Busing Opens Pipeline of Athletes, Raises Questions

In 1982 and 1983, Reseda High School’s basketball team won the City 3-A Division title, but almost no one on the squad came from Reseda.

Both seasons, most of them (9 of 11 in 1982, 8 of 10 in 1983) were residents of downtown Los Angeles who attended Reseda High under the Permit With Transportation program, rather than staying at their home school, Washington Preparatory High School.

“Without a PWT program,” said Bill Hughes, who coached Reseda both those years, “we couldn’t have fielded a varsity level team.”

Reseda is an example of the secondary impact the PWT program has had in the San Fernando Valley: the creation of an athletic pipeline from Los Angeles’ minority communities.

Of the 19,000 PWT students who attend Valley campuses, two-thirds are black. As a result, the black athlete, once a rare sight on many local high school teams, is now in abundance here. And, in turn, some Valley teams are excelling in sports traditionally dominated by largely black inner-city schools.

Basketball is the clearest example.

Before Reseda won its two city titles, Cleveland High, another Reseda-area school, won the previous two years, first with five PWT students on the team and then seven. The year before Cleveland won, Taft High in Woodland Hills won the championship, led by Darryl Butler, a PWT student who was city player of the year. Both Taft and Cleveland have improved so much that the schools have been moved up to the tougher 4-A level of competition in basketball.

Reseda’s football team, with a starting lineup that was 80% PWT, made the playoffs this season for the fifth straight time and finished 7-3.

“If we don’t have them,” Reseda football Coach Joel Schaeffer said of the PWT students, who made up nearly half his roster, “we go 0-9, with grandeur.”

But the infusion of minority-student talent at Reseda and other Valley schools has meant more than just athletic success. It has also increased the weight of other subtle factors that threaten the purity of high school athletics:

The Exploitation Factor: Washington High Principal George McKenna, whose school is one of three that feeds PWT students into Reseda, says he worries that athletes who attend Reseda rather than his school are vulnerable so far from home. Although unable to offer examples, McKenna says he believes minority athletes at Valley schools have been “cut loose”--arbitrarily transferred back to their neighborhood high school--once their sport’s season has ended.

At Reseda, administrators deny they treat bused-in athletes differently. But basketball Coach Hughes acknowledged that he has encouraged his PWT athletes to take lighter class loads during the semester their sport is being played. Hughes said such advice was an attempt to compensate for an academic environment that he believed was often more challenging than what the PWT students faced at their home schools.

The Recruiting Factor: Because the PWT system targets specific minority-area schools to feed into specific Valley schools, it creates a “pool” of potential athletic talent beyond the school’s neighborhood. High school coaches are not supposed to make overtures to Los Angeles athletes--such as scouting “feeder” junior high schools and encouraging students to come to Reseda, rather than Washington. However, suspicion that such practices occur runs strong among rival Valley coaches, who accuse one another of trying to gain advantage by manipulating the PWT system.

The Home-Team Factor: Teams that consist primarily of PWT students lack a “hometown” feeling, a failing that may discourage fan support unless the team is markedly successful. Former Reseda Coach Hughes, who this year began coaching at Pierce College, said one of the reasons he quit Reseda was that, “I was not coaching a local team.”

The Superstar Factor: Some minority athletes enroll in the PWT program, coaches say, because they believe it will be easier to establish themselves as stars in the Valley than in the often more competitive inner-city leagues. “A lot of kids can’t play down there (the inner city),” Hughes said. “If they play for Reseda, they can be a star and make the newspapers.” Because of this, coaches say, they increasingly find themselves dealing with athletes who believe, usually unrealistically, that their talent will carry them to a pro career, making competence in academics superfluous.

One of the most vocal critics of the way the system works is Washington Principal McKenna, who has won nationwide attention for turning Washington into a “preparatory” institution where students are required to sign semester-long contracts to do their homework.

In terms of athletics, McKenna said, PWT “is good for those students in the respect they make the team. Maybe they couldn’t have made the team here. But what are they playing for? Are they simply being exploited?

“The ‘C’ average rule (which requires a ‘C’ average and no ‘Fs’ to stay eligible for extracurricular activities) has kept exploitation from being the order of the day. But they can be exploited if they were only recruited to be an athlete. There is a greater possibility of exploitation when a kid is taken out of the neighborhood. He is less protected.”

Answered Dimitri Vadetsky, assistant principal in charge of athletics at Reseda: “I’m not going to prostitute myself to create a system like that. We have the same feeling for PWT youngsters as we do for our own kids. Their parents have the same aspirations as those in Encino.

“We have curriculum. We have mandated courses they have to take like four years of English. The coaches can’t do anything about that. They (the students) won’t graduate. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit some coaches say, ‘Don’t take calculus or don’t take geometry this semester. Take it next year if you can.’ There have been kids out of control who took five P.E. classes to maintain their eligibility. But that doesn’t go here.”

Ex-Reseda Coach Hughes told it this way:

“They leave the city and come out here to play, and they find the academics are tougher. They find out they can’t make the grades. So some coaches manipulate and help keep the kids eligible. They find out which are the easiest teachers.

“The coaches look over their (the students’) schedules. They may tell them to take a tougher course in the spring, for eligibility purposes and so they will have more time to study. I recommended that they’d better be careful what they take.

“There is a lot of pressure on these kids. They practice until 5 or 6. And play the games. Just as there are different levels of playing ability, so there are different levels of academics. Counselors don’t always take that into consideration. Some kids are not as talented. They have to be careful, especially so they don’t overload.”

Hughes was sitting in his office at Pierce recently when a reporter asked him if he had taken steps to recruit any of his Reseda PWT players away from their home schools.

The question so irritated him that he quickly turned to former Reseda players Sedrick Hannah and Wally Manns--both Los Angeles residents who went on to play for him at Pierce, and were seated nearby--and asked each individually, “Did I ever meet you before you came to Reseda?”

Both shook their heads no.

“Because we won, people assume we recruited,” Hughes said. “I never talked to any one of my players. I didn’t know any of them from Adam. Eugene Jackson (3-A Player of the Year last season) went to Sepulveda Junior High. I’ve never been there . . . . I couldn’t get there to save my life.”

Greg Herrick, now in his sixth year as Cleveland basketball coach, was just as defensive when the same question was asked.

“The whole thing is preposterous,” he said. “I didn’t know Tyrone Mitchell (first team All-City player last year) until he was a sophomore here. He originally signed up for football. He played in our summer league, and I saw some things I didn’t believe. But I didn’t know about him before. I don’t have time to recruit.”

Both coaches said recruiting of PWT students does go on at “other schools.” But, in the PWT system, even recruiting may not be enough to guarantee athletic excellence.

The critical variable for a Valley coach is which Los Angeles schools feed PWT students into their school--or, more specifically, which ethnic neighborhood the PWT students come from.

“It all depends on who you are matched up with,” Hughes said. “We were matched up with Washington,” a predominantly black school. “If you are matched up with Jefferson, you get Asian kids. If you are matched up with Belmont, you get Mexican kids. That is not the school you want to be matched up with for basketball,” a sport that, for reasons that have been much debated but never resolved, has been dominated by blacks.

‘Cheated’ by Program

Reseda’s dean of students, Charlie Dumas, the 1956 Olympic gold-medalist in the high jump, said he felt “cheated” by the PWT program when he was an inner-city teacher. Dumas said he felt “the busing program was taking away good athletes--for that matter, good students. We could have used the wins, could have used the publicity. It hurts a school when a set of athletes move out.”

Washington Principal McKenna described the flow of PWT students to Reseda as “a drain of resources. It’s a one-way drain.”

Responded Reseda administrator Vadetsky, “That brain-drain stuff is baloney. We also get our share of hockey pucks (from PWT feeder schools) as every school does.”

Referring to complaints that schools like Reseda are siphoning off talented students from the black community, Vadetsky called it “their opportunity. We’re not forcing them. This is a multicultural experience for them.”

Vadetsky, who worked in an administrative position at a South-Central Los Angeles school for several years, said PWT students at Reseda are taught “middle-class standards,” a remark that tends to irritate minority parents, who feel enrolling their children in PWT illustrates equally solid values.

“This is good for racial harmony,” said Vadetsky, a prematurely white-haired man who said he is affectionately called “Snow White” by black students. “They (PWT students) brought us an outgoing spirit copied by locals.” As an example, he talked about Reseda’s white cheerleaders copying cheers used at black schools.

The PWT students at Reseda “belong to us,” Vadetsky said, and are grateful for the safe environment. “They don’t like weekends (at home). What do they have to look forward to? The parks aren’t safe. They don’t want to go home. School is the safest place to be. It’s not safe to be in the streets.”

“I don’t need math,” one Reseda PWT student, a star athlete, told a teacher. “I can hire somebody to do that when I’m in the NBA.”

It is a conceit all too frequently echoed in locker rooms, according to Vadetsky.

Hughes said that, when he coached at Reseda, he tried to counter it by posting on the gymnasium bulletin board newspaper accounts of former high school or college stars cut by the National Basketball Assn. The idea was to remind his players of the low odds of becoming a pro athlete.

‘South-Central L.A. Myth’

“There are kids who just think they are going to be pros,” Vadetsky said. “That’s baloney. The coaches stress there are not too many Marques Johnsons (Los Angeles Clippers forward) or John Williamses (highly recruited Crenshaw High basketball player who wound up at Louisiana State University).

“These kids put all their eggs in one basket, but the reality is ridiculous. It’s a South-Central L.A. myth. They don’t realize you can be outstanding in high school, good in college and nothing in the pros. They see a way out of the ghetto. They see multimillionaires, huge contracts. But how many can make that?”

Attitude problems have been complicated by logistical problems.

When PWT began, Hughes said, “the kids had to come to school at a certain time and leave at certain times. The kids had to be on the bus by 3 (p.m.) until November, leaving us with a 35-minute practice.”

That changed.

Busing for Participation

In the second or third year of the program, services were increased to include buses that would leave later in the day to allow PWT students to take part in practices.

“For band, cheerleading, football and basketball, if these kids could not compete, there was obviously something wrong,” Vadetsky said. “They had to have the same privileges and the same opportunities for participation.”

Eventually the number of buses shuttling back and forth between the Valley and the inner city was expanded to allow PWT students to attend games as spectators. PWT buses would leave the inner city at around 5:30 p.m. in order to get students, who had attended classes at Reseda High earlier in the day, back for an evening football or basketball game. The buses would then leave for the final trip home at around 9:30 after basketball and as late as 10:30 for football.

In many cases, the school needed the extra spectators.

“You tend to lose that neighborhood feeling with a lot of (bused-in) minority students,” Vadetsky said. “If you do not have a good team, if you have a weak team, you have a preponderance of parents of kids show up.”

That could hurt a school like Reseda, where the parents of PWT students rarely attend games because of the travel time and job requirements back home.

Hughes had the advantage of coaching a winner. “Couldn’t be a whole lot of resentment. Everybody follows a winner. But you heard people mumbling that it was not a local team,” he said.

“The inner-city kids sometimes have more loyalty than a local kid,” Vadetsky insisted. “The kids bused here identify very closely with this school. The kids get behind a winner. They don’t care who it is. There was one kid, a white kid, who was ineligible and couldn’t play basketball. The other kids were calling out to the coaching staff to have him play. There is no color distinction among the kids, just tremendous loyalty for the school.”