HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL PREVIEWS : Two Paths to the Summit : Cleveland and Simi Valley Highs Exist in Vastly Different Worlds, but Their Basketball Programs Are Linked in a Big Way--They Have Reached the Top

In the neighborhood of Cleveland High in Reseda, some non-residents who drive through at night feel a bit uneasy. When they stop at a traffic signal, many casually drape their right arm over the front seat, fingers extended toward the passenger door. The folks who hang out in the shadows on those streets smile when they see that. They know what this stretching exercise is all about.

“See it all the time,” said a young man named Ronald as he stood at the corner of Roscoe Boulevard and Vanalden Avenue. “What they’re doing is, they’re lockin’ the car door. But they don’t wanna’ seem like they’re doing it because of us, you know? So they act real cool when they do it.”

Not too far away, just off the scenic Simi Valley Freeway in the neighborhood of Simi Valley High, there is a sparkling new structure known as the Brunswick Recreation Center. Brunswick Recreation Centers are what rich people call bowling alleys.

At Cleveland High, administrators worry about violent gangs and turf wars. At Simi Valley High, a turf war is a lively debate between campus maintenance supervisors over whether to plant red fescue or Kentucky bluegrass on the football field next spring. As for gangs, well, the extent of that problem at Simi Valley High runs along the lines of whether it was Joey’s gang or Tommy’s gang that was supposed to bring the popcorn to Billy’s house for last Friday night’s HBO movie.

When students at Cleveland High observe Martin Luther King’s birthday, the students at Simi Valley High must wonder why they don’t get to stay home on E. F. Hutton’s birthday.

The two schools are only 12 miles apart, and yet they could not be more distant from each other. To understand that, one must only realize that even if sequined rock star Prince and aging crooner Frank Sinatra lived next door to each other, it’s still unlikely they would make a habit of pounding on each other’s door with a six-pack in hand, looking to party. Sure, both of them are singers, but their differences form a canyon that is almost impossible to bridge.

The basketball teams at Cleveland and Simi Valley mirror the schools. They are very different teams, perhaps extremes on some sociologic, demographic and economic spectrum. And yet, for the past two years, the Cavaliers of Cleveland and the Pioneers of Simi Valley have been linked in a very big way. They have dominated all comers in the Valley area, a stinging one-two punch of City and Southern Section basketball that has left most opponents mumbling to themselves.

More of the same is expected this season.

Cleveland, which thrashed three-time defending City 4-A champion Crenshaw in the semifinals before losing to Fairfax in the title game last season, has seven key players returning. However, perhaps its best player, Michael Gray, has been shelved for 10 weeks because he flunked a course. Albert Fann, the team’s best player as a senior last year, also was forced off that team because of academic problems. At Cleveland, academic problems are as common as small shoes at Bill Shoemaker’s house.

Simi Valley, which reached the championship game of the Southern Section 4-A playoffs in 1986 and made it to the quarterfinals last season, will rely on the nucleus of the 1986-87 team, including senior Don MacLean, one of the most heavily recruited players in the nation. But if any Simi Valley players are booted off the team for academic shortcomings, do something crazy, because the end of the world is very near.

Both basketball teams have, in recent years, arrived at the same place: the top. But their team buses depart from very different places. A statistical look begins to tell the story.

At Simi Valley, 99% of the students speak fluent English. At Cleveland, 94% of the students do. Eighty percent of the parents of Simi Valley students have attended college. At Cleveland, 57% of the parents furthered their education after high school.

The ethnic breakdown also points out vast differences. At Simi Valley, 82% of the students are white. Only 2% are black, the same figure at the school for American Indians and Alaskan natives.

At Cleveland, the minority (47%) of the students are white. Blacks comprise 17.5% of the school population and Latinos make up 24%.

“My average player here is a middle-class kid whose parents are in a trade or, more likely, a profession,” Simi Valley Coach Bob Hawking said. “We have a lot of doctors and attorneys and businessmen. A typical mix, I guess.”

Not a typical mix by Cleveland’s standards. The coach of that basketball team, Bob Braswell, paints a much different picture.

“The average kid on my team is a kid like Michael Gray,” Braswell said. “A single-parent home with just his mother trying to work and pay the bills and raise a son. But they are parents who care.”

Cleveland is a school at the forefront of court-ordered integration. Of the 2,199 students in the four-year school, 380 attend on the Permits With Transportation program, a voluntary desegregation program in which

students are bused to schools outside their neighborhoods. An additional 609 are in the school’s magnet program--a specialized area of study offered by individual City schools--and only 37% of those students live in the school’s district. Nearly 800 students arrive each morning after a long bus ride. Many come from Los Angeles. Gray and teammate Earl Bodden live in Watts, a block or two from predominantly black Locke High.

“We have youngsters of many different ethnic backgrounds and social levels working together,” Cleveland Principal Ida Mae Windham said. “They get to know each other. But the problems are the unknowns. Someone new comes in from out of town with different cultures and expectations, and it can pose the kinds of problems that might be special to this kind of school.”

One of the biggest problems is gangs. Much of the landscape around the school is smothered with graffiti, which is common on school property itself. Three small trees growing within 40 feet of Windham’s office have become living billboards, with spray paint proclaiming the area to be the home turf of at least two separate gangs.

“It’s a problem, no doubt about that,” Braswell said. “I even have to be alert to guys on my own team. In 1985, I had a kid on my team who I knew was a gang kid. He was from downtown L. A. I saw it and I tried to help, but he got more involved with his gang friends and then he failed a course, left the basketball team and drifted away. Today, that kid is in jail.”

At Simi Valley, which has an enrollment of 2,487, the problems school officials deal with the most seem insignificant by Cleveland’s standards.

“Gangs are definitely not a problem here,” Simi Valley Principal Dave Ellis said. “The biggest problem here is attendance. We fight that all the time. We average 88 or 89% attendance, but that’s not good enough. The average student might be able to miss three days a semester because of illness or other personal reasons, but we have students who miss more days than that, believe me. But really, in the first 40 days of this semester, two-thirds of the kids didn’t have a single absence.

“Simi Valley is a school of kids who are pretty self-motivated, kids with goals and ambitions.”

Bulletin boards at the two schools further emphasize the differences.

At Simi Valley, a boldly lettered poster outlines the rules of the detention hall, or the much-feared after-school study hall:

No gum-chewing, eating or drinking.

Study independently. No writing on desks or tables.

Students who fail to follow these directions will be expelled from detention hall.

That sign might bring laughter from the kids at Cleveland. Expelled from detention hall? Doesn’t that mean paroled?

At Cleveland, a New York City police wanted poster is taped on a window outside the school police office. In summary, it says that the New York police would like to talk to a Mr. Benito Gonzalez, who is suspected of murdering someone, and if he should show up at Cleveland High, please run away really fast and contact someone with a gun, preferably a police officer.

At Simi Valley, this poster:

Atomic Bomb Drill

Drop to the floor and get your head under a desk or a table.

Keep your eyes turned away from the windows.

Atomic attack! Certainly nothing to take lightly. But records show that there hasn’t been a single nuclear bombardment in Simi Valley.

At Cleveland, though, there have been personal attacks. Lots of them. And outside the Cleveland principal’s office is this sign:

“If reporting an incident to police, officers will ask for the following information:

Number of suspects

Weapon used

Vehicle used, if any

Physical descriptions of suspects

That seems a bit more practical than atomic bomb warnings.

Want a more subtle indication of the different worlds in which the two schools exist? At Simi Valley, a giant marquee in the school parking lot last week proclaimed, “Happy Thanksgiving. Gobble. Gobble. Gobble.” At Cleveland, there were no cute little sayings on the school’s marquee. There was, however, an empty carton of nonfat milk that had been wedged between two slats and set on fire.

Simi Valley won the Marmonte League championship in 1982, 1984, 1986 and 1987. The Pioneers have made it to the 4-A playoffs eight times in the past 10 years. Cleveland has been just as successful in this decade, winning two City 3-A titles under Coach Greg Herrick and advancing to two City championship games under Braswell.

The differences in the two programs begin, of course, with how the players get to school in the morning. Gray is a typical example of a student bused to Cleveland. He wakes up each morning at 5:30, before sunrise, at his mother’s home on East 113th Street in Los Angeles and steps onto a bus at 6:25. A one-hour ride through congested traffic gets him to Cleveland High at 7:30. Basketball practice keeps him at school until the sun has set, and he normally returns home at 8 p.m.

“It was the same way when I lived in Chicago,” Gray said. “You just get used to it.”

A typical Simi Valley student’s day starts at about 7 a.m., proceeds with a five or 10-minute ride in a nice car--more than likely a foreign car--to school and a return home at 3 p.m. in the same car.

“Part of our success comes from having the players living within a few miles of the school,” Hawking said. “Our varsity team played 50 games this summer. They live here and it makes it relatively easy to get everyone together. That’s not the case at most schools.”

Definitely not at Cleveland, where nine of the current 16 players are involved in the busing program. Couple that with truckloads of victories each year, and what you invariably get are charges of illegal recruitment of the best athletes. Braswell has heard all the comments and allegations made against him and Cleveland. It used to anger him. Now he laughs, pointing out that such complaints always come from schools with sagging athletic programs.

“This isn’t Simi Valley,” he said. “This is an old neighborhood. There has been no influx of new people with kids. If it were not for busing, this school would be shut down right now. It’s a melting pot here, and that’s great. But when you put the impact of the busing program together with our record, it’s inevitable that you get hit with charges of recruiting.

“This program recruits itself. Kids aren’t dumb and their parents aren’t dumb. They read in the papers about Cleveland’s athletic program and when it comes time to decide, some of them come here. They get the chance and they take it.”

Damon Greer, a standout guard on Braswell’s team, is one who took the chance. He lives in Lakeview Terrace, which is not in the Cleveland’s attendance boundaries. And he doesn’t hide the reason he picked Cleveland.

“I had a choice,” he said. “I could have gone to Crespi or Alemany or even Kennedy, but I came here because of the basketball program. I saw that they played my kind of game, fast-paced, fast-break basketball. That’s why I came, and that’s true for most of us on the team right now, to be honest. We wanted to be part of Cleveland’s basketball tradition.

“But we also knew Cleveland was a good school and that we would get an education.”

At Simi Valley, education is not a part of school, it is school. While Braswell frets about academic ineligibility, Hawking probably should be concerned that his players might pirate their way into his bank’s computer and drain his account, just for a joke.

“Grades are not a problem here and never have been,” Hawking said. “We have the kinds of kids here who just don’t run into those kinds of problems. We only take kids into our program who have solid characters and who are academically oriented. In my 14 years here, I honestly can’t recall losing a varsity player because he was academically ineligible.”

In his first two seasons at Cleveland, Braswell lost three players because they failed a course. Gray, who was expected to be this year’s team leader, became casualty No. 4.

“I worry about these guys,” Braswell said. “I worry because if it wasn’t for sports, a lot of these kids wouldn’t even be in school. They would have dropped out long ago. And now, with the rule that you can’t play sports if you get an F in any course--even if your grades in your other four or five classes are all A’s and B’s--we’re going to lose some more kids. And when we take away any motivation and these kids are forced out of school, you know what happens to them? Gangs, that’s what happens to them.

“Getting involved in something very bad is very easy for a lot of these kids.”

Somehow, from the ethnic and cultural kettle of Cleveland High to the extreme suburbia of Simi Valley come two unusual athletic programs. But from two extremes, Braswell and Hawking have created teams that are remarkably similar when it comes time to add up the wins.

“When you look at the successes of Cleveland and Simi Valley,” Hawking said, “you see that this is the way we do it, but over there, there’s another way to do it. You can look at different programs and see vastly different approaches and backgrounds, but there’s always one common denominator, and that’s the desire to be successful. There are definitely teams, and a lot of them, who really don’t care if they’re successful.”

The teams will meet Tuesday at Cal State Northridge. Both have large vocal followings. But in a clash of two titans from different planets, there is, remarkably enough, little friction or resentment between the sides.

“To be honest,” said Windham, the Cleveland principal, “I don’t know how aware students here are of places like Simi Valley. It’s really a world they have not experienced or seen much of.”