Highlighting Coaching Excellence - Manny Anaya
Coach Manny inspiring students in the classroom.
Coach Manny Anaya moved to San Francisco when he was ten, leaving behind the small, familiar world in El Salvador where he’d been raised by his grandmother and an extensive network of “aunties” to live with his mother and two brothers in the Mission district. It was an abrupt change, one that forced him to learn a new language and grow up prematurely as the oldest male in the household. He attended a series of schools as his mother learned to navigate the SFUSD enrollment system: Sanchez Elementary, Everett Middle School (both now SCORES sites), the bi-lingual program at Newcomer High School, and finally Mission High.
At the start of Manny’s 11th-grade year, his mother and youngest brother died after their apartment at 14th and Folsom streets caught fire. A family friend stepped in to help care for the boys until Manny’s younger brother decided to return to El Salvador. Now on his own, Manny took a job as a dishwasher and channeled his focus into his schooling. “Graduating from Mission High was a huge achievement for me,” he says.
Though he had dreamed of studying to become an architect, Manny went straight into the workforce, getting a job at a paint warehouse. He settled down with his high school sweetheart and became a father, welcoming his first child in 1989. By 1992, he was working for SFUSD in security, where he continues to work today.
Determined to model a positive outlook on life for his children, Manny started volunteering at his son’s school, J Serra Elementary, helping out at lunchtime and out in the yard, where he created a Friday fun and fitness program. “I started developing a passion for working with kids,” Manny recalls, one that would continue to grow and intersect with America SCORES.
In 2005, a mutual friend connected Manny to Program Director Roberto Gil, who hired him as a SCORES coach at ER Taylor, initially for soccer and later for poetry. Always a passionate soccer fan (an older brother played professionally in El Salvador) Manny found coaching deeply gratifying. “He’s the ideal mentoring coach,” Roberto says of Manny. “He’s open-minded, committed, and well organized in his training methodology. He sets good limits, and the kids feel safe with him. He’s also particularly good at working with girls and has high expectations for them. Nearly all of the girls who graduate from E.R. Taylor leave with both high levels of soccer technique and mental resistance.”
“He does it all,” says SCORES Executive Director Colin Schmidt, “and he’s thoughtful about everything he does.”
In the poetry classroom, Manny draws on his own experiences to inspire his young students, telling them stories about his childhood. “I’ve always had a passion for poetry, and the roots go back to one of my favorite aunties in El Salvador. She used to read poetry to me every weekend, and she would assign a poem for me to perform for her. I initially thought of performing as a kind of torture, but I came to really enjoy it, and the experience made me the coach I am today.
“Right before I left El Salvador, my aunt signed me up for a city-wide poetry contest. She introduced me to using body movements - my hands, my arms - as a way to enhance the poem I was reciting. The grand prize for the contest was a big, beautiful gold-leafed bible. I wanted it so much. I didn’t win the contest though; I got second prize. But I remember seeing my aunt’s face and how proud she was. I relay that message to my team today. I tell them, ‘Don’t take this as a performance. Take this as a moment that you’re going to be relishing for the rest of your life. It will be stuck in you. Look around, find your parents’ faces. See how proud they are of you.’”
Manny uses a range of methods to inspire his team at E.R.Taylor, incorporating music and taking his poet-athletes on walks around the school to closely observe their surroundings. “I’m a big nature lover,” he explains. Fifteen years into his role as a SCORES coach, Manny is still going strong. “I no longer see this as a job. I see this as a passion, as a way of reaching kids so that hopefully one or two in the future will do the same thing.”
One or two seems like a too modest goal. A rich pipeline of his former students at E.R.Taylor has gone on to achieve remarkable accomplishments. Anthony Spears Jr., a selective mute when he first joined SCORES, developed his expressive capacities so fully under Manny’s guidance that he was selected to compete the SCORES National Poetry Slam in Washington DC. Bridgette Marin was selected for the U.S. Women's U-14 National Team. An entire team of E.R. Taylor students collaborated with Grammy-winning music producer Narada Michael Warden to set their words to music through a collaboration between SCORES and the ASCAP Songwriting Residency. And one of Manny’s current students, April Barrios-Escobar, a SCORES 2020 poet-athlete laureate, just won the SCORES West Coast Regional poetry slam.
April sums up Manny’s gifts succinctly, describing how she managed to convey such confidence onstage during her recent performance at the West Coast slam. “I looked out in the audience and saw Coach Manny. He believes in me, and he’s always there when I need him.”
