Will Preps Come Out to Play on Vacation? : Year-Round School Calendar Expected to Have Impact on Sports

As the Bell High School football team made its way through the City playoffs last fall, Eliud Pacheco, the 2-A Player of the Year, never set foot in a classroom.

In fact, when Bell lost to Roosevelt in the 2-A final Dec. 12, Pacheco hadn’t been to class in more than seven weeks. And the only homework he’d done had involved a dust rag, a vacuum cleaner or a mop.

“It was great,” Pacheco said. “I didn’t have to worry about school. I didn’t have to worry about getting home early to do homework. I could do whatever I wanted.”

Pacheco and Bell weren’t breaking any rules, either.

Under the year-round school calendar used by Bell, Belmont, South Gate and Huntington Park high schools, Pacheco and 19 of his teammates were “off-track” in November and December, which means they were on vacation during the second half of the season.

If the Los Angeles school board adopts a year-round school calendar, as it is considering doing to help solve an impending shortage of 55,000 classroom seats, athletes in all of the district’s 49 high schools will be in a similar position.

And judging by the experiences at the four Los Angeles high schools that already operate year-round, the 12-month school calendar will have an impact on athletics. How much of an impact seems to be a matter of debate.

John Anderson, former South Gate High principal, said the loss of potential athletes in the first three years after the school adopted the year-round calendar in 1981 was insignificant.

But Barbara Fiege, coach of the girls’ volleyball and basketball teams at Belmont High, said: “If and when every high school goes on year-round, it will have a tremendous effect on athletics.”

The major question: Will students give up vacation time to participate in athletics?

In the year-round calendar currently being used, students are given two two-month vacations each school year.

Except at Belmont, where the students are given a choice of calendars, they are divided geographically into three “tracks,” with those on A track on vacation in July-August and January-February, those on B track off in September-October and March-April and those on C track off in November-December and May-June. Everybody gets a week off between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Most athletes, then, are on vacation at some point during the season in which they participate. Basketball players on A track this year, for instance, will be off-track from Dec. 24 to March 5, which means they will play all but the first three weeks of the season while on vacation. A district rule requiring athletes to attend at least three classes on the day of a weekday event has been amended to exclude students who are off-track.

Said Huntington Park Principal Marjorie O’Hanlon: “Actually, we have greater participation than we did before--not only in terms of numbers because we are a bigger school, but we also have a higher percentage of young people participating. And their grades are better.

“If you’re really into athletics, it’s wonderful to not be all cluttered up with algebra and English all day. You get to spend your whole day working out.”

Anderson, who is now the principal at Monroe High in Sepulveda, said he had at first been a little skeptical of the year-round calendar. “But after three years, the loss of kids in terms of participation was insignificant,” he said. “The team still practiced every day; the kids showed up, and it happened.

“Kids have a lot to say about when families take vacations, depending on how committed they are to a program. By the time they’re in high school, going on vacation with the family is not normally an item of high priority. Being with their friends, participating in activities becomes very important to them. And they will have an unusually large say in terms of when vacations are scheduled.

“The year-round calendar did not have a significant impact on the program. And that goes for things like drama, too. The leading lady was there.”

In some cases, however, she was not there. And some bit players were absent, too.

In 1983, when both the preliminaries and finals of the City cross-country meet were postponed because of rain, the South Gate girls’ team lost its best runner, Soccorro Vasquez, whose family finally got tired of delaying its vacation.

South Gate finished third behind Kennedy and Palisades. If Vasquez had been there? “I don’t know if we would have won, but it would have been closer,” Coach Jim Douglas said.

Douglas, who left coaching after that season partly because of similar incidents, said he sometimes lost control of his athletes when they were off-track. “If somebody who’s having a bad season goes on vacation, it’s a good excuse for them to disappear,” he said. “Once they’re out of class, you never see them again.”

Fiege, Belmont’s volleyball and basketball coach, said she loses several athletes each season when the tracks change. “(Students) get to the time in their life when they realize they need to work and start paying for graduation. We lose a lot more 12th-graders than we used to because during their vacation is the only time they can work.”

The year-round calendar presents problems for coaches, too, she said. She believes the seasons should be changed to match the tracks.

“Coaches with families will want to take that vacation time,” said Fiege, who coaches the volleyball team during her vacation. “If they happen to be put on a track where they’re going to be off 45 days during their season, they’re going to say, ‘Forget the volleyball team,’ or, ‘Forget the basketball team.’ I think we’re going to be hurting for coaches more than we already are.”

Many athletes, though, seem to favor the year-round calendar.

Roman Gomez, Belmont’s two-time state champion in the 1,600- and 3,200-meter runs, requested before his junior year to be put on C track so he would be on vacation for the final month of the track season. Administrators in general say it is not that easy to change tracks, but Belmont Principal John Howard said: “I make decisions on the behalf of kids, not on behalf of some bureaucracy.”

So, in his final two years at Belmont, Gomez ran every big meet--league final, City final and the state meet--without the added pressure of worrying about his grades. He slept late, worked a variety of odd jobs in the morning, then worked out for about four hours a day. When he was in school, he had only about two hours a day to work out, he said. The extra time allowed him to warm up properly, he said, and to “do things more correctly.”

Gomez, now a freshman at USC, believed he had an edge on his competition.

Not having to worry about school was a psychological release, he said. “And running, I’d say, is about 90% psychological. If you’re mentally prepared, you win races.”

Also, not having to worry about running races when he was in school allowed him to improve his grades, Gomez said. “It was great for me,” he said of the year-round calendar.

His principal, Howard, agreed. “It was incredible,” he said. “He went from D’s to B’s and A’s.”

At South Gate, football Coach Gary Cordray tries to get most of his players on B track, which means they are on vacation for all but the last two or three weeks of the regular season.

“We like to have all of our kids together as much as possible,” Cordray said. “And if they’re going to be here in the summer for conditioning anyway, they might as well be going to school.”

Also, by having them in school in July and August, Cordray knows that players academically eligible at that point will be eligible for the entire season. At traditional schools, mid-semester grades are posted a week or two before the end of the regular season, sometimes depleting rosters just before the playoffs.

“Our players can spend a lot of time concentrating on football instead of going to school,” Cordray said.

At Bell, football Coach Tosh Nitta doesn’t have his players on the same track, but he has a year-round class for them.

“We have contact with most of our players during the off-season so it allows us to have continuity in our program,” he said.

One of the negative aspects of the year-round calendar, of course, is that some athletes never get a vacation.

Pacheco, for instance, plays basketball and baseball besides football, so most of his November-December vacation is taken up with football and most of his May-June vacation is taken up with baseball.

Still, he said the year-round calendar is great.

When he was out of school last fall, Pacheco’s mother and sister were in Mexico and his father was working, so Pacheco spent his mornings doing housework. He went to school for lunch, then lifted weights before practice.

“You have a lot of advantages when you’re on vacation,” he said. “If the coaches give you plays that week, you study the plays. You don’t have to worry about anything else. I had a hamstring pull, so I went to the pool and ran.”

The way Pacheco sees it, he wasn’t robbed of any vacation time.

If he had gone to a traditional school, what would he have done to kill time during the summer?

“Played ball,” he said.