Football Lifts L.A. High Schools
December 10th, 2009 - byOne of the goals of NCSA and Chris Krause’s book Athletes Wanted is to demonstrate the power of athletics. Our aim is to educate as many student athletes as possible about the recruiting process and in turn allow them to use sport as a vehicle to maximize their life potential. I wanted to share a story from today’s Wall Street Journal showcasing the power of athletics.
Rap Mogul Snoop Dogg, a.k.a. Calvin Broadus, has helped engineer an emergence of football in South Central Los Angeles by founding the Snoops Youth Football League. Crenshaw High School is a game away from winning the city title and becoming the inner cities first serious contender for a California state-championship bowl game. Many of the team’s stars are the first graduate’s of Snoops Youth League.
Before Mr. Broadus, there wasn’t much organized youth football in the Crenshaw district. A diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan who played quarterback at Long Beach Polytechnic High School, the 38-year-old caught the coaching bug nearly a decade ago when he began volunteering as the offensive coordinator for his sons’ youth team in the Orange County league.
After a few seasons, frustrated with the program’s high fees and strict rules, Mr. Broadus invested $1 million to launch his own youth conference that charged about $200 less per player than most Pop Warner teams, offered discounts for siblings and allowed parents with criminal records to volunteer. Mr. Broadus invests an additional $50,000 each year to sustain the program.
“Snoop brought football back to South Central—that’s why we’ve been so successful,” says Gregory Shoaf, known around Crenshaw as “Coach Crazy,” who has been schooling local players at the kindergarten level for the past 40 years.
Featured in films such as “Boyz N the Hood” and “Love & Basketball,” Crenshaw leads the state in basketball-championship titles and has produced baseball greats including Darryl Strawberry. But its football program has long been considered something of a joke. Before head coach Robert Garrett took the helm in 1988, he says former players in the neighborhood, parents and even teachers would heckle the football team on game days with questions like, “How many points are you going to lose by this time?”
One of the biggest problems, says Mr. Garrett, was always that the district, home to the street gang known as the Crips, hadn’t had its own Pop Warner team since the 1970s, with few parents able to volunteer as coaches, let alone pay registration fees. As a result, despite the region’s abundance of athletic potential, Crenshaw’s high-school football teams have lacked the chemistry and camaraderie that comes from playing with one’s teammates from the age of five, since students were forced to disperse and commute to other districts to play football at the junior-high-school level if they were to play at all. (Crenshaw alumnus Brandon Mebane, now a defensive tackle for the Seattle Seahawks, says he didn’t start playing tackle football until the ninth grade—he played baseball instead.)
Mr. Broadus can’t take all the credit for Crenshaw’s success, of course. Mr. Garrett says some of the steps he has taken over the past two decades to change the school’s football culture are also starting to bear fruit. He has challenged neighborhood hecklers to try their hands at assistant coaching, instituted a business dress code for players on Fridays, opened his own home to players on holiday weekends and insisted that college scouts start coming to campus to meet his players face to face. Four years ago the team won the city title, though it wasn’t ranked in the state’s top 10.
Still, Mr. Garrett admits that Mr. Broadus “has helped the program a lot.”
“I celebrate what he’s doing—he’s probably saved thousands of kids—and he doesn’t have to do that,” says Mr. Garrett. “I may not want to hang out with him, but he’s putting his money where his mouth is.”
