BY CHRISTINE VARNO
Staff Writer
Tonya Badillo and members of Team Jump Off put their hands together in Badillo’s yard. A Long Branch mother is spearheading a drive for a youth recreation facility in the city.
“Our kids need a safe place to go after school so they can stay out of trouble,” said Tonya Badillo last week. “We need a recreation center here in Long Branch. Other towns have the YMCA, but we don’t have anything.”
Badillo reached out to city officials to propose a recreation center be constructed, and said Mayor Adam Schneider agreed that there was a need but that funding wouldn’t be in place for the project for a few years.
“I don’t have the money to build a recreation center,” Badillo said. “If we got a building, I would do the rest. This is not a new concept, we are just proposing a place for kids.”
And the city director of recreation and human services agreed with Badillo.
“There is a need for a community center in the city,” Carl Jennings said in an interview earlier this week. “I have spoken with the mayor and council, and the mayor is in the process of addressing the need.”
Members of Team Jump Off gather in Tonya Badillo’s yard to play basketball. Jennings added that the city may form a partnership with the Long Branch Housing Authority to construct a community center sometime in the future.
Badillo took matters into her own hands and turned her family’s Joline Avenue home into a safe haven for the city’s youth this spring.
She created Team Jump Off, an organization for teens that offers life skills as well as mentoring and field trips.
Team Jump Off was born in April 2003 when Badillo saw that one of her four sons was hanging out with a “tough crowd.”
“My son starting picking up new behavior and his pants were hanging lower and lower,” Badillo said. “I was scared I was going to lose him to gangs. Gangs are a real thing. If you hear these kids talking, you will know it is real. Some people say these kids are just emulating gang members. Acting like gang members is a real danger.”
(Clockwise from left) The Badillo family: Jason, Carlos, Tonya, Gilbert, Gilberto and Vito. Badillo said she believed that if she did not act soon, her son would get mixed up in a gang, dealing drugs, and could end up dead.
That was when Badillo decided that teens could use her home as their recreation center.
“We have an open-door policy, after school and for anything else,” Badillo said.
Badillo told her son to invite his friends, who she described as “a tough group of boys,” over to her home. She asked them what would make them want to come to her home after school, and their answer created Team Jump Off.
“They said they just wanted to play [basket] ball,” Badillo said. “So, my husband put up a hoop in our yard and it began.”
In the beginning it was just a dozen boys who started coming to Badillo’s home every day to play basketball and to get some free food, according to Badillo.
But it started growing into a real group, she said.
“I made rules,” Badillo said. “There is no cursing, no reference to gangs, and no rough housing once you enter my house. And the boys gave us the name Team Jump Off.”
The once small group of boys is quickly outgrowing the space Badillo provides for them.
Today there is a group of more than 30 boys and girls between the ages of 13 and 18 who have joined Team Jump Off.
“It has grown,” Badillo said. “On Friday nights we have movie nights, and for those who don’t play basketball, they put on skits in my living room.”
Badillo said she is also in the process of starting a girls’ empowerment group.
Badillo credits the Long Branch Concordance (LBC), a grassroots collaborative in Long Branch that addresses needs in the community, with Team Jump Off’s success.
“I met [LBC Director] Terri Blair and told her what I was doing,” Badillo said. “She helped me get my story out. The LBC is our fiscal agent until we become a 501c3.”
With the help of the LBC, Team Jump Off received a $10,000 grant from Monmouth Cares in West Long Branch, which Badillo said will be used to hire a coordinator to organize e-mails and bookkeeping.
Team Jump Off has received a $750 donation from the New Jersey Road Runners Club, which has also named Team Jump Off as a beneficiary of its run at the end of this month.
Badillo said any donations will be used to fund Team Jump Off T-shirts, pizza for movie nights, paper and art supplies. Any extra money will be saved to fund a recreation center.
Over the three-year period, Badillo said she has seen a real change in several of the youths who come to her home, especially in how they treat one another.
“When there is a new member who comes into my yard and is cursing, they will say that there is no cursing here,” she said. “They really have taken ownership of it.”
But she added that she has also seen a strong reaction in the community.
“We have received so much support and so many e-mails,” she said.
The Athletic Department at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, has even signed on, Badillo said.
The Long Branch Recreation Department has volunteered to bus Team Jump Off to Monmouth University on Saturdays starting at the end of the month, where the teens will use the gym facilities and be mentored one-on-one by basketball players from the university’s team.
Badillo said Team Jump Off is a day-to-day process.
“What we do is more immediate,” she said. “We try to stop fights before they happen or just give these kids a place to be or just some food if they need it.”
She added that two gangs were homegrown in Long Branch and that gang activity is an increasing problem in today’s world.
“Yeah, maybe we don’t have gang shootings on the corner of our streets, but that is why we are doing this, to prevent that from happening,” she said.
And so far, she said, she feels good about her efforts.
“I just love these kids,” she said. “I celebrate my birthdays with them and these big tough guys go card shopping and pick out cards with tulips on them for me.”
Although the goal of Team Jump Off is to keep the teens safe on a day-to-day basis, Badillo said her long-term goal is to see each of them go to college.
“I am constantly sneaking in [the topic of] college and asking them to talk about different colleges and majors,” she said. “I would love to see them go to college, and I will be there at their graduations.”
For now, Badillo wants a recreation center where the teens could have ownership in their programs, she said.
“I am not saying that a recreation center is a cure, but these kids need options. I hope a recreation center will provide them with options.”
For more information or to make a donation, contact Team Jump Off at www.Teamjumpoff.homestead.com.

