Matt Hanna knows what it takes to succeed. A talented athlete and natural born leader, he captained his Johns Hopkins University lacrosse team to several NCAA championships. After college, he brought that commitment to excellence into the classroom, teaching middle and high school history classes for 13 years, as well as coaching lacrosse and other sports.

He spent the last five years of his teaching career at Baltimore City’s Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. But Hanna was troubled by the lack of after-school and weekend opportunities available to his students. So he decided to create his own.

“When I see something that’s broken, I don’t wait for other people to fix it,” explains Hanna. “So I started a weekend program that was just a chance for some of the young men that I coach to meet me at a park to work out and talk about college and their career plans.”

Gradually, Coach Hanna’s pick up games and informal chats with his athletes began to have a profound impact on their lives, motivating Hanna to found Next One Up in 2009. The program is named for the poem by Marc Kelly Smith that encourages every person to “pull the next one up” the mountain.

Next One Up supports promising student athletes in Baltimore City who face challenges in their homes, neighborhoods, or schools. It addresses these challenges through creative individual solutions, and partners with each student, providing year-round athletic, academic, and mentoring resources from middle school through college.

“We bring in 25 young men starting in seventh grade. We’re not looking for the best athletes or students; we want to know—how badly do you want it? We’re looking for the kid that’s going to show up on Sunday mornings at 9 o’clock with no excuses, ready to work. We have alumni who work for us, so we understand what these students need. A lot of it is love and discipline.”

Next One Up’s playbook for improving lives has proven to be a winning strategy, evidenced by its participants’ 100 percent high school graduation rate and alumni success stories. This fall, Next One Up celebrates the opening of its first dedicated space—a 14,000-square foot facility at Belvedere Square, dubbed “Base Camp.”

“We’re calling it ‘Base Camp’ because of the idea of climbing the mountain,” says Hanna. “Base Camp is the gathering point for the climb. This facility will have everything we want in one place: a weight room, kitchen, academic spaces, and maker spaces. It will even have a small barbershop that one of our graduates will run. It’s really bigger than I imagined. That’s because I have an awesome team and there’s so many amazing kids I get to work with every day.”

Twelve years ago, Matt Hanna discovered the Marc Kelly Smith poem “Pull the Next One Up,” and it has since become the credo of his nonprofit organization, Next One Up. Inspired by the poem’s message of helping others find personal success, the program invests in Baltimore City student athletes by providing long-term mentoring on the field and in the classroom. “For us and our kids, it’s about generational change,” Hanna says.

Hanna founded Next One Up while coaching lacrosse and teaching history at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, where he had a front-row seat to his students’ lack of extracurricular education. In 2009, he started a scholarship program to send four lacrosse players to summer camp, and four years later, with help from a fellowship from the Open Society Institute, the initiative included camps, weekend pick-up games, and mentoring.

Today, thanks to partnerships with the Ravens and T. Rowe Price, among others, the nonprofit provides its roster of 120 male students with resources such as SAT test prep and guidance on finding the right high school or college to ensure that they succeed academically, athletically, and socially. The initiative is geared toward middle and high school-aged students who face potential deterrents from reaching their goals, such as unstable housing or incarcerated family members. The results speak for themselves—100 percent of participants have graduated high school and have been accepted to two or four-year colleges. “We have students who have major challenges to weather,” Hanna says. “We fill in the cracks and the gaps.”

Recruiting students at an early age has also created a growing alumni base. Past participants such as Litchfield Ajavon, who is a freshman football player at the University of Notre Dame, can come back and talk about their experiences to current students. Plus, the students can look to Winfield Hopkins V, a Next One Up graduate who is now the Associate Program Director. “They can see how I came up,” Hopkins says. “I try to sit down with the kids and offer to talk with them.”

As Next One Up approaches its double-digit anniversary party on October 24 at The Accelerator Space, Hanna says he’s starting to become nostalgic, especially thinking about how the program’s legacy as a support system continues to grow stronger with each class of young men. “I’ve taken a step back to celebrate the success of these guys and the overall growth of the program,” Hanna says. “For us, the future is focused on continued success and developing great stories and young men in the city.”