It all starts with a good toss of the pigskin in Juniper Park, but the Queens Falcons are about a lot more than just football. They're about steering kids in the right direction at pivotal forks in the road.

Five years ago a group of volunteer coaches decided to expand their duties from the field into the classroom. Calling their program Run To Daylight, they started tutoring the kids to help them get into elite private schools with full financial aid.

The program's been building a great track record, but this year it suffered a major setback.

Head coach and co-founder Stephen Hoffman was lost in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He was a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald.

“Steve just loved being with kids,” says his identical twin brother Gred. “He loved coaching them he loved teaching them and he loved teaching them to do the right thing.”

Greg, who works for Merrill Lynch, vows to do his best to keep his brother's vision alive.

“To me, having the program survive - not only for Steve but for all the kids - the one question I asked was, ÎWho's going to help all these kids that Stephen helped, because Steve's gone?’” says Greg.

But he isn't alone. There are coaches like Tim Cavanaugh, who actively seek out those who are falling through the cracks.

“We used to go out on Friday and Saturday nights thinking we’d find a kid at 1:30 a.m. Saturday morning hanging out,” says Cavanaugh. “You know something's wrong with them, and we'd talk to the kid and influence him to come down to practice. Once the kid gets involved in practice and he's off the streets and he's exhausted at the end of the day he's not going to be hanging out at 1:30 in the morning - it's the last thing on his mind. So we try to influence them to come to practice and then once we get them involved we take the next step. We say, ÎWhat about school? What are you doing with your grades?’”

And from then on it's history.

Over the past few years, the program has gotten dozens of area students into private high schools with full scholarships. A lot of these young people say before they got involved they didn't even know private high schools had scholarships, and they certainly never imagined they'd be eligible.

“It helped me in discipline, hard work, determination, and it gave me a lot of qualities that I acquired now that I'm in high school,” says Shawn Casadiego.

Paul Gradezki adds, “It's a great opportunity for me to get away from here and get a better chance to go to a better college.”

Right now the program has been working with more than 100 boys in Queens middle schools and high schools, getting them into competitive local high shools like Holy Cross and various private boarding schools like Choate Rosemary Hall and Lawrence Academy in Connecticut.

They say it won't be easy to continue without their head coach, but if they follow his advice they say they can make anything happen.

- Gigi Stone