Coaches Fight Recruiting War of Different Nature : Once Students Become Involved With Gangs, It’s Nearly Impossible to Get Them Into Athletics

The 11th-grader caught Ernie Carr’s eye one day last fall in Carr’s physical education class.

Students 6 feet 4 inches tall tend to stand out in general P.E.

Carr, the basketball coach and athletic director at Dominguez High School in Compton, persuaded the young man to attend an off-season varsity practice after school.

The youth arrived in jeans. He had no basketball attire except for his shoes. He didn’t have a gym bag. Still, he showed promise. He picked up the fundamentals quickly. His movements were graceful. He dunked the basketball effortlessly. Carr thought he had found a diamond in the rough.

Then the problems began.

Carr saw the player only about once a week. He was “habitually absent” from school. Carr noticed the student hanging around with the “wrong people” at school.

“You want to indulge the effort,” Carr said. “But you don’t see him for a week. If you try too hard on them, spend all your time, you’ll lose the kids you already have in the fold. The overtures you make toward them aren’t going to be heard.”

Carr said that twice in the past school year he approached students he thought might be gang members because he also thought they could be basketball players.

He was 0 for 2.

Coaches in areas of high gang activity are waging a bitter fight to entice potential athletes away from the gangs.

Some are mildly successful. Ed Woody, former L.A. Jordan High football coach, said he was able to bring as many as nine gang members a year into the major sports.

But for others, such as Reggie Morris, Manual Arts basketball coach, the numbers don’t exist. They just aren’t able to interest gang members in athletics for any extended period of time.

Apparently, once students get involved with gangs it’s nearly impossible to get them out.

Said Byron Scott, the Laker guard who graduated from Morningside High in Inglewood in 1979: “A lot of kids in the community got involved because they thought it was something cool, but in a lot of gangs in L.A. there’s no way out. The only way out is death. That’s the way it goes.”

Kenneth Williams, a former Locke High football player and also a former gang member, said: “There was pressure (to join the gang). But I also thought it was something that was cool, something that would make you be cool. The gangs were everywhere. You couldn’t miss it.”

Willie Allen, Pomona basketball coach, said: “Once (students) get involved (with gangs), they tend to stay away from athletics. I guess the gang becomes the family. Athletics is a family, too. Maybe they can’t be in two families at once. Maybe they can’t break away. There’s a lot of pressure from the gang to stay.”

Indeed, most coaches have stories of gang members who managed to break free of the gangs, only to falter and fall back.

Woody said that frequently, there are large numbers of gang members out for football at the start of the season.

How many stick it out?

“Maybe six or seven,” Woody said. “We usually lose them to eligibility. That’s when he gets back with his friends, kind of slips back into that old mold.”

Sometimes, though, an incidence of gang violence will push some over the line to athletics for good.

Last year, Howard Robinson, a tailback and nose guard on the 1981 Jordan team, was shot and killed.

“It forced the kids participating in sports to realize, to open their eyes,” Woody said. “Some told me they didn’t want to get involved with gangs because of this, that they wanted to stick with sports.”

For the most part, though, the coaches say, there is steady traffic away from sports.

Experience tells E. C. Robinson, the football coach at Locke in Watts, that he shouldn’t bother with prospects he believes are gang members. They usually are trouble and rarely complete the season. Despite past failures, however, Robinson remains hopeful.

“I had a kid (transfer) from Carson about two years ago now,” Robinson said. “He was about 6-3 and about 285. He played linebacker. And the reason he left Carson was because he was in a gang. He was out for a while, but it got so bad. He was a Blood and around here it’s the Crips. He wasn’t working out.”

Robinson said he wins over only 50% of the players who are also gang members. His is one of the higher ratios.

Morris, basketball coach at Manual Arts, has also become frustrated in his efforts to sway the gang members. Unlike Robinson, Morris has stopped approaching prospects he suspects are gang members.

“In all honesty, I don’t do it as much as I used to because if I see a guy who is 6-7 with the hat, with the dress, with the look , he’s not going to want to conform,” Morris said.

“Ten years ago, we could approach everybody. There are guys here, right now, that are in gangs and drugs that are 6-6, 6-7. Real prospects.”

Rare though they may be, there are some lasting successes. Some students have shed their gang ties and played in high school. Some have even gone on to play in college.

Those victories encourage some coaches to keep trying with gang members who show potential as athletes.

“If you could talk to 100 kids and one kid changes, I think you’ve made some progress,” Scott said.

According to Ira Reiner, L.A. district attorney, there are between 40,000 to 50,000 gang members belonging to 400-500 gangs in Los Angeles County.

The police department has 15,000 names of known gang members in its computer listing.

There are gang prevention programs in Los Angeles County schools and the communities, and they have received more exposure recently because of a higher awareness of drug problems in this country.

Still, there apparently are not enough programs to counter gang growth. There were 450 established gangs in 1986, up from 320 in 1980, according to the Community Youth Gang Services Project.

One of the oldest school-related gang prevention programs, Alternatives to Gang Membership, was started in 1982 in the Paramount schools.

Other similar programs, sponsored by the United Way, have been started since then. In the San Pedro, South-Central Los Angeles and Pasadena-Altadena areas, fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students go through programs designed to point out alternatives.

The idea is to teach the children how to stay out of gangs, in hopes of eventually cutting off gang recruitment altogether.

Dan Verches, in charge of United Way area gang programs, says it’s working.

“The success rate is very high,” Verches said. “We give them a pre-test and a test after the program, and according to those test figures, 90% are saying no to gangs and drugs.”

Said the Lakers’ Scott: “They have math, they have biology (in the schools). I think it would be great to have a class on inner-city gangs. If you could do anything just to scare them about what gangs and drugs can do to them.”

Before the Paramount program started, a survey found that 50% of the students there approved of joining a gang. That figure fell to 10% after the program was instituted.

There are other recently developed school programs, among them Project Heavy in the L.A. Unified School District, Cops for Kids in L.A. County and Turning Point in Orange County.

So far, however, gang prevention programs have not been enough to offset gangs’ enormous influence.

Steve Valdivia, who runs the L.A. County-sponsored Community Youth Gangs Services Project, says the gang problem is so overwhelming that adequate resources are simply not available.

“ Anywhere, I don’t think you can find the resources,” Valdivia said. “As it is, we’re having $88,000 cut from our budget next year (from a County budget of $1.1 million).”

Still, Valdivia said, the program is effective, with leagues set up to pit rival gangs against each other in sports contests instead of fire fights.

“(The games) can sometimes be bloody affairs, in that they don’t want to wear the traditional football gear and really want to get into it,” Valdivia said.

“We hope to see some communication. Something to win except a gun battle. Instead they can win trophies on the football field.

“I’m sure there have been kids that have returned to school and followed school sports as an avenue. It’s a short-term solution for problems between the gangs.”

The Community Youth Gang Services Project has 5 offices, employs 56 workers and has another 20 volunteers, Valdivia said. That for the 50,000 or so gang members in L.A. County, he added.

There are many answers to the gang problem. And yet there are no answers.

Coaches, school officials, police officials will do most anything to persuade students to stay away from gangs.

They scream. They whisper. They plead. They scold. They warn. They trick.

And yet, the problem persists and grows.

Without sports, though, the problem might be even worse. Said Richard Vladovic, Locke principal: “Sports have been a unifying factor (in) breaking down gangs. I really feel that.”

Vladovic believes that Robinson is a big influence on his players. In fact, Robinson had the starters on last season’s football team attend a class that prepared them to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test for college.

“If they wanted to play football for him, they had to be at school at 7 o’clock in the morning for that class,” Vladovic said.

Said Michael Cooper of the Lakers: “I’m always out there (giving talks) because I know that when I was growing up I was looking for help. That’s what we’re doing, trying to help one, two, as many as we can.”

Morris, Manual’s basketball coach, would like to see more of that kind of help.

“We need athletes returning (to talk in the schools) and saying, ‘This is where hard work got me and it can do the same for you,’ ” he said. “I had one pro athlete from a local team tell me that he couldn’t do it because he was on vacation. Vacation? We need recognizable figures to come out and be role models.”

Carr, Dominguez basketball coach, said: “You have to separate the 9- to 14-year-olds from the 18- to 22-year-olds hanging out doing nothing. Younger kids come into contact with this guy and he has a great impact on them. They identify with the success of the older guy. Maybe it’s girls or money, by whatever means he got it. The older ones have chosen their path.”

Said Woody, former Jordan football coach:

“On the weekend, I’ve challenged Imperial Courts and Jordan Downs (two government housing projects) to a football game. So instead of getting out there during the week and shooting each other and fighting, I get the (sideline) chains and throw them out a football and they get rid of their anxieties out there on the football field. It’s a good old sandlot football game. I’ve been doing that for five years.”

Despite all that, the gangs have established such a foothold that the trend away from sports may be irreversible. Joining a gang has become accepted culturally. Join a gang, deal drugs and earn lots of money. It’s the easy way, the cool way.

Go to school, get good grades, play sports and graduate, then go to college, get good grades and graduate. That’s the hard way.