Boys & Girls Club announces new location

The year 2023 is a big one for the Boys & Girls Club of Las Cruces.

The year marks the 60^th anniversary for the club that opened in Las Cruces in 1963.

The year marks the 15^th anniversary of the Lou & Mary Henson Breakfast, which has become the most important fundraiser for the club, and which has brought numerous big names in the world of sports as well as the world of Boys & Girls Clubs.

The year marks the 10^th anniversary of Ashley Echavarria’s hiring as the Las Cruces club’s chief executive officer, a role she took on at age 26.

The year also marks the official announcement of the club’s coming new home and location.

At the club’s 2023 Lou & Mary Henson Breakfast April 20, which featured former NBA player Anthony “Spud” Webb, Echavarria announced the club will be renovating, then moving into, the old Allen Theatres’ Video 4 building on El Paseo Road.

“We are finally able to make this longtime dream of a new building a reality,” Echavarria said. “This project is huge. But our kids deserve this. The world has changed and we need to change, too. It doesn’t stop at home, and it doesn’t stop at school. It takes all of us.

“And don’t worry, those slanted floors are not going to hinder us.”

Mary Henson, widow of longtime New Mexico State University basketball coach Lou Henson, spoke to the audience and talked about this year’s special guest, Webb, noted for winning the 1986 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, despite standing just 5-foot-6.

“Coach Henson didn’t care how big the players were,” Mary Henson said. “He just cared about how big their hearts were.”

Another little guy at the event was Alex Saenz, a current Las Cruces club member who was named Member of the Year for both Las Cruces and the entire state of New Mexico.

Saenz spoke of his family’s struggles with homelessness, and said, “The Boys & Girls Club was always there for me.”

As a youngster growing up in Dallas, Texas, Webb said the Boys Club was there for him as well.

Webb mentioned the man who convinced him to join the club.

“My mentor at the Boys Club took me off the streets,” Webb said. “A lot of my other buddies became statistics.”

He described the dilapidated conditions of some of the Dallas Boys & Girls clubs, comparable to the outdated current Las Cruces club, which has been in the same building since 1963, a building much older than that.

“When I get to the NBA,” he said he told himself, “I’m going to turn that around.” He said he has helped raise more than $1 million for Boys & Girls Clubs since.

Interviewed on the stage at the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum by NMSU broadcaster Adam Young, Webb talked about being recruited by North Carolina State University coach Jim Valvano, whose Wolfpack had just won the 1983 NCAA national championship.

Webb’s Midland (Texas) College team had won the junior college national championship the year before, but standing in the airport, at 5-6, he didn’t look like the kind of player who could help a Division I powerhouse.

Upon seeing Webb, Valvano reportedly turned to the assistant coach who’d recruited him and said, “If that’s Spud Webb, you’re fired.”

But Valvano indeed brought Webb to NC State and treated the young Texan “like I was his son,” Webb said.

After two years at NC State, Webb was drafted by the NBA Detroit Pistons, but was cut. He was soon picked up by the Atlanta Hawks, where he would wind up playing seven of his 13 NBA seasons. With the Hawks, he played with such names as Hall of Famer Dominque Wilkins, Tree Rollins, Doc Rivers, Antoine Carr and Cliff Levingston.

“I saw all these guys, and wondered what I could do,” Webb said. “I realized I could pass them the ball. They all wanted to shoot the ball, so they needed someone to pass it. Dominique would think he was open if he was in a phone booth.”