Sacramento has produced a number of world class athletes - Dusty Baker, Bill Cartwright, Debbie Meyer, and of course Mayor Kevin Johnson to name a few. But what's to be said about young athletes who have talent, but not the means to be successful?

A group of seven successful Sacramento athletes, including former NFL players Gio Carmazzi and Alex Van Dyke are now back in Sacramento to help steward underprivileged high school athletes to succeed not only in sports but also in life.

Their organization, Game Plan Academy (GPA), will be holding an eight-week camp on Sundays from March 15 through May 10 at Hiram Johnson High School. It will focus on recruiting from schools with low Academic Performance Index (API) ratings and schools from low-income areas.

Says Academic Mentor Brent Pottenger, who will be teaching math and SAT preparation, "We are trying to have an academy style camp so we can bond with the kids and mentor them over a longer period of time. This is one way we thought we could operationalize our love for community involvement, plus we were all student athletes, so it relates closely to what we did as students."

GPA, which is a nonprofit, relies on corporate sponsorship so students who would not usually be able to afford a mentoring program will be able to learn positive new skills. Besides working on math, English, college and career preparation, the program would like to address the question: what do these high school students want to do beyond college?

Pottenger added, "I have a health background, so one of the things we're trying to promote is the development of a whole person. Sports just provides a healthy outlet for people, but we're also working on an explicit health, nutrition, and fitness part of the program. Where there are monetary and learning disparities, there are also health disparities."

GPA has already contacted coaches in low API schools to nominate students who have potential to succeed but need a little encouragement. Then students who are nominated must submit an essay where they write about the challenges they face in their lives. Though there are only fifteen submissions so far, there are 40 spots in the camp, so what it comes down to is: students who write the best essays will be chosen to participate.

For now, only football players who are wide receivers, running backs and quarterbacks can apply, because those are the positions Carmazzi and Van Dyke, the camp's two sports teachers, can teach.

GPA would love to expand into other sports such as baseball, golf, and perhaps basketball, and get more professional athletes to coach.

Pottenger says, "Sacramento is a hotbed for baseball, and we want to make baseball our next sport. We would like to approach J.P. Howell of the Tampa Devil Rays, or Greg Vaughn and begin our baseball camp in August or early fall."

After the high school athletes graduate from the camp, they will have a sense of accomplishment, and according to Pottenger, Mayor Kevin Johnson may even speak at the graduation ceremony.

*Images credited to Gameplanacademy.com