Girls Make Points With Recruiters While Playing on Off-Season Teams

They are the most cussed and discussed local figures in girls basketball, although Steve Kavaloski and Len Locher say they’re just a couple of guys in the right places at the right time.

Their off-season basketball programs for girls are growing at a rapid pace. Together they have the potential to influence about 90% of the top high school players in Southern California.

To the elite player, off-season basketball, with its national tournaments and summer all-star camps, offers more than the high school season can provide: exposure to lots of college coaches, quality playing time against outstanding opponents and national awards and recognition.

“If you are seriously thinking of playing basketball in college, then you’ve got to play (all year),” said Locher.

Locher, of Oxnard, counts 200 hopefuls in his Ventura-Santa Barbara Sharks program. This is his fourth season hosting girls off-season basketball programs. Kavaloski founded the larger Long Beach-based Southern California Women’s Basketball Club in 1976. His spring Run and Gun League handles about 400 girls a year, with plans to expand to 500.

“Our programs rank in the top 10 in the country, if not the top seven,” Locher says.

Kavaloski goes one boast further: “I know I have the best program in the state.”

Their styles are different, but their personalities are similar.

Kavaloski, the mover, the doer, fidgets. He rarely sits down.

“I always have to be doing something,” he said while seated behind a battered wooden desk in his office, a converted bedroom painted musty yellow in his second-floor apartment in Long Beach.

Locher is equally as pensive and probably more intense.

“I believe in discipline,” he said, stroking his bearded face while seated high above the floor at Firestone Fieldhouse at Pepperdine University.

Each man has had only limited high school coaching experience. Kavaloski spent 3 1/2 years as part-time head coach at Garden Grove High School. Locher was a walk-on assistant for several seasons at San Gabriel High. Much of the actual teaching in their own programs is done by high school coaches who volunteer.

They stress fundamentals, discipline and improvement. “Goals, rolls and tolls,” explains Locher, whose straight black hair, beard and glasses and piercing glance give him the appearance of a high school vice principal rather than the gym rat he professes to be.

Players in both programs are as young as 8. Faced with the “keep up with the Joneses” mentality often generated by off-season play, many drop out. But those who stick it out receive additional training that usually leads to a four-year college basketball scholarship. Only seven of 119 players in Kavaloski’s elite senior division did not receive a scholarship offer. The Sharks have had a similar rate of success.

“This is not a social thing like basketball is in high school,” said Kavaloski. “These kids here really want to play and learn basketball.”

Kavaloski and Locher have a rivalry as intense as some of the competition they have created for their pupils. Their teams meet often during tournaments and usually Kavaloski’s groups prevail. Locher says that’s because Kavaloski is too win-oriented and the Sharks are trained to peak later in the summer, when, he claims, Kavaloski refuses to play him.

Natural geography has intensified the rift. Kavaloski draws from southern Los Angeles County and all of Orange County. Locher claims the San Fernando Valley and points north and west. Mulholland Drive is their unofficial Mason-Dixon Line. Few athletes cross it.

“I look upon our relationship as if it’s a Lakers-Celtics thing,” said Locher.

Kavaloski added that Locher’s politicking “has made a few All-Americans that can’t shine the shoes of other players.”

A former newspaper reporter, Locher is an adept publicist. His reputation as one of the West Coast’s experts on girls basketball developed, in part, because of his successful communication skills and understanding of the media. At a recent tournament sponsored by the AAU and run by Kavaloski at Gahr High School in Cerritos, the only information available was a press release that Locher had written. He also publishes a scouting service newsletter for coaches, an idea Kavaloski has recently attempted to copy.

“He does a better job of getting his kids exposure,” admits Kavaloski.

Kavaloski may be the coaches’ favorite. They like his personal touch and refusal to play favorites during recruiting periods.

“I don’t advise my players (like Locher does),” he says. “I give them advice.”

Some think Locher influences players.

Said one successful coach who asked that her name not be used: “He (Locher) is a very powerful person. If you are not supportive of his program, he can hurt you.”

Locher doesn’t dispute that.

“I don’t tell kids where to go. I give them advice on where not to go.”

Neither Kavaloski nor Locher has made it to Easy Street on their earnings. Both work out of their homes. The off-season programs run from March through September and that makes it difficult to hold full-time jobs. Kavaloski makes about $18,000 a year as a part-time newsprint handler for The Times. He also receives a few thousand dollars a year from player membership fees.

Locher declines to discuss his finances, saying only that “I’ve invested, but I’m not filthy rich.

“Society as a whole is so money-oriented. We ask for things and buy things that we really don’t need.”

Locher holds a part-time job as the prep pollster for the CIF Southern Section office in Cerritos. He’s worked there 10 years.

Kavaloski has sought sponsorships from shoe manufacturers and other athletic companies. An affiliation with the AAU generates some funds. He expects his 1987 budget to top $55,000. Each player on his elite traveling squads must pay her own way to out-of-state tournaments, but he occasionally offers some financial help, which he terms “scholarships.”

Locher refused outside sponsorship until recently when he said he would seek Olympic development funds. He prefers, instead, to rely on volunteer coaches. He does not offer much financial help. The budget for the Sharks runs less than $10,000 a year, he said.

Kavaloski recruits players based on high school performance for his elite groups. Locher said he does not. Both say they would like to attract more minority athletes from the inner city. In both programs all girls get a chance to play. Locher requires a 3.0 grade-point average for each player on his elite teams.

“Winning is secondary,” said Locher. “That’s the big difference between Steve’s program and mine. Nobody wants to win as much as I do, but I won’t do it at the expense of a kid’s development. I want them to develop and go to college.”

Kavaloski admits he recruits to win.

“It’s my competitive nature. I want national championship teams.”

He says he scouted 360 junior and senior high school games last winter. In three of the past four years his 16-year-old-and-under group has won at least one highly coveted Basketball Congress International (BCI) tournament.

Each program produces players who know how to win. Locher’s program, which includes the prestigious Blue Star West Invitational Camp, counts two-time Cal-Hi Publication player of the year Terri Mann of Pt. Loma High as one of its graduates. Kavaloski once had former USC player Cheryl Miller enrolled.

“Steve’s program gave me the competition I needed. He put me on a pace I was ready for and that helped me,” said former Valley Christian High School center Kari Parriott, the Southern Section’s 1-A Division player of the year. She received a scholarship to Oregon State based primarily on her performance last summer in a BCI tournament where she was named its most valuable player after leading Kavaloski’s 16-and-under group to the tournament championship.

Another Southern California prep star, Andrea Knapp of Louisville, had similar praise for Locher.

“Without Len’s program I wouldn’t have received the visibility and the scholarship offers,” she said. Ironically, Knapp decided to attend UC Berkeley, over Locher’s objections.

Kavaloski, 42, and Locher, 32, grew up in tough neighborhoods. Locher attended Bell High and East Los Angeles College. He was a rebel.

“I wouldn’t play the game (with instructors),” he said.

He took his first job with the now-defunct Alhambra Post-Advocate and later worked for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. While in Alhambra, he took an assistant girls coaching job at San Gabriel High. In 1980 he helped found and later became director of the U.S.A. Basketball Development League for girls, an effort that set the foundation for his move north three years later.

Kavaloski was a dead-end kid in Bell Gardens who was out on the streets fending for himself at 15.

“I was an obnoxious little punk,” he said.

An Army stint in Korea in the mid-1960s got him interested in coaching when he was ordered to coach a boys high school team composed of Army brats. A job as an assistant boys coach at Bell Gardens High helped put him through school at Pasadena City College and later Cal State Long Beach. He founded his first basketball club 11 years ago and joined Garden Grove High in 1980.

They have changed the course of girls basketball. But why do they do it?

“A hobby,” said Locher. “It’s something that is needed and I enjoy doing it.”

Kavaloski takes a different view.

“I work hard. I don’t ask for much. When I’m old and broke maybe (the girls) will support me.”

He rolls his eyes and gestures with arms that barely fill the sleeves of his polo shirt. “I keep wondering what will happen when I get tired of this. I guess I’ll be here until someone else does it.”