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by Lee Hubbard
San Francisco – The indoor gym at the San Francisco Christian Center on Mission Street on the border of San Francisco and Daly City was filled with a seated and standing room only crowd of former San Francisco athletes from a bygone era. They all looked upon the stage as Joe Belfrey, a former basketball standout at Balboa High School in the late 1970s, surveyed the room.
Instead of being suited in uniforms and tennis shoes, these former athletes were in jeans and slacks. The days of being young, vibrant and oozing with energy were done. Now they were laid back and reserved, like elder statesmen who had accomplished things. But you could still feel the competitiveness and the rivalries in the room. Belfry stood at the center of the room, looking at his creation and what he helped to create.
City Ball is a website and organization with a few thousand members that Belfrey created to highlight past and current San Francisco and Peninsula athletes. Belfry organized the City Baller celebration, which highlighted various athletes from the past.
“We started this as an old school reunion,” said Belfrey, but it became bigger than a reunion. “I was in the Balboa class of 1978. In 2015, I gathered old school basketball players from across the City at a church. We did a prayer and a remembrance of all the lost players.”
From there, Belfrey created a website and a facebook group, in which City Ball exploded. People from the past and present have come to the Facebook group to comment on past and present City athletics in basketball, football, track, baseball and wrestling. The group has brought people back to reminisce and to get engaged in the local sports scene going on in San Francisco.
“When social media got into it, we were able to communicate to athletes from different eras,” continued Belfrey. “After the first gathering we had, a lot of former athletes, officials and coaches have gotten involved with City Ball.”
In the eighth year of City Ball, Belfrey recently honored past athletes and coaches including Alex Toeaina from Balboa High School, Shari Chadwick from Lincoln High School, former Skyline Junior College Men’s Basketball coach Pete Pontacq, Woodrow Wilson educator and basketball coach Don Toomer and McAteer Jaguar basketball player Charleston Pierce.
Toeania, is a pastor in Antioch and he has been in the ministry for close to 20 years, founding Soul’d Out Christian Ministries. He was a football player at Balboa in the late 1970s. Then he played at City College and later at San Jose State University. Later, he had a tryout with a few pro teams and he has had two sons who have played in the NFL.
Chadwick was a cheerleader at Lincoln High School, and she is currently a swim and water aerobics instructor at Martin Luther King Pool in Bayview Hunters Point. Pontacq was a coach at Skyline Junior College who won several league titles, including a California Junior College state basketball championship. He was a Hall of Fame coach at Skyline, who coached at Skyline for over 20 years, coaching hundreds of San Francisco and Peninsular basketball players.
Toomer was a football player at Ohio State and played professional football in Canada. He moved to California, becoming an educator and coach at Woodrow Wilson High School, where he led the warriors to several league championships. His teams made it to the historic Tournament of Champions. He later was a principal at Aptos Middle School and he was also a collegiate and professional NFL timekeeper. He is the father of former NFL standout Armani Toomer.
Pierce played basketball at McAteer. He was a rec league player who played in the Summer Pro-Am League before ending up playing at Simpson Bible College. He is now a model, actor and teacher.
“Sports and its impact on people is underestimated,” said Supervisor Shamman Walton, who was on hand at the event. “A lot of young people get mentors and father figures through sports. It’s the first exposure to academics for many people.”
“Acknowledging people gives them the recognition they have deserved,” continued Belfrey. “People went into other areas of life through sports. They have used sports to help the community and further their careers and family life. This is what you can get from sports.”
Aside from acknowledging the former athletes, Belfrey is in the process of helping to create scholarships and program funding for some of the younger athletes coming up today. While they do have some community based programs for the youth that focus on sports in San Francisco, he wants to get more former athletes involved in San Francisco sports to help the younger generation.
“We need to introduce this history to the younger generation and connect it to the younger generation,” said Belfrey, “This will let them see we can be a tool for them and a network.”
Lee Hubbard is a Bay Area journalist who earned his masters’ degree in journalism at Northeastern University. Well known to longtime Bay View readers, he can be reached at superle@sbcglobal.net.
