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“We’re not just trying to make them better players, we’re trying to make them better people,” Pulaski/Carmen Southeast High School varsity basketball coach Melvin White says. (Photo by Edgar Mendez)

Editor’s note: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service staff pick the stories that still resonate with them after a chaotic 2020.

Unfortunately, because of  the COVID-19 pandemic, athletics have been put on hold in many schools.

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Things couldn’t be much more different than last year, when players ran laps and pounded basketballs into the Pulaski/Carmen High School gymnasium, while boys varsity basketball coach Melvin White howled at them from the sideline.

“It’s tough love,” said White, who was a standout basketball player at Dominican High School and a scholarship athlete at Colby Community College in Kansas before deferring his hoop dreams.

It was a decision he still regretted. Not wanting his players to go through what he did, he pushed them to persevere when things get tough. Coach White was grooming his players to be more prepared for basketball, and also the game of life.

The story about White and his players was the first story I wrote in 2020, and it also happens to be my favorite.

Click here to read the story.

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Raised in a South Side neighborhood where he still lives, Edgar Mendez is the managing editor of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. Mendez is a proud graduate of UW-Milwaukee, where he double majored in journalism and sociology, and of Marquette University, where he earned a master’s degree in communication. He won a 2018 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award and 2014, 2017, and 2018 Milwaukee Press Club Awards for his reporting on taverns, marijuana law enforcement, and lead in water service lines. In 2008, he won a Society of Professional Journalists’ regional award for columns dealing with issues such as poverty, homelessness and racism. His writing has been published by the Associated Press, Reuters, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other media. He has also co-authored three articles published in scholarly journals.