Shooting for the stars at Harlem PAL...

Shooting for the stars at Harlem PAL...

Heather Wines/CBS

Actors and producers from new CBS drama 'NYC 22' visit with youngsters during Pro Hoops tournament at Harlem Police Athletic League last week.  

Theres nothing like a high-octane jolt of TV star power supplied by actors who portray a crime-busting squad of New Yo rks Finest to keep hundreds of uptown kids on the straight and narrow.
That was the lure that drew five stars from the new CBS crime drama NYC 22 to a gym in Harlem to coach, cheer, schmooze and inspire a group of teens facing off in a Police Athletic League basketball tournament.
The scene was PALs Harlem Center, at 441 Manhattan Ave., where kids who are prone to truancy and other troubles were dazzled by a band of accessible, down-to-earth troupers.
It was designed to make the kids themselves feel like the stars, said Alana Sweeny, PALs executive director. And it was very, very cool.
The fast-paced show that premiered last week follows six NYPD rookies as they patrol the streets of Harlem. Most of its exterior shots from the Red Rooster on W. 126th St. to Trinity Cemetery on W. 155th St. were filmed uptown.
Few TV dramas have been shot almost entirely uptown, as were the street scenes in the 13-episode first season of NYC 22. The interior of t he precinct was built and filmed on stages at Chelsea Piers, CBS said.
With their small-screen tough-guy personas and zest for warmup shots on the basketball court with the kids the shows actors made powerful role models for youths, Sweeny said.
The lesson is they can be anything they want, limited only by their own imagination, if they work hard, stay focused and say No to those things they know they should say No to, she said.
To teach that lesson, PAL and its partners in the NYPD, Manhattan District Attorneys office and Drug Enforcement Administration teamed up with Pro Hoops, a basketball training program that provides free sessions for PAL participants.

Funded in part with cash seized from drug dealers under the DAs asset-forfeiture program, the group opened the Harlem Center and other gyms on weekend nights to provide a safe place for 12- to 18-year-olds during peak crime periods.

Then, Pro Hoops conducted an eight-week training progra m for 140 kids, which culminated Saturday night in a championship tourney with some 85 competitors and hundreds of spectators.

CBS provided food, basketball jerseys and gift bags with the shows logo. Jane Rosenthal, executive producer of the crime drama and a founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, took photos of the kids, while Richard Price, the shows writer and a novelist who worked on The Wire and The Color of Money, chatted them up.
CBS also shipped in the stars, including Felix Solis, who plays Sgt. Terry Howard, a no-nonsense Gang Intel Unit cop who trains the rookies to smoke out the gangbangers.
But Solis had something else in common with them: He had been a PAL kid himself, raised in the streets of Chelsea and the Village.
And he gives the charity credit for teaching him a healthy respect for adults, order and discipline.
If it wasnt for the Police Athletic League, I would have been a real knucklehead, Solis told the Daily News.
I would have been a derelict who saw everyone older than me as authoritarian and an enemy, and I could have made a lot of stupid choices on the streets if there was no one there to teach me theres another option.
Thats what PAL does, he added. It teaches you the options.

dfeiden@nydailynews.com