Vargas, 56, is the town's youth sports and gang intervention coordinator. Having played rugby in college, he suggested that the children form a team.

None knew the sport -- a fast-paced forerunner to American football. Vargas showed them a film and took them to a tournament in San Diego. He taught them the basics and began scheduling games in the Southern California Youth Rugby Organization.

They liked the relentless tackling and physical contact. It was football without pads.

The Hawaiian Gardens Eagles youth rugby team was born.

"After that, everybody started changing," said Rios, now 16. "Everybody stopped banging. We liked the sport so much that we didn't have time for that no more."

That was in 2006.

Since then, Hawaiian Gardens -- one of the smallest and poorest towns in Los Angeles County -- has emerged as a Southern California youth rugby powerhouse.

The city's program now has three teams and 45 players under 16, including a team of girls who protested when the city seemed willing to fund only boys teams. Many players have family members who are in gangs.

Sharing cleats and jerseys, they beat rivals from larger cities and from wealthier areas where the sport is better known: San Clemente, Santa Monica, Long Beach and San Diego County.

The three Hawaiian Gardens teams won their divisions this season; the girls squad went undefeated.

This weekend, 10 Southern California teams will compete in the state youth rugby playoffs in San Luis Obispo. Three teams will be from Hawaiian Gardens.

The players -- black, Latino and white -- have learned rugby's essential lesson: Support each other.

"They blend together well," Vargas said.

The teams remain as unknown to town residents as the sport they play; their own parents don't understand it.

Yet Hawaiian Gardens youth rugby squads offer a glimmer of what is possible to a town where gangs are entrenched and races haven't blended well.

A blink on the 605 Freeway, Hawaiian Gardens, with a population of about 15,000, is less than a square mile in area -- a collection of modest stucco houses, dense apartment buildings and low-end retail.

The working-class town may be best known for its casino, with its giant electronic freeway billboard, that provides a large chunk of its tax revenue.

But more about Hawaiian Gardens is defined by its insular barrio and HG, a local street gang that has plagued the city for generations.