Blast Star David Bascome Makes a Difference Off the Field With Hope4Life

If your name is David Bascome and life hands you lemons, you don't make lemonade. You make lemonade, lemon squares and lemon meringue pie. Because if your name is David Bascome, life has handed you some pretty big lemons, and a lot of them too. But it has also handed you a relentless drive to make life better for everyone around you.

Bascome, 40, had an impressive 17-year playing career in indoor soccer, the latter part of it spent with the Baltimore Blast, with whom he earned three championship titles. Now, he is in his fifth season as the team's assistant coach.

While soccer saved him from a life of abuse and bad decisions, it more importantly became the catalyst for his true passion � saving the lives of others.

"This is what David lives for," said Charles Hatcher, whose Champions 4 Champions non-profit organization inducted Bascome as one of its Legends of Sports and in turn supports his projects. "He's turned himself into what an athlete or role model in professional sports should be. Your life is not your own now. You're giving back to the [people] who made your life possible."

In order to do this, Bascome developed a non-profit organization with the lofty goal of guiding youths away from a life of violence, drugs, and crime in his native Bermuda. Calling it Hope4Life, Bascome has since brought the program to Baltimore, and he is currently working to expand it into Guam and St. Lucia.

Bascome's journey to this point was not an easy one.

He began playing soccer around the age of 7, but didn't take it too seriously. It was merely a fun way to pass the time. And fun was difficult to find for Bascome, who suffered from a speech impediment that caused him to stutter. He was shy and often acted out to compensate for the struggle.

Compounding a tumultuous relationship with his parents, as a teenager, Bascome suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend who would drive him on trips away from his home.

"When you're going through an abuse, stuck in a car for the longest time, you're thinking you just want it over," he said. "You close your eyes and you just want everything to end. And it was going through this process for seven years of my life. It kind of made me understand that the only safe place I had was the game."

After graduating high school in Bermuda at age 16, his talents as a forward brought him to Anderson Community College in South Carolina on an athletic scholarship. Bascome knew what he was there for and he was interested in little else.

"Education, I was above that," he said. "I just wanted to play soccer, play the game. So what happened was that a year went by, and I started failing my classes. November came around, and it was like, now you've got to go to class. You've got to do some work, and I was totally lost."

His disdain for school was underlined by the fact that when the weekends came around, he felt like he was on his own. The cafeterias were closed, and he had no money for food.

It was then that Bascome met a friend at neighboring Clemson and the two ran a phone number scam to garner themselves some extra cash. Unaware of the potentially serious consequences of what amounted to a federal offense, Bascome thought nothing of it until his friend was caught and named him as an accomplice.

During a soccer game, he was pulled off the field and taken to an office. There, officers handcuffed him and threw him into jail to await a court appearance.

"I didn't have a clue what was going on," he said. "The worst thing I felt was that I never knew what time it was. They always kept the lights on. I'm sitting in this cell for weeks, and I said this just can't happen. This is where everything has to change."

Bascome was released on a personal bond but wasn't free of the charges until several years ago when he returned to Anderson to rid himself of the legal issues. After the incident, he dropped out of school and traveled to England. From that turning point, he put his negative experiences to work, pushing himself through many sleepless nights to expand Hope4Life.

The organization varies in its activities, but remains true to its primary mission to help at-risk youths get the most out of their lives, giving them alternatives to getting mired in a cycle of drugs and violence.

In Bermuda, where Bascome has spoken (without any hint of his now-overcome impediment) everywhere from schools to correctional facilities, he founded the eight-team Island Soccer League in 2007 with the goal of keeping young men off the same tough streets on which he grew up.

In Baltimore, Bascome has willed Hope4Life to flourish. He's gotten involved with city schools, recruiting Blast teammates Robbie Aristodemo, Machel Millwood, Pat Healey, and Pat Morris to tell their success stories as well.

Former Chief of Accountability for Baltimore City Schools and current CEO of the ED-TECH Group, Dr. L'Tanya Simmons, met Bascome through her organization, which is designed to support education with the aid of celebrities as mentors. She has witnessed firsthand how Baltimore, like most cities worldwide, faces many of the same problems that Bascome has experienced and witnessed in Bermuda.

"Often what appears to be laziness is really avoidant behavior," Simmons said, "a coping response based on the pain associated with trying and failing repeatedly despite their best efforts. Over time, this learned helplessness is labeled as 'laziness' by teachers and parents, a label that is much easier to bear than labels the child may suspect are more accurate, such as 'stupid' or 'incapable.'"

Feelings with which Bascome is acutely in tune.

Bascome has street credibility and personal experience to support him, but his effectiveness as a speaker goes beyond that. Anyone who has experienced one of his energetic stories delivered in his slangy island lilt, finds it difficult to put into words that undeniable spark that completely captivates his audiences, young or old.

"It feels like he's touching you, talking right to you, not just a whole group," said Healey, who looked up to Bascome while growing up. "That's what he has, he just has a presence."

And like any good soccer play, a great deal of preparation goes into those speeches. Careful not to instill false hope and ardently outspoken about "keeping it real," Bascome tailors his speeches and activities to his audiences.

He recognizes that people of all ages can analyze information if it is delivered correctly. "If you're speaking to the little people," he said, "and they're watching 'Spongebob,' you've got to watch it too. I have to do it because I have to enter their world."

David Burch, Bermuda's Minister of National Security, has worked closely with Bascome to make Hope4Life and the ISL a reality.

"David meets the children where they are, not where society thinks they should be, not where society hopes they are, but actually where they are," Burch said. "He makes no assumptions about the young people he is working with. He listens to them and talks with them, not at them. He hears their plea for help and does all he can to assist."

Through his indoor soccer career and his work with Hope4Life, Bascome said he has been able to heal much of the damage of his youth.

But the growth of Hope4Life is far from complete. Bascome plans to tackle the problems of other countries and cities head on, and he said he's looking forward to launching a social networking site for the program's kids in the spring.

"For me in the long range, it'll be that Hope4Life is designed not only to bring people together, but even countries together," he said. "This is my mindset. People may think I'm out there, but now I've got Guam, we're searching into St. Lucia, I've got Bermuda. There's a broader spectrum."

A broader spectrum of which Baltimore is lucky to be a part.


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Photos:

- Homepage Image: David Bascome, Baltimore Blast assistant coach and Founder of the Hope4Life program, works with children during a Hope4Life event - courtesy of Hope4Life
- David Bascome sits for a portrait - Photo by Arianne Teeple
- David Bascome works with children during a Hope4Life event - courtesy of Hope4Life
- The Hope4Life program logo - courtesy of Hope4Life
- David Bascome works with children during a Hope4Life event - courtesy of Hope4Life
- David Bascome plays during a game - courtesy of the Baltimore Blast
- The Baltimore Blast at practice - Photo by Arianne Teeple
- Baltimore Blast assistant coach David Bascome, left, talks to #20 Midfielder Robbie Aristodemo during practice - Photo by Arianne Teeple
- Baltimore Blast assistant coach David Bascome runs drills during practice - Arianne Teeple