Lorenzo Perry, who hopes to one day open a training center, works at the Mount Hope Neighborhood Association, where he is a program coordinator for the youth program.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE — Lorenzo Perry, the greatest running back in the brief history of Bryant University football, has returned to the Mount Hope neighborhood where he grew up dreaming of football glory.

His mission is to help young adults refine the skills they need to find a job and to nurture in Pop Warner players the fundamentals they will need to make their football dreams come true.

Perry, 25, teaches life skills to 19- to 21-year-olds at the Mount Hope Neighborhood Association on Camp Street. That assignment resulted from his success last summer as interim coordinator for a work-readiness program for 15-year-olds.

“How to dress, how to interview, how to conduct yourself in a professional manner. They were looking for someone who was educated and from the neighborhood,” Perry said during an interview. He qualifies on that front. A National Honor Society student at La Salle Academy, he graduated from Bryant in 2007 and spent about six months in the Target Corp. management program before leaving to chase his dream of playing professional football.

Drafted last January by Team Arkansas of the proposed All American Football League, Perry trained until mid-March, when the AAFL announced that it was postponing its inaugural season to 2009. He started looking for work in May and landed the Mount Hope position.

“I’m trying to do a lot of community work to help youth and young adults, older kids who unfortunately made some wrong decisions and don’t have the skills some of the employers are looking for,” he said.

“I’m trying to give back while I’m in a position to. Now I’m in a position to do that, but I won’t always be. I have dreams to go off and do my own thing,” he said. His business goal is to open a speed and strength training center.

Perry is also coaching. He and his brother Herlin, a year younger and “a crazy, rugged animal” who inspired the defense, took the Mount Hope Cowboys Pee Wee team to the Pop Warner national championships at Walt Disney World for the second consecutive season.

“It’s the team I played for when I was younger,” he said. “I loved the game then and I love working with the kids now. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Perry played Pee Wee football for his uncle, Herlin Perry, and often dropped by Collier Field, near the Peter Pan bus terminal, when he was in college to help the kids run plays.

“They’re from the neighborhood; I’m from the neighborhood. It was a thrill for them,” he said.

In the late summer of 2007, two months after Lorenzo graduated from Bryant, Herlin asked whether he would coach a Mount Hope team. He said yes and got the Pee Wees, one of six teams in the organization that serves about 175 players and cheerleaders.

“I was definitely a little nervous at first. I had always worked with kids, but a half-hour here and there. And you’re more than just a coach. You’re like a mentor. Sometimes you’re the only male figure in those kids’ lives. I was definitely a little nervous taking over the whole operation.”

Perry empathized with many of his 10- to 12-year-olds. He grew up on Abbott Street in the heart of Mount Hope, a working-class neighborhood on the city’s East Side, and went to Martin Luther King Elementary School and Nathan Bishop Middle School. His father was not a presence in his life, but his uncle Herlin “was like a father figure,” and his aunt Robin was like a second mother.

“I come from the background a lot of these guys come from. Single parent, grew up in poverty,” he said. But he learned that if life isn’t fair, “you can’t let that be an excuse for not succeeding or not putting forth your best effort.”

Coaching his team reminded him of the years (1993-1998) he played for the Cowboys.

“Those were the last years you got to play football with all your friends,” he said. “On a high school or college team, you develop a new core of friends, but in Pee Wees, you’re playing with all the friends you grew up with. They’re like family. That was one of the best things.”

The Mount Hope organization did not belong to Pop Warner in those days, so when Perry’s team won the R.I. Pre-Teen state championship in 1996, that was it. Last year was the Cowboys’ first in Pop Warner, and its first trip to Lake Buena Vista as the New England champion. Perry’s Cowboys lost to teams from New Jersey and California, but his players were thrilled just to be there. For most of them, it was their first time on an airplane and their first real road trip.

“It’s definitely beyond football when we go down there. These kids from the city, to take these kids there is an experience in and of itself. You should see their eyes light up. Coaches are focused on football, and the kids are talking about the rides they want to go on. We’d lose a game, and they’re racing back to the hotel to see who’s the first one in the pool. The kids are so happy to be there that that’s their focus.”

Last year, even Perry got caught up in Disneymania. “It was my first time at Disney World, and we were racing to a different park every day. It was definitely an experience for me.”

Perry says his players “are good kids now, but who knows where they will be in three or four years. When they get older, that’s when you start to lose them,” he said.

He has felt the pressure they will feel to try drugs and join a gang and hopes they will follow his example.

“I was never one to buckle under peer pressure,” he said. “I was a leader, and that helped guide my way through the streets, the gangs and the drugs. I never let anyone dictate my actions because at the end of the day I’m responsible. I wanted respect, and whether it was because I was a good football player and tough, I was respected. I could say I’m not smoking that blunt or I’m not going over to beat up that kid. Football led me to go to La Salle and kept me out of certain environments. They helped me elude some of the pitfalls inner-city kids fall into.”

Perry rushed for 4,469 yards and 85 touchdowns at La Salle. He spent two years as a kick returner at the University of Massachusetts, transferred to Bryant and rewrote the record book there, rushing for 3,329 yards and 37 touchdowns. He was a Division II All-America and one of eight finalists for the 2006 Harlon Hill Award as the best player in Division II.

Today, Perry still looks like he could put on the pads, squeeze his 5-foot-6, 185-pound frame through a hole and go 80 yards for a touchdown, but he understands that teaching intangibles to 12-year-old Pop Warner kids is more important in the long run than finding a hole at the line of scrimmage. He preaches lessons he hopes will help his players avoid getting involved in melees such as the cafeteria brawl between Pop Warner Midget teams from Edgewood and Dorchester, Mass.

“Our pep talks incorporate life and life’s lessons to motivate the kids,” he said. “I’m grateful that our kids went down (to Florida) acting like a class act and avoiding the stereotype of inner-city teams. Our guys played with a lot of sportsmanship.”

Just like their coach did when he was a kid in Mount Hope.

mszostak@projo.com