When Keith Brockman started smoking marijuana at age 13, Bob Jones, Garth Taylor, Tony Walls and Melvin Gay -- his Garfield Gators coaches -- knew about it.

"They knew my brother was doing it. And when they saw me hanging around his friends, they knew I had started smoking, too," he said. "They told me what I was doing was wrong. That I would end up dropping out of school or in prison. They told me that I still had a lot opportunities to change my life."

For a young black man -- one of four children born to a single mother in the public housing projects of Garfield's Schenley Avenue -- Mr. Brockman, now 24, said it was a stern lecture from the only men he has ever known as father figures.

"They came down hard on me," he recalled, "but they probably saved me. Growing up in Garfield at the time was not easy. There was a lot of gang violence, drugs and people going to jail. At that time, these men are the people I looked up to because they chose to care about me. And since then, they have shown me how to be a man."

Now, a father of two, Mr. Brockman's story is one of failure and success, perseverance and loss, and how a young black boy on the periphery grew into a man.

Seated in a small back room at the Garfield Family Support Center on Hillcrest Avenue where he volunteers as a tutor, Mr. Brockman recalled that it all started on the football field at Fort Pitt Elementary when he was 12.

"For many of the guys my age, we were all excited," he said. "It was a chance to play community sports. Before that, we didn't have much in terms of sports or playgrounds. We used to cut the bottoms out of crates and hang them on roofs to play basketball."

And for the two years he played Gator football, he and his friends saw it as an "outlet for many of the struggles we saw at home every day," he said.

"I grew up with a group of around 10 guys and we were all in the same boat," he said. "Only one of our friends had both parents at home. The rest of us had single mothers on public assistance and we saw them struggle to feed us, cloth us or buy us presents."

Football not only kept him and his friends busy for much of the year, but the coaches started "developing an interest in us, and talking to us about how to handle ourselves and situations at home," he said. "Sometimes, it was easy to start thinking about how to take matters in your own hands because you got tired of waiting for the government to feed you once a month."

It is at such a critical juncture that "these young men need a strong role model in their lives," said Garth Taylor. "They have to trust you to be there for them every day. You are someone they can measure themselves to, and it is a big deal when they know that you can succeed doing things the right way."

His coaches, Mr. Brockman said, staved much of the angst and peer pressure he felt to steal or sell drugs because his mother couldn't afford to buy him things like the latest Nike sneakers.

That wasn't the case for all of his friends.

"Six of my closest friends took the other road," he said, and now each of them has done time in a state or federal prison.

"One of my friends just got out of prison recently and he is trying to do something with himself," said Mr. Brockman, who will graduate this month from a 10-month Americorps-Coro Center for Civic Leadership program on community leadership.

"But he can't seem to get anywhere because he now has a felony. They call it an 'F on your jacket,' and he is trying to do the right thing, but life is hard for him."

For Mr. Brockman, the hurdles came after high school.

"I wasn't prepared for college," he said of the two years he spent at Penn State-New Kensington and Waynesburg College before dropping out in 2002.

"I went thinking that it would be like high school, and I didn't concentrate much on my studies. I wasn't prepared to be on my own," he said. "At home, I had my mother, and my coaches watching me."

With only two years of college, and nothing to show for it but college loans, Mr. Brockman returned to Garfield deflated and unsure of himself.

Once again, it was the men of the Garfield Gators, the men he calls "my uncles," who talked to him about what he could take away from what seemed like the bitter aftertaste of failure.

"That was a hard time in my life," he recalled. "I didn't know what to do next. Selling drugs was there and I could have taken that road. But these men made sure that I stayed around them. They showed me that I wasn't a failure just because I didn't graduate from college."

After a few temporary jobs, Mr. Brockman landed a housekeeping position at Shadyside Hospital, and also took a second full-time job with a service and electric supply company in Garfield. That was also the time he started having children -- Ki'Arra, 5, and "Little" Keith, 3 -- both with the same woman.

He is not married to their mother, but he said his children "motivate me to be a strong man for them and to show some of my friends in Garfield that you don't have to be a 'sucka!' to do the right thing."