with each participant, a zero tolerance for violence and disrespect," Andrecolich-Diaz said. "The minute we see any disrespect, there's a consequence. The kids know it's a privilege to be part of the NYSP. We're here to teach morals and values in a safe environment.

"Now, those kids are playing together, learning how to get along and how to problem-solve. We have very few discipline problems."

Choices help

Another successful aspect of the NYSP at Monroe is that kids are encouraged to make their own choices about the sports in which they'd like to receive more intensive instruction. And one of the choices is not basketball, at least not right away.

"What we did with basketball was say that you couldn't choose it until the last two weeks of camp, and you had to have good attendance and behavior to get it," Andrecolich-Diaz said. "We want them to play basketball, but we want to expose them to the nontraditional sports, too."

And all the while, they're learning about values, too.

"We use sports as a magnet," Andrecolich-Diaz said. "We wave the sports in front of them, but once we get them we bombard them with the values."

What that has proven to be effective in doing -- and what program evaluators see when they're on site -- is producing kids who are being good sports and who respect themselves and others because they want to, not because they have to.

"Evaluators see kids who aren't coming for their own agenda, but who want to be involved in a respectful program and who are doing the things we hope they're going to do in high school and on their way to college," said Shapiro.

"When we went to teaching the values -- the way you're supposed to be, to act and behave--the kids bought into that respect," Andrecolich-Diaz said."We didn't want them to be good sports just for the points, we wanted them to be good sports because that's the way you're supposed to act. This is how our camp evolved."

And that's what earned the Conte recognition, though Andrecolich-Diaz and Shapiro agree that awards aren't the reason they've poured their hearts and souls into the program for more than 20 years.

"I remember being 13, 14 and almost giving up," Andrecolich-Diaz said. "But I had a teacher who helped me out -- it was that hope that someone instilled in me.

"And now the NYSP has afforded me opportunities as an adult, too, that I never would have had otherwise. What I observe here is what I bring back to my own teaching situation. The 'walk tall, talk tall, stand tall' message is something we should be giving all of our kids -- whether they're in the NYSP or not -- every day."

TheSilvio O. Conte Award of Excellence

The NYSP's highest honor is named after the late U.S. Representative from Massachusetts who advocated government's responsibility to the underpriviledged. Conte used his authority within the House Appropriations Committee to promote areas such as education, housing and the NYSP. His strong convictions and straightforward style guided his drive to increase funding for the NYSP.

Nominees for 2000

* University of Arizona

* University of Detroit Mercy

* University of District of Columbia

* Monroe Community College

* University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire

Previous Conte winners

Previous winners of the Silvio O. Conte Award of Excellence:

1999 -- University of Massachusetts at Lowell

1998 -- University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire

1997 -- Malcolm X College

1996 -- Hampton University

1995 -- University of Detroit Mercy

1994 -- University of Arizona

1993 -- University of District of Columbia