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Quarterback gives many quarters back
by Robb Fulcher
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Mike Power mixes work with pleasure at the office. |
Mike Power of Hermosa, a former Boston College and WFL quarterback and now a high-powered financial portfolio manager, is playing on a wider field since he discovered how to give back to the world of youth football that has helped to fuel his successes.
Power, 33, has changed his top-notch quarterback clinic from a for-profit business into a charity, pumping thousands of dollars into the area’s Pop Warner Youth Football programs and helping to fund needier Pop Warner programs elsewhere.
"It probably sounds corny, but every step of the way I owe the success I have in business to sports," he said. "That’s where I learned everything from developing a work ethic to teamwork, leadership, perseverance, everything. I thought it was time to start giving back."
Since September the transplanted Bostonian has poured $3,750 into Pop Warner programs, mostly on the Palos Verdes Peninsula where the bulk of his young quarterbacks play. That total includes matching funds from Howard Capital Management of Los Angeles, where Power oversees fixed income portfolios. The Pop Warner money is expected to really start flowing next year, when the busy season for the quarterback clinics begins.
With the help of one of the young quarterback’s parents, Ken Kilroy, Power set his sights even wider and funneled $1,000 to a Pop Warner program in the Venice area, where some kids have trouble scraping up the proper equipment to wear onto the football field.
The donation saved local Pop Warner officials from announcing that they couldn’t buy trophies for the kids’ season-ending ceremonies.
"It was touching, you know. It was pretty cool," Power said.
Kilroy, a Westwood resident who is president of the company that owns 20th Century Fox films, spent $1,000 on 25 Power clinics for his son Ross, who played Pop Warner last year for the Venice-based West Side Youth Association.
"Mike asked me where I wanted to put that money, and I said ‘I can’t think of a better program than the one in Venice,’" Kilroy said.
Some of the Venice players walk two and three miles to nighttime practices, where fathers coach them and make themselves available for tutoring as well, Kilroy said.
"It’s a great program," he said. "A lot of these kids are in difficult economic circumstances, but they are great kids."
To hear Power tell it, he’s not so much running around doing good deeds as sincerely paying back a long-held debt.
"I called my mother and told her I had started doing the quarterback schools for charity and she didn’t say ‘Oh, good for you, wow that’s great,’ anything like that. She just said ‘Boy, have you changed,’" Power recalled with a laugh.
Back east, Power played for Boston College from 1986 to 1989, following the era of Heisman trophy winner Doug Flutie. Power led the Eagles in passing and total offense during his sophomore season.
He went on to play one year for the Barcelona Dragons of the World Football League, then tried out as a free agent for the NFL’s Houston Oilers in 1992 and again in 1993, but was cut both times.
With a business degree under his arm he joined a New York financial firm, and then was transferred across the country to the West Coast, where he wound up moving on to his current employer.
In California, he set up Mike Power First Round Quarterback School, using lots of praise and never a sharp tongue to teach youngsters to throw a backside post or make four "reads" of a defense before firing a pass. Mothers and fathers sometimes play pass defense in the drills, and Power works to keep the learning fun and informal.
"I was doing well in business and I didn’t really need the money," he said. "I was getting checks and forgetting to cash them."
And so, beginning in September, Power has been returning all of the clinics’ proceeds to the Pop Warner programs, and the work has taken on a new dimension.
"It’s just different when you’re not doing it for yourself," he said.
Mike Power can be contacted at 473-9100. ER