For founder Anthony Fernandez, Extreme Youth Athletic Training is about his own mistakes.

It’s about two of his brothers getting caught up in street life, eventually killing themselves with drugs, and it’s about promises he made to his mother moments before she died six years ago.

It’s about his being a better husband and father than he was a teenager, and teaching kids that there are things they’ll love enough to stay off the streets.

“I made mistakes,” Fernandez said. “I ended up finding out the hard way that in life, your choices and decisions are huge, and if you don’t make the right ones, you will pay. I’d take a baseball game and a classroom any day over the stuff I was doing.”

Fernandez launched Extreme Youth Athletic Training in Nashua a little more than a year ago as a nonprofit. He’s had to start charging a fee because fundraising is harder than it looks: It costs $5 per session for the year-round wrestling camps and general fitness sessions and the football training camps run sporadically throughout the year.

The program started in a street-side field near the Boys & Girls Club and is now tucked into a tiny studio below a cafe in the mill buildings downtown. It is one of the only year-round wrestling and conditioning programs for local kids.

Fernandez offers the wrestling and general fitness classes to kids in kindergarten through grade 8.

All but two of the 32 kids in Fernandez’s first class had never wrestled before. Many have now joined the Boys Club wrestling team that Fernandez helps coach.

“Kids are coming home with medals. They are learning how to love the sport,” he said. “Through athletics, you can just become a good person. I forgot that when I was a kid. I got lost there. Now I’m trying to teach them what I forgot.”

Teen athlete

Fernandez, 34, grew up in what he calls Nashua’s “projects,” living in various homes in the city’s Tree Streets neighborhood.

His uncle, Ron Aubut, trained him and taught him how to train others. He excelled on the baseball diamond, football field and wrestling mats around the city.

He won two New England championships wrestling titles for the Boys Club team. He won city, state and regional championships for the Rotary West baseball team, and a couple of state championships playing on the Elks Crusaders football team, Fernandez said.

In his middle teens, Fernandez started heading down a darker path. Some of his friends started quitting sports teams and getting into trouble. Eventually he followed, dropping out of high school and spending his time on the street.

What followed was years of law breaking: robberies, fights, taking and selling drugs, pimping women.

It culminated during the early morning hours of May 4, 2001, outside Martha’s Exchange Restaurant and Brewery. A man said something to a woman in Fernandez’s group of friends as they walked by. One thing led to another and Fernandez woke up in a jail cell.

His victim had a fractured skull and was comatose. Fernandez was charged with attempted murder and his bail was $500,000, he said.

About a month later, Fernandez was waiting for his trial at Valley Street jail in Manchester when a guard called him over one day with bad news. His brother, 19-year-old Ryan Fernandez, was dead of a suspected overdose.

Fernandez was allowed to go to the funeral, he said, but only in shackles, escorted by sheriff deputies. He had to stay 50 yards away from his family.

Later, he pleaded guilty to a charge of first-degree assault and went to prison. One day another guard called him over. His father, Felipe Fernandez, was dead.

Fernandez was again escorted in shackles, this time to an empty funeral home where he stood over his father’s casket in prison orange and said his last goodbye.

“You get back in the van and back to prison and back to reality,” Fernandez said.

Six years later, Fernandez was released from prison.

He moved to South Carolina, close to the family of his wife, Tammy. Fernandez got a job as a warehouse foreman there and was on a forklift one day in January 2005 when he got a phone call. Almost immediately he was on a flight to New Hampshire and to the side of what would become his mother’s deathbed.

She died that night, but not before having a final talk with her youngest son. That talk, in many ways, led to what Fernandez is doing now.

“We’ve done without because of how I felt about her,” Fernandez said of his mother, Jacqueline Ramos . “She made me make some promises and this is one of them. I’m going to keep it. Believe me.”

Extreme is born

“There’s a right road and a wrong road. I’ve been down both of them,” he said. “Not everyone gets the chance to come back. I got lost there. I lost focus on what my uncle taught me. Now I’m trying to teach them what I forgot. Who better to teach your kid than someone who’s been there?”

Extreme Youth Athletic Training moved into the mill complex early this year, about a year after he pulled his first student, his nephew, off the streets of Lowell, Mass.

He offered to train his nephew, Nashua South starting lineman Julier Rivera. Rivera accepted and they began working out in a field near Ledge Street Elementary School.

“Kids from the neighborhood started seeing us out there and hearing the whistle,” Fernandez said.

First, a couple of kids from the neighborhood joined in. Then more. Then still more.

In two or three weeks, 20 or 25 kids were running, jumping, shuffling and sweating their way around that field. And Fernandez got an idea.

He spent a few months holding training sessions in that field.

Parents would park in a semi-circle and turn on their headlights to light up the mats. Later, he moved into the space below Mill 6 Cafe.

According to some parents, you can’t argue with the results.

Fernandez coaches Ryan Kelley’s 7-year-old son Matthew in wrestling.

“For me, the biggest thing Extreme has taught is that it’s OK to work hard, and if you do work hard, you will see the benefits,” Kelley said. “The confidence element is absolutely noticeable for both my kids.”

Kelley’s 10-year-old daughter Brodie attended some of the fitness camps Fernandez runs to get in shape for basketball, Kelley said.

“Her confidence skyrocketed. Her playing skyrocketed. Part of it was she had more confidence and also ability,” he said. “Her confidence is so high now because she’s working hard. She knows she’s doing things she needs to do to improve herself.”

Brandie Lovell’s 5-year-old son Andrew and 14-year-old daughter Zenobia both wrestle at Extreme.

“It has built him so much confidence. He’s come out of his shell. He’s made so many friends there,” she said of her son. “I like how (Fernandez is) bringing in his experience to the kids to help them keep on the right track. I think Andrew’s learned a lot about integrity, confidence. He’s a completely different kid. He’s just learned so much.”

Lovell said she knew Fernandez as a teenager and is impressed with how he’s turned his life around.

“If you know Tony, his whole life he’s always been the straightforward tell-you-like-it-is kind of guy. He has taken that energy and it’s completely positive now, and he’s really passionate about kids and the directing them into a positive light,” Lovell said. “I think we really need a program like this for parents who are trying to keep their kids out of trouble. And who better to lead by example? Who better to show you can change your life? You don’t have to lead that kind of life.”

Joseph G. Cote can be reached at 594-6415 or jcote@nashuatelegraph.com.