The former three-time state champion Reading High basketball coach and one-time Olivet kid has taken over as the organization’s new chief executive officer.
For a brief moment, the bright smile usually found on Rick Perez’s face transformed into a determined scowl.
He bent his knees, extended his arm and exploded toward his goal. He leaped forward, slamming the miniature basketball in his hand through a metal basketball hoop mounted on the multicolored wall inside the Clinton Street Olivet Boys & Girls Club.
A half-dozen young men, at the club training to be counselors for Olivet’s summer camp program, tried to stop him. They couldn’t.
“Yo, he dunked on all of you!” a bystander shouted.
Perez’s posterized victims erupted into laughter and cheers and a chorus of “Oohs” as his trademark smile returned. It grew even bigger when he realized his ferocious throw-down had ripped the small rim away from the concrete block wall.
“I already broke something,” he said with a chuckle. “But that’s OK. That’s what it’s there for. We’ll just put it back up.”
For a brief moment, the 42-year-old Perez had been transported back to his childhood. He was suddenly 12 again, messing around with some friends at the Boys & Girls Club where he had spent countless hours as a kid.
A lot has happened since those salad days. Perez became a high school and college basketball star, he built a successful career as an educator, he had a historic stint as the three-time state champion coach of the Reading High boys basketball team.
But on Monday afternoon, he was back where it all started. He was back to his roots, back with his family.
“It’s just home,” he said.
Perez will soon have a lot of opportunities to revisit his youth at the Clinton Street club, as well as Olivet’s other locations in Berks County. That’s because the former Olivet kid is preparing to take over as the organization’s new leader.
On May 24, Olivet’s board of directors announced that Perez had been hired as the organization’s chief executive officer. He will officially start his tenure June 17.
“To me, it’s critically important,” P. Sue Perrotty, Olivet board of directors chair, said of picking a former Olivet member to head up the organization. “He has a commitment to the families and the kids and the communities we serve.”
At the beginning
That commitment was forged back in the early 1990s, when a 10-year-old Perez was searching for a place to belong. It was just after his parents had divorced and he was desperately looking for connections, seeking a place and people he could call his own.
He found the Clinton Street club.
“The Olivet was a refuge,” he said. “It was a family. You got love there regardless. It was stability, it was safety, it was a place where you could go and people wouldn’t judge you.”
The club was only a few blocks away from his home at Third and Oley streets but sat on the other side of the highly trafficked Schuylkill Avenue.
“I remember sneaking across Schuylkill Avenue,” Perez said. “I couldn’t ride my bike across it, I had to run. If I would have been riding my bike across and got hit by a car my mom would have come to the hospital and beat me so bad I’d have to stay in the hospital.”
So, to avoid the wrath of his protective mother, Perez ran, as fast as he could. He remembers arriving at the cub sweaty and breathless, sprinting into the gym and jumping right into a game of basketball.
“I remember eating lunch there, swimming with my socks on,” he said of his time at the club. “I remember the friendships, sitting poolside with friends. It’s the place where I had my first kiss.
“It was loud, and it was beautiful. It was a place where we could be ourselves. It’s a place where we were embraced.”
Perez said that culture, built through the organization’s more than 100 years serving the greater Reading community, has not changed.
So when he heard about a job opportunity there, he was more than a little interested.
“It was a no-brainer,” he said. “It wasn’t a hard sell.”
Back in Reading
Taking over as Olivet’s CEO is a return home, of sorts, for Perez. For the past few years, the Wilson High School graduate has been serving as director of River Rock Academy’s Clifton Heights Campus.
He’s been commuting to Delaware County from Muhlenberg Township home he shares with his wife, Kristin, and their three children. But now, he’ll be back working with kids from Reading, something he knows a lot about.
“I want them to see that I’m just like them,” Perez said.
In order to do that, Perez will first have to work on getting kids into Olivet’s clubs.
Perrotty said the COVID-19 pandemic hit Olivet hard, forcing the organization to shut down its clubs. And the organization hasn’t rebounded as quickly as its leaders would have hoped it would.
Perez said he’s keenly aware of the challenge and is prepared to tackle it head-on. He said he and his staff will put on a full-court press, making their presence known in the community.
“We need to go get the kids,” he said. “We’re going to go get them and get back to having fun.”
Perez said his goal is to bring the clubs back to what he remembers experiencing as a kid. He said he can still picture the Clinton Street club so packed that the walls would sweat and the floors would be damp from the heat caused by the sheer number of kids running and jumping and playing.
“We just want to bring that energy back,” he said. “There needs to be excitement in this place. There needs to be laughter in this place.”
His Plans
Perez said he plans to lead that charge from the front. When asked what he pictured his first official day on the job would be like — a date that coincides with the start of Olivet’s summer camp program — he didn’t hesitate with his answer.
“Give me trunks and sandals, I’m getting in the pool,” he said. “And I need to get me a water gun, that’s how I’m showing up to camp. Big ones, too.”
Or course, it won’t be all fun and games for Perez. He said he has lots of ideas, including efforts to help kids build successful futures.
The first step in that process, he said, will be a program called “Whose the Next CEO?” Using himself as an example, he hopes to inspire kids to open their eyes to the world of opportunity just waiting for them to grasp it.
Because that’s what Olivet did for him. It’s what the organization is built to do and, Perez said, it’s what it will do for years to come — with a lot of good times thrown in.
“We’re giving hope, giving love, through smiles,” he said. “Olivet is alive and well, and we’re going to continue to thrive.”