LEE VINING, Calif. -- The nation's largest airplane graveyard. The remnants of a deserted Japanese internment camp. The highest point in the contiguous United States. The San Andreas Fault. These are the barriers that stand between them. These are the walls both God and man have created to separate urban from rural, rich from poor, those who love Jamba Juice from those who've never heard of it.
At one end, with the clear blue sky and snow-capped Sierra Nevadas behind them, nine small-town high school softball players prepare to fight for a league championship. They gather around their coach and listen to the pregame instructions: Play hard, play smart, play confident and the title will be theirs.
At the other end, a seven-hour drive south through a remote desert landscape and into the Sepia-toned canopy of smog that hangs ever overhead in Long Beach, 45 student commissioners finalize plans for the big-city school's prom night. They gather in a classroom and vote yea or nay on a variety of last-minute issues. With the band, location and theme already picked, the rest will fall into place.
On the surface, they seem to have little in common. The nine softball players, almost half of them Hispanic, hail from Lee Vining High, tucked away in a stoplight-less town in the High Sierras. It's a school that was threatened to be closed after a group of students once burned it down. The school hasn't had a softball team in 15 years; it hasn't won a Hi-Lo League championship in any sport in 11.
The 45 members of the student commission, nearly three quarters of whom are Asian, attend one of the most competitive and diverse high schools in the country, Long Beach Polytechnic. It's a school of 4,400 students that Sports Illustrated last year declared had the nation's top high school athletic program. Its list of famous alumni only begins with Billie Jean King, Snoop Dogg, Cameron Diaz and Tony Gwynn and includes more NFL players than any other high school in the country.
Black History Month is a time to reflect on the changes that diversity brings to sports. Over the past year, ESPN.com has explored those changes and found it isn't only a matter of black and white:
• Racial harmony: The Linkimers embraced the differences among their family, while remaining indifferent about them.
• Closing the cultural divide: It's more than a seven-hour drive that separates Long Beach Poly and tiny Lee Vining. but students at the schools are closing the gap.
• Friday night fights: In Dearborn, Mich., an all-Arabic football team shows its opponents the way the game was meant to be played.
• No guts, no glory: Vanessa Lucero is out to prove that sports are only for boys until a girl joins in.
• A football melting pot: In Atlanta, football players learn more than X's and O's; they learn how to be American kids, too.
While Poly is the largest school in the southern section of the California Interscholastic Federation (the athletic governing body for California high schools), Lee Vining is the smallest. Perhaps nothing illustrates that more than the fact that there are nearly four times as many clubs at Long Beach Poly (112) as there are students at Lee Vining (32).
But along the 355 miles of highway that separate the two schools, an unofficial experiment has been taking place. By bringing together big city and small town, geographical, cultural and racial differences have been shoved aside so that a group of high schoolers can learn more about life than they'd ever pick up in a classroom.
The result has given one small community a newfound confidence to attack life, while offering a group of big-city school kids a fresh perspective on the world outside their concrete jungle.
"At first, when people would say, 'Give back to the community,' I'd ask, 'Why?'" said Kavell Ferguson, a senior at Long Beach Poly. "Now I know why. You can change somebody's chances for success in life. And you can learn a whole lot about yourself along the way."
Like where your water comes from. What clean air smells like. And the fact that there's more to the world than energizing fruit smoothies and 20-screen movie theaters.
This all started nearly two years ago, when Terry Speir, the activities director at Poly, saw an article in the Los Angeles Times chronicling the challenges Lee Vining faced in athletics. The story highlighted how the school had to rely on fundraisers to purchase regulation basketballs and how the school's teams had to travel as far as 350 miles for some games.
Speir proposed to her student commissioners that they adopt Lee Vining as a sister school and try to help them out. So they held a car wash to benefit their new friends and invited them to attend a leadership conference. A few months later, the offerings were reciprocated, with students at Lee Vining inviting 25 Poly students to the mountains to learn about small-town life. Later, Poly's Grammy-recognized jazz band played a concert in Lee Vining on its way to the Reno Jazz Fest.
This year, a week before the season started, the Poly girls' basketball team invited the Lee Vining team down for a basketball clinic. And a couple weeks ago, a group of 40 Poly students visited Lee Vining for the weekend, skiing, sledding and snowmobiling while doubling the attendance at the school's winter dance.
Said Kevin Peanh, who graduated from Poly last spring: "We're the same. We're both of the MTV generation, but we're different. They had never heard of Jamba Juice. I couldn't believe that. But they're so much more relaxed and laid-back."
Said Lee Vining freshman Mayra Cortez: "It was cool because we don't see a lot of Asians or a lot of black kids. And I can't imagine not driving a half-hour to go to the movies or an hour to get groceries. We were a little town and a little school and with them, we believed. They showed us that anything is possible."
Especially on the athletic field. For a school that has never won much at anything, the Lee Vining girls' basketball team, encouraged by its preseason clinic, finished this past season 13-8 overall and 6-2 in its league, good for a second-place finish. For the first time in school history, it was a host team for a playoff game.
"It was just phenomenal," Lee Vining coach Rena McCullough said. "That clinic was so inspiring for the girls. It just got the season started off on the right foot."
But that story is truly nothing compared to the transformation that took place on a raggedy softball diamond last spring. There, nine girls who had never picked up a softball before February, at a school that hadn't fielded a team since the early '90s, found themselves playing for the league championship -- in black and white warm-ups donated by Poly, using bats and balls donated by NZ Sports, Poly's athletic supplier.
"Would we have had a team without [Poly]? Probably," said McCullough, who also coaches the softball team. "But it wouldn't have been easy. We certainly wouldn't be where we are.
"When somebody like that takes an interest in you, it builds your confidence. If Poly believes we can do it, why don't we believe we can do it?" McCullough said.
And at Lee Vining, confidence is half the problem. This is a school where fielding a team, never mind winning, is often the goal. Eight-man football teams with only one reserve. Softball teams that have none.
The day the softball team played for the league title, the baseball team lost 28-2 on another field. At a postgame meal, one of the baseball players stood up and toasted the girls, saying, "To the Lee Vining softball team ... the group that actually won something this year."
The Tigers are often treated like the Bad News Bears they sometimes resemble. Rival Mammoth canceled a softball scrimmage this year, McCullough said, because its team wouldn't gain anything from playing Lee Vining. The league championship against Big Pine was rescheduled three different times to accommodate Big Pine's prom.
"We're pretty much the redheaded stepchild around here," McCullough said. "Nobody respects us."
With nine newcomers to the softball field, every single basic fundamental -- from catching to throwing, hitting and sliding -- had to be taught.
McCullough started by teaching the players how to catch.
"But it wasn't really catch," she said. "It was more like chase."
One day, principal Frank Romero said he rushed into the gym to hear what the racket was all about.
"It sounded like they were bowling," he said.
McCullough then shifted to lessons on how to slide.
"Most of that was filled with all these girl flailings," she said. "They'd run up to the base, get ready to slide, then throw their arms up and yell, 'I can't do it. I can't do it.'"
When it came time to find out who would pitch, two girls -- Cortez and McCullough's daughter Mariah -- were the only options. Nobody else could get the ball even close to the plate.
"I'm not talking about bouncing it before the plate or missing it a little bit to the side," McCullough said. "They'd pitch it to the on-deck circle, up in the air off the backstop. It wasn't safe."
Before they started live action, McCullough, a former high school softball star herself, made the girls take 5,000 swings hitting a tossed ball into a fence. Then she made them field 1,000 grounders. After that, McCullough invited people from town to scrimmage with the team. Though the score wasn't kept, the locals drilled the high schoolers -- even McCullough's 10-year-old daughter reached base.
"They'd catch a grounder and be like, 'Yes!' and just stand there," McCullough said. "I'd have to tell them, 'You're not done. Now you have to throw it to first base.' The most basic things they just didn't know. I'd have to tell them to go back in the dugout after they were out."
They lost their first game 37-12, with 20 walks, eight errors and five hit batsmen. But then came the turning point. After an umpire called their second game early because of a time limit, Lee Vining appealed and won. But to finish the seven-inning game, they had to bus the five hours south, deep into the desert, to Trona.
"So that's what we did," McCullough said. "The teachers thought I was crazy. Our principal thought I was crazy. The girls didn't understand. But I told them, 'You never leave anything undone. I believe you can win this game. If we drive five hours for two innings, you better win this game.'"
They did, 10-9. In the next game, a rematch with the team that beat them 37-12, Lee Vining won 18-15 despite playing with just eight girls after their third baseman had been suspended.
It all contributed to a scenario in which Lee Vining needed to win both games of a season-ending doubleheader at Big Pine to capture the Hi-Lo League championship. In the top half of the final inning of the first game, Lee Vining tied the score 5-5, only to walk the first four batters in the bottom half of the inning -- two on four pitches -- to lose 6-5.
The girls walked off the field in tears.
"I had never seen that before," McCullough said. "Never. It just shows how much this meant to them. It shows how much they believed. Hopefully we can build on it."
The dream was over, but lives were forever changed. The girls of the Lee Vining softball team and their 23 classmates now believe they can aim higher, go further. And that's important in a community where kids don't always go to college, where playing for Pat Summitt seems as remote as the drive to Long Beach. But this summer, two of McCullough's student-athletes will attend the Lady Vols basketball camp. In a way, they have Poly to thank.
"Poly sets an amazing example for what's possible," McCullough said. "College, life, a career outside this town. And that's important. I don't want the best thing that's ever happened to these girls to be playing sports for me."
On the other side, the 45 kids in the Long Beach classroom changed as well. They saw the lake where their water comes from. They stepped outside, took a deep breath and inhaled the crisp mountain air. And they realized there's more to the world than iPods, shopping malls and graduating at the top of your class.
"We might have more opportunities, but we are sitting in traffic, always rushing to get somewhere, completely stressed out about life," Poly senior Ngoc Nguyen said. "They are so calm and relaxed and more in tune with nature. They taught us to appreciate the little things that we don't even realize."
Wayne Drehs is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at wayne.drehs@espn3.com.