Young men on a mission at Mission High School

Courtesy: The San Francisco Chronicle by Gwen Knapp

As he watched his city champions warm up for Monday's practice, coach Arnold Zelaya explained how the Mission High boys' basketball team came together. The story does not have a pretty beginning.

Grade trouble forced a couple of the seniors out of Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep years ago. One of them entered Balboa High, ran into trouble there and, to his parents' dismay, had to move over to Mission. Another student's discipline problems led to expulsion from one school and a shift to 18th and Dolores streets.

Zelaya told a few more similar tales before he summarized: "I'd say about half of them, when they ended up at Mission, they wanted out." The coach understands all too well. Twenty-six years ago, when he lived in the neighborhood, his mother refused to let him accept assignment to Mission High, sending him off to Sacred Heart.

Despite extensive upgrades over the last decade, the school cannot entirely shake its longstanding reputation as a dumping ground.

"I embrace that, the dumping ground," said Zelaya, also the dean of students. "Now we're the dumping ground for the private schools."

If he seems to be swaggering a little, he's entitled. Mission won its second city championship in three years on Friday when it beat Wallenberg 67-60. At 7:30 tonight, the Bears will play in the first round of the Division IV state tournament, facing Capital Christian of Sacramento in Kezar Pavilion.

But that's not what makes Zelaya boastful. The team currently has a collective grade-point average of 3.o3, he said, announcing the number as proudly as if he had a son with a .303 batting average in the majors.

Some of the seniors who unhappily defaulted into Mission High have already been admitted to college, including Terrence Langston, who plans to attend Cal State Northridge. He has a 3.3 GPA, and an hour before basketball practice Monday, he did warmup exercises of another sort.

Langston worked on scholarship applications, polishing his presentation for two selection interviews in the next week. He went to Room 104 and met with a volunteer for ASAP, the school's 6-year-old Athletic Scholars Advancement Program. The organization grew out of athletic director Scott Kennedy's commitment to placing Mission's student-athletes in college summer camps, an effort that became more urgent after the shooting death of football player Raymon Bass in May 2004.

Founded shortly after Bass' murder, ASAP raised $18,000 in its first year, according to executive director Judy Grossman. This year, she said, the operating budget reached $350,000.

The goal of sending teams to summer training camps expanded to include college-application help and trips to strictly academic summer camps at Ivy League schools such as Cornell, Columbia and Brown.

Junior basketball player Jaleel Stancil's older brother, Jeff, became one of the first Bears to attend Cornell for a summer session. So Jaleel became one of the few current basketball players who did not come to Mission against his will.

"I knew the other schools didn't have ASAP," he said, "so I wanted to be here."

The basketball team went to two camps last summer, one at Santa Clara University, Zelaya's alma mater, and one in Sonora. The Wallenberg team also attended the Santa Clara camp, and the soon-to-be championship rivals became friendly, pulling for each other in matchups with other opponents. The Mission team, by all accounts, bonded over the summer.

"We got to eat together, and we'd laugh and joke with each other," senior JaVaughn Shannon said. "We almost stayed up till 1 a.m. talking."

Shannon had attended Sacred Heart and Balboa, and he came to Mission intending to transfer as soon as possible. "But it actually turned out to be the best thing for me," he said. ASAP helped put him on track academically, he said, and he plans to attend college.

When the team returned for the fall, 11 of the players were supposed to be on the football team. That season, however, came to a halt after three non-league games because the team - a playoff qualifier just a few years ago - couldn't draw enough academically eligible athletes.

So the basketball players started lifting weights together and waiting for their chance. Zelaya noticed older players keeping tabs on younger ones, making sure they went to class.

The coach deliberately scheduled a tough preseason, and the Bears started out 1-5. They are now 21-10, a number that Zelaya recited casually. He was a lot more excited about his team's GPA.