Boosters Keep Prep Athletics Alive and Kicking : Support Groups Serve Up a Lot More Than Pancake Breakfasts to Raise Funds

Since the passage of Proposition 13, many high schools have been struggling financially, and money for athletics has been hard to come by. At many Southern California high schools, booster clubs have stepped in to close the gap between the amount of money that schools can allocate to sports and other extracurricular activities and the amount that is required.

Booster clubs have long been in the business of raising money, putting on occasional events such as pancake breakfasts to send a school band to an out-of-state competition or a basketball team to far-away tournaments.

But fund raising has become an on-going activity, particularly in football, the sport that requires the most money because it has more players than the others. Football players also need expensive equipment, costly medical insurance and two or three buses to take them to games on the road.

Fund raising is no longer limited to pancake breakfasts, hawking game programs at the gate or selling hot dogs and sodas at concession stands.

These days the parents or school alumni who make up booster clubs have become vendors of many things: foam-rubber hands with fingers that show a team is No. 1, raffle tickets, seat cushions with school colors and crests and hats, pins, scarfs and balloons. The list is endless.

Other ways of raising money include jog-a-thons and lift-a-thons (where athletes lift weights to garner pledges from donors). There are celebrity basketball or softball games or games between school teams and alumni or between students and faculty members. There are dances and social mixers. In jurisdictions where it is legal, some booster clubs run bingo games.

Stan Thomas, CIF-Southern Section athletics commissioner, was a coach before he moved into administration. From 1964 through 1974, Thomas was the head football coach at Neff High School in La Mirada, where his teams won nine league titles and two CIF championships.

Thomas said that when he was coaching at Neff, which has since closed because of declining enrollment, “we didn’t have a booster club because I didn’t want an extended period of involvement with a club.

“We did have an unofficial group of parents who were so willing that when I asked them to do something they did it and we had a lot of success.

“But times have changed and needs have changed. There’s a whole new perspective. If I were coaching football today, I would want to have a booster club because the team would need their financial support.”

He said school boards are always looking for ways to cut budgets and that athletics and other programs are one direction in which the boards often look. When financial cuts are made in sports, booster clubs often step in.

“If we’re talking about the survival of athletics in the Southern Section,” he said, “I think you will find that booster clubs (are becoming) very important in augmenting (funds for) high school athletics programs.”

At Banning High School, which has had an athletic booster group since 1958 and where football is king and gets most of the attention, Athletic Director Andrew Nelson said the club is vital. Banning has won 12 Los Angeles City football championships, 10 of them under Coach Chris Ferragamo, who will be coaching at Harbor College in the fall. Nelson said Banning club members “raise thousands and thousands each season, and the school can’t afford to support the football program all by itself.

“We wouldn’t have a football program without the booster club.”

Louis Ramirez, athletic director at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, said his athletic program could exist without the Dads Club, but would not flourish.

He said the club, which admits women and elects them as officers, contributes from $20,000 to $35,000 a year to the school and gives more money to instructional and other school programs than it donates to athletics.

Club members lend invaluable assistance at the school’s concession stands at the athletic stadium, he said. “I ran the concession stands for three years, and it was just a pain.”

He said that since 1968, club member Joe Reed, whose children have graduated from Birmingham, has operated the concessions and has produced food and drink more cheaply and at a higher profit than when it was run by the school.

Ramirez said that club members who man the concession stands “do a lot of hard work, which saves us thousands and thousands of hours of work. Without them, we would still have an athletic program--but on a more frugal rate. Without them, our program would be less enriched.”

The successful football program at Muir High in Pasadena doesn’t need much enrichment, possibly because it is strongly supported by no less than four booster groups, all of which raise funds to provide things that the school district cannot pay for.

One group consists of football players, another of parents, a third of alumni and a fourth of residents and businessmen.

Muir Coach Jim Brownfield, whose varsity won 24 straight games and CIF Coastal Conference championships in 1985 and 1986, said his program doesn’t have a financial problem.

Brownfield, who will take a leave from coaching football next fall but will continue to coach girls track in the spring, said each club has specialized fund-raising duties.

He said the players hold lift-a-thons, jog-a-thons and garage sales to pay for team meals, league patches to put on their jackets or to rent buses more comfortable than the run-of-the-mill variety. “They get a recliner bus, not a kidney puncher,” he added.

The parents sell T-shirts, work at concession stands and 50-50 raffles (in which the team gets half the proceeds and the winning ticket holder the other half) and solicit donations.

The alumni put on the team banquet and provide awards for it. They also provide the helmet decals given to players for top performance and any special decorations of recognition. Alumni also put together a team press guide.

Pasadena residents in the fourth group, the Railbird Club, put on community fund-raisers and the money is used for such things as shooting and editing films of Muir and opponents, other team literature or stationery. “Anything that promotes the school would be theirs,” Brownfield said.

He said the four groups do not have elected officers but “round-table officers who get together and coordinate going to games and sitting in a special section.

“They have their own interests. We’ve found that you get a lot more mileage out of people if you give them a special interest, not a huge burden.”

Booster club officers and coaches and administrators say that, if they have one complaint about their operations, it is that they have to get a lot of mileage out a few people, the devoted individuals who seem to end up doing most of the work.

Julian Rodriguez played football at Banning High, graduating in 1949. He has been a member of the school’s booster club since it was formed in 1958 and has been an officer since 1975, he said, serving “as either second or first vice president or president.”

Rodriguez said the club has about 200 members, including 70 businessmen in the Wilmington community. But he added that there are “only about 10 dedicated members who do all the work.”

Al Dellinger, Venice High football coach for many years, said the primary function of his school’s athletic booster group is to raise funds for all sports and that members “have done real well.” But Dellinger said it is usually “a small group of parents that have carried the burden.”

Cathrine Stevens, incoming president of the Birmingham Dads Club, has two sons who have been athletes at the school, one who graduated last June and another who will be a senior in the fall.

Stevens said the club has 200 members but that not many help out at the concession stand or the annual pancake breakfast. “We don’t get as much help as we could use from all parents,” she said. “We have a little nucleus of faithful who always come down and help.”

Sometimes the clubs also seem to have little nuclei of troublemakers. But incidents in which Southern California high school booster clubs collectively make trouble don’t seem to occur often.

Recently, one local club was found to have paid bonuses to some coaches in violation of CIF rules. But after meeting with that school district’s board of trustees on the matter, CIF Athletics Commissioner Thomas declined to recommend sanctions.

Thomas was quoted as saying that he would not recommend sanctions because people who had been involved in the club were no longer members and to punish the school and its athletic program would be punishing “kids for the adults’ actions.” Several years ago, one Southern California prep football coach resigned after a losing season, saying that he had been harassed by anonymous telephone callers at his home, assailed in unsigned letters to a local newspaper and criticized by leaders of the school’s athletic booster organization.

At the time, a school official was quoted as saying, “I think the problem lies with certain individuals in the club. You tend to think of a boosters club as being of one mind, but that’s not always the case.”

Thomas said that such incidents don’t happen often, saying “the majority of our high schools are very well managed and booster clubs are very successful within that structure.” He added that there seem to be “very few problems within that area, but there are some.

“The importance of a principal interfacing with booster people is the fundamental reason whether (a club is) successful or unsuccessful. The less involvement by a principal, the more problems there are to deal with.

“If a booster club can hire and fire or buy and sell, the principal has sold the farm.”

Andrew Nelson, athletic director at Wilmington’s Banning High School, said his school’s relationship with athletic boosters has been “very positive” and that Banning club members are “just good people who like the school and support” it.

There have been misunderstandings between school officials and boosters, Nelson said. But usually the boosters “talk to the coach and the principal, and things square themselves away very quickly.”

Ramirez, athletic director at Birmingham High School, has been at the school since its Dads Club was founded in 1961 and said the club has never attempted to exceed its authority.

“The club has a constitution, and our principal has the final say on everything,” Ramirez said. “(Members) set up their own constitution to say they would never overstep their bounds.”

“You can get heat from individual parents, and we never purposely avoid that,” he said. Such pressure, he added, usually comes from “individual parents” who can’t understand why a child is not playing because he or she is “a terrific kid.”

Brownfield, the football coach on leave at Pasadena’s Muir High, said that, although his relationships with boosters have generally been positive, “there are drawbacks. Sometimes people get involved with booster clubs for personal reasons. They get caught up (with thinking), ‘I donate money, and I’ve got something to say on the field.’ And that’s dangerous.”

Pressure appeared to have been applied recently to Muir basketball Coach Mike O’Connor. Pasadena Star-News prep columnist Steve Hunt wrote that he had received a letter criticizing O’Connor for not arranging what Hunt said was “a significant summer tournament schedule.”

Hunt commented that “a group of Muir parents continues to take shots at O’Connor in an apparent effort to oust him.”

O’Connor, whose teams have won two Pacific League championships and one CIF title in his three years as head coach, said someone had called him about the letter. He said the caller told him that the “last letter was an individual thing that was done without the group’s knowledge. I believe that is true.”

O’Connor said there have been “numerous letters from parents to the school concerning athletics in general,” including “some involving the basketball program.”

“Quite honestly, we are very short on facilities and equipment in the basketball program.” He said there doesn’t appear to be enough money in the district budget to correct those problems and that there are “quite a few people who have a variety of things they would like to see done.”

A group that would like to see things done at Muir is the Blue and Gold Club, an athletic support group formed in 1985. Joseph Brumfield, whose son, Joey, played basketball at Muir and graduated this year, said that he has been the club’s president almost since its inception.

Brumfield said that the letter to the Star-News was not sent by the club but by an individual who had a son on the basketball team. But he said the club has other concerns about the basketball program.

He said the club supports “academic and athletic achievement for students at the school” and has raised funds for team banquets, scholarships and dress uniforms for the basketball team.

Brumfield said he is concerned that in recent years, few Muir basketball players have received athletic scholarships to four-year colleges. (His son Joey, who received an academic scholarship to UC Berkeley, plans to try out for the basketball team after his freshman year.)

He said about 10 senior basketball players have graduated from Muir in the last few years and that he can think of only one who received a basketball scholarship, Stacey Augmon, a 1986 graduate, who received a basketball scholarship to the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Coach O’Connor said that another recent graduate, Tony Akins, had received a basketball scholarship to Cal State Dominguez Hills.

As for Brumfield’s contention that few Muir basketball players have been getting scholarships, O’Connor said, “Kids don’t get scholarships unless they get their grades, and I can’t be held accountable for kids who had poor grades when I got there (to Muir).

“When I started at Muir, my first semester, almost the entire team was ineligible. Many were borderline, and I held study halls for them, did grade checking and helped get them eligible.”

Brumfield said some of the graduating seniors who did not get scholarships may not have been good students or done well on college entrance examinations. But he said that the Blue and Gold Club has been setting up counseling programs in an effort to correct such problems.

However, for a player to receive an athletic scholarship, Brumfield said, “A kid has to be inspired by his coach and get his grades.” The failure of athletes to receive scholarships, he said, “should be addressed by the school system.”

He said that his group will recommend to the school board that Muir hire a basketball coach who works full time. Coach O’Connor, he said, is a “teacher in another school district.” O’Connor said that he teaches at a junior high school in Temple City.

Sheila Burrad, Muir athletic director, said she wishes that O’Connor “was at Muir. It would make things a lot easier on all of us.”

But Burrad said that it would be difficult for O’Connor to transfer to Muir and that he would lose money if he did go from one school district to another.

Asked if Blue and Gold Club members have some legitimate concerns, Burrad answered, “Sure they do, and money is one of them.”

She said that an example of poor equipment for the school’s basketball program is the gymnasium’s “horrible bleachers,” which take “10 custodians to get them out and 10 to get them back.”

Brumfield said the gym needs “a lot of things. The clock has been there 30 years. One side works; the other doesn’t.”

Burrad said that each of the four Pasadena high schools--Muir, Pasadena, Blair and Marshall--receives the same amount of money from the school board for athletic programs. She said she doesn’t expect the board to increase its allocations and that, if club members “want to get more money (for Muir), they’ll have to raise some.

“We can’t do anything about the money part, but we can try to do something about other” club concerns. But “how we spend money and whom we play is really a school function.”

Whatever the merits or drawbacks of booster clubs, Muir’s Brownfield, for one, thinks that money raising ought to taken out of the hands of club members.

Brownfield, whose long career in coaching football and other sports has included stops at Palm Springs High School, Loyola Marymount University and California State University at Northridge, said he has proposed to the Pasadena school district that it establish a foundation to raise funds for athletics at district schools.

He said he believes such a foundation will eventually be established. “What happens most of the time with booster clubs is that you must say thank you (to contributors),” he said.

Booster club members have not been trained and don’t have sufficient time to raise money, Brownfield said, adding:

“Booster clubs just don’t say thank you and that leaves a bad taste with people, who feel they are being used. One answer is to get a professional foundation that knows how to raise money and bring it in year after year without upsetting people.”

Rodriguez, the Banning High Boosters president, has been raising money for athletics at that school for about as long as Brownfield has been coaching. He has been a booster since the group was formed in 1958, and he said he has been an officer since 1975, “either second or first vice president or president.”

Rodriguez said his group backs sports other than football, “but we make money to support all sports from football,” which draws large crowds for its winning teams. He said the group buys “things that the school does not provide” and that last year the group raised between $10,000 and $12,000.

He said the group has raised money with a yearly pancake breakfast, by holding raffles during half time at football games and from annual dues from members ($6 for an individual, $12 for a family).

He said the club has no money to squander. “We only buy jackets (for football players) when they win City championships. If we bought jackets for league championships, we would go broke.”

At the start of the school year, he said, “about 80 business people donate $20 each right away, and that gets us going. But it is getting harder and harder to get new business people (in Wilmington) to join.”

Though Banning has had success in raising money and has spawned the state’s first academic booster club, founded in 1978, Rodriguez and other club members may find contributions harder to come by.

If more and more new business comes to Wilmington, and its owners either don’t live in the community or don’t have children in Banning High athletics, the new businessmen may have no interest in donating money for school sports. Rodriguez and his fellow boosters may then wish they had professionals to help them beat the bushes for contributions.

The Long Beach Polytechnic High Boosters raised about $7,500 last year, said Bob Oatey, the club’s incoming president. But his group supports activities other than sports--the band, singing groups, drama and the Reserve Officers Training Corp.

Since there are so many fingers in the Long Beach club’s pie, it may be why school teams sometimes do their own fund-raising projects. Oatey said that “the football people and alumni conducted a golf tournament and got a weight room” from tournament proceeds and donations from alumni.

Two Roman Catholic high schools with strong athletic programs--Loyola of Los Angeles and Crespi in Encino--also have strong athletic booster clubs. But both leave the fund raising to professionals, not to the clubs.

Loyola’s booster group was formed in 1981. Jon Dawson, the athletic director, said the first group, mostly parents, “wanted to help support athletics.”

But Dawson said the school “came up with a counterproposal that the club not be a fund-raising group but run the concession stands and provide game management and staffing at football games.”

He said the Rev. Patrick J. Cahalan, Loyola president, “runs the fund-raising and development policy. He does such a good job of fund raising that, if we need something, we get it.”

Dawson said if a booster club raises money, members may think it “entitles them to make policy decisions. We don’t have the same pressure that some schools that rely on booster clubs have. We have a good relationship; it’s not adversarial.” Wayne Ratkovich, the Loyal club’s president last year, said the club appoints commissioners to oversee each of the school’s nine sports and that each commissioner periodically publishes a newsletter on each sport.

Ratkovich said each commissioner is responsible for a concession stand operated at his sport, and each organizes a yearly dinner for a particular team.

He said the division of duties between Loyola’s administration and the booster group is a good system. “It’s very effective, and you don’t break up a winning combination. It’s working very well for the school and Father Cahalan.”

Paul Muff, Crespi athletic director, said his school used to have an booster group that raised about $20,000 a year for athletics and built a weight room for the school.

But about five years ago, Muff said, the school began its own development program and hired a full-time director for it. He said the director’s duties include raising funds “not just for athletics but also for school programs in general, (including) buildings and improvements.”

He said Crespi now has separate booster clubs for mothers and fathers. Each has a booster committee chairman whose “primary purpose is to be in charge of football and basketball, getting ads for the program.” The clubs, he said, “are not money-making but are more social.”

Muff said that before the school had a development director, “a number of groups were involved in fund raising, and they were tapping the same people over and over.”

He said that sometimes booster clubs “can be a little fanatical. They can get you into some problems when they are not directly under your jurisdiction. Sometimes (club members) tend to think they have a say in what’s going on. That’s obviously not the case here.”

Muff said that, in his eight years as athletic director, Crespi has received “normal parent complaints” about the athletic program but that they were “not centered “ in booster groups.

He said booster club officials “never tried to call the shots, never tried to get rid of a coach. I think they knew we would never allow that to happen.”