SMALL SCHOOLS : A Peek Into Their World Reveals Some Similar Experiences . . . but With Little Differences : Los Pinos Camp Team Plays Out Its Sentence

Coaches sometimes complain about the drawbacks of the job--miserly pay, marathon hours, flaky kids, cranky parents or unsupportive administrators.

But Jeff Oestreicher of the 90-student Los Pinos Forestry Camp may have the hardest high school basketball coaching job in Orange County.

And he loves it.

Oestreicher’s varsity material consists of a group of 16- to 18-year olds who have had plenty of experience with courts, just not the basketball kind. Few have played any organized basketball.

Many of the prospects are former cigarette smokers, according to school counselors, and nearly all have had drug or alcohol problems.

The Patriots’ home games are held in a spacious gym . . . on the slope of a 3,000-foot mountain in the Cleveland National Forest.

There are no cheerleaders and no adult fans--and even if they came, where would they sit? There are no bleachers.

The picturesque county-run probationary school, founded in 1970 on the site of a former Job Corps camp, is 26 miles up the Ortega Highway from San Juan Capistrano. In terms of altitude, Los Pinos is the county’s top team.

Oestreicher, a 6-foot 8-inch former player at St. John Bosco and a graduate of USC, visited the school two years ago when he was working weekends with teen-agers in the probation department, and “fell in love with it.”

“It’s a unique type situation with its own special challenges,” he said. “It’s a really healthy atmosphere and a fantastic way to work with kids.”

When opponents describe this team as “tough,” they may be talking about more than its basketball attributes. At the nearest human settlement three miles away, the rangers refer to the team as “kiddie cons.”

Those words offend Oestreicher, who takes deep pride in his players, but there is a certain truth to it.

All the Patriots have received a sentence in juvenile court. At a given time, the roster may include assorted runaways, car thieves, drug dealers, gang members, and burglars.

On the upper arm of one of the school’s better players is a tattoo of a grinning skull with a red Mohawk haircut.

“A lot of times these kids are the same as any other kids,” Oestreicher said. “A lot of times they just haven’t had a positive role model in their life.

“They haven’t had anything to do with authority other than to spit in its face.”

Most have never met each other before and have little in common. Oestreicher’s job is to meld them into a team.

“If these kids weren’t on the court at Los Pinos together a lot of them wouldn’t even speak to each other,” he said.

“We’ve got punk rockers, heavy metallers, Mexican gang members, black kids and surfers. If they weren’t appointed by the court to Los Pinos, they probably wouldn’t be buddy-buddy.

“Every coach wants to win and it’s great to win, but more than anything else . . . the thing I’d like to show them is they can play together and accomplish something.

“It doesn’t have to be victories, a won-loss record for Los Pinos. Pulling off a fast break can be an accomplishment for these kids.

“I’d hope that maybe something might click in their heads and they’d learn that different people can have a common goal.”

But Oestreicher’s goals for his team must be achieved in a dramatically short time.

He will never enjoy the luxury of having a player in his program for three years. The Patriots are lucky to have the same player for three months. Average sentences at Los Pinos run from 45 days to a year.

Almost every week the team loses someone--not temporarily, but for good.

“It’s something we always have to consider,” Oestreicher said. “We’ll say, ‘We have a game on the 7th, so-and-so gets released on the 10th. Good, he’ll still be here for the game.”’

For the first two months of the season, Oestreicher never had the same lineup for more than seven consecutive days. It’s like trying to coach a team in a revolving door.

“When I hold basketball tryouts in November, I don’t even ask the kids for their names,” he said. “I just line ‘em up and get their release dates.

“I only keep the kids who are going to be there until halfway through the season. If 30 come out, that will eliminate 20.”

When he chats with the coach of the current Pinon League champions, St. John’s of Whitewater, Calif., the conversation inevitably turns to recently lost players.

They use terms that would be alien to most high school coaches--”early releases,” the reward for making exceptional progress, and “termination,” the fate of boys who break the rules and are returned to juvenile hall.

Oestreicher still misses a particular 6-1 forward, a rare player who had the advantage of two years on a high school team before coming to Los Pinos.

The experience stood out. He scored 45 and 47 points in the first week for the Patriots.

“He was supposed to be up five months, but he’d worked his butt off in camp and they gave him an early release,” Oestreicher told St. John’s Coach Larry Strange.

“I hated to see him go for the sake of the team, but I had to give him my blessing. He deserved it.”

Strange could sympathize.

“We had a big man like that at the beginning of this year who went AWOL on me,” he said. “He went home for a 10-day furlough and never came back.”

Of course, a constant flow of new prospects arrive from the court system and juvenile hall.

Many have had considerable practice in the art of stealing. One school counselor jokingly suggested that the best way to inspire the defense is to have the players imagine the ball is a hubcap.

The Patriots actually have one returning letterman, because of a case of recidivism.

Oestreicher was glad to have him. Despite being about 5-5, the player was a catalyst for last year’s team, which finished second in the league, qualifying for the CIF Southern Section small school playoffs for the first time in school history.

That also was the first Patriot basketball team to win more than two games.

This season’s team did not do badly, with a 5-8 overall record. But the Patriots were tied for second place in league last week at 3-4 when an upset by Twin Pines knocked them out of playoff contention.

Oestreicher said one thing the team lacked was a motivational leader, somebody with spirit. The returning letterman had it, but he showed up too late in the season.

“If only he’d been busted sooner . . . “ Oestreicher joked.

His team rebounded well and played good defense at times, but it had an alarming tendency to lose the ball on offense. The Patriots have committed as many as 51 turnovers in a game, a trait Oestreicher attributed to a lack of game experience.

But success is measured differently in this program. The season has yielded five wins and an immeasurable growth experience on the court. Perhaps some new self-esteem.

Meanwhile, on the outside, the boy who started the year as a 6-1 forward for the Patriots still calls Oestreicher every week with invitations to play pick-up ball and news of his enrollment in a business college and his new job in a retail management training program.

Oestreicher, who thinks of himself as the player’s “big brother,” would like to steer him toward junior college someday.

“A lot of these kids have never had a chance to win at anything in life,” Oestreicher said. “They’ve lost in a lot of areas of life, which is why they’re in contact with us in the first place.

“It’s a big deal for them to be on a team, wear the uniform, travel to other schools and win basketball games.

“As far as the therapeutic effect on someone who’s had everything stacked against him--or someone who has stacked everything against himself--there’s nothing better.

“I’m not out to save the world because I’m not that type of a person. But if I say one thing that clicks in a kid’s mind 10 years from now and causes him to do something with his life, then I’ve done something.”