General
Half-Steppers’ coach Eric Avery sounded a little tired on the phone Monday night, if not a slightly frustrated, as he reported on the team’s first full day of Junior Olympics competition at Tad Gormley Stadium in New Orleans.
For the past year the Richmond Half-Steppers have been going up and down the state of California to qualify for the Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympic Games. This year 10 boys and eight girls qualified. According to coach Johnny Holmes, the boys relay team is ranked third in the country.
Half-Stepper head coach Johnny Holmes stood around Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park track Wednesday evening waiting for Moses “Bullet” Baker, age 8, — the first leg of his nationally ranked relay team—to arrive for practice. Teammate Josh Johnson, 8, was waiting, too, and had already loosened up when coach Holmes spotted him. This would be their last chance to iron out their hand-offs and make sure everything was correct before they jumped on a bus Friday night for New…
Richmond residents have fun at Nicholl Park while watching the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform “2012—The Musica!”
Less than two days after Daryl Russell, 20, was gunned down in plain daylight and only a stone’s throw away from a community center, Richmond Police Chief Chris Magnus and officials from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office stood near the blood-stained site and announced a new joint gang task force.
Raquel Orozco is from Mexico. She arrived in Richmond as a teenager and didn’t speak a word of English. Ten years after graduating from Richmond High, she is completing her Ph.D. in chemical engineering this year from UC Davis. Last Sunday, Orozco, along with 11 other Latino UC Davis students, hosted over 100 Richmond United Soccer Club players, family members and friends on their campus. After brief introductions and a tour of the school, players and parents got to ask…
A parade of African-American cowboys from Oakland, corvettes from around the bay, local youth associations and sports leagues and a host of others paraded through central Richmond Saturday in the city’s long-running annual Juneteenth festival. The parade was led by grand marshal Fred Jackson, a long-time community activist, and ended in Nicholl Park.
Ready to move forward after the first quashed attempt, Chevron’s Richmond refinery began the process to restart its embattled Renewal Project on Monday by filing a new conditional use permit application. This will be the second attempt to complete the project, which was halted by a county appellate court in 2009 after it was narrowly approved by the city council. The project is meant to upgrade equipment at the refinery and replace aging components.
Richmond’s Lincoln Elementary School playground and parking lot were turned into a Bike Fiesta Saturday, with scores of neighborhood bike riders and dozens of bicycling enthusiasts from throughout the city coming out to celebrate cycling. It was mild mayhem as bike-riding youngsters careened, sometimes on wobbly wheels, around the school grounds dodging bystanders and each other.