What do a Houston Rockets fan turned movie star and Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) have in common?
They’ll both be speaking at the Young Educated Latino Leaders (YELL) conference on Oct. 3 at Allan Hancock College’s Marian theater. Diana Perez, the event organizer, said that the YELL conference is geared toward motivating high school students to think about education as a pathway to the future.
“We want students to be college and career ready, we want them to know that education is an avenue for success, and that’s one of the reasons we want to focus on inspirational and motivational stories,” she said. “We want every student to know that they can beat the odds.”
The keynote speaker at the conference will be Carlos Pratts. He’s a rising star in Hollywood, best known for playing Thomas Valles in the feel-good running flick McFarland, USA.
That movie told the true story of a scrappy cross country team from a small prison town in California’s Central Valley. The McFarland kids work in the fields before dawn, go to school, and run in the afternoon. There are trials and tribulations and sports-movie drama, but it can’t slow them down—eventually, they run their way to the state title.
Pratts told the Sun that he grew up loving football, not cross country. “I was never a runner,” he said. “I weighed 235 pounds when I was a kid, so I was more of a heavyweight—O and D line. My running was 3 yards.”
After landing the role, of course, he ended up running more than 3 yards. Pratts said he trained for months for the film. The film’s state championship, he said, was no cinematic trickery—the former lineman and his fellow actors ran it as a race.
“What you see was actually there,” he said. “We went at it 100 percent.”
Pratts was raised in a household of educators in Houston, Texas—his mom taught English and ESL, and his stepdad taught biology.
When Hancock reached out to him, he said, he jumped at the opportunity. “I grew up with educators, and every time I can give back to youth I’m excited,” he said.
He thinks the film has a specific message that resonates with the YELL conference. “Whatever your dream is, chase it,” he explained. “The race is a journey. The journey that these seven guys from McFarland go through changed their lives. Cross country changed their lives.”
The real Thomas Valles, who now works as a correctional officer, said much of the same thing. After graduating from high school, he ran for the College of the Sequoias for three years.
“The reason I ran and went to college is because of the running,” he told the Sun. “I wanted to be competitive.” Valles walked by a corrections course and asked the professor if he could sit in; before long, he was a criminal justice major.
Eventually, he transferred to Cal State University Bakersfield. “The running and the stuff that I learned through running helped keep that door open until other doors opened,” he said. When he graduated, he didn’t want to go back to working in the fields. And so he found himself doing four years of search and rescue and maritime law enforcement on a Coast Guard ship in the San Francisco Bay.
After that, he found work as a correctional officer at a prison in McFarland—back in the same town where “the majority” of his teammates had found work as teachers and educators. Valles now coaches cross country at McFarland High School. He’s back with the team that took the state championship not once, as depicted in the film, but nine different times.
“We tell the kids—it’s not our story, it’s their story,” Valles said. His state-winning squad, he said, was the slowest out of the nine years. “How they chose us, I don’t know.”
Still, he said, the stories in the film reflect various athletes from those nine years. “They came from the same economic backgrounds that we did,” he said. “Most of us were first generation here in the states. The opportunity to come to school here—you can’t let what [your parents] sacrificed down. You have to carry the torch.
“Life isn’t easy, college isn’t easy,” he added. “You have to go out and earn it.”
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at [email protected].