Tough Kids Do Hitting at the Hoop : Security Camp Cagers Win Games, Also Shoot for Better Life

In the three seasons that Camp Kilpatrick in Malibu has had a basketball program, the records of its varsity teams have been 18-3 in 1986, 15-6 last year and 8-10 this season.

Its players’ records are a different matter.

Camp Kilpatrick is a Los Angeles County security facility for boys who are juvenile offenders. And if you ask John Parra, a camp deputy probation officer, why the inmates are serving sentences, he answers succinctly:

“Anything you can think of, they’ve done.”

Henry Vargas, a probation officer and the camp’s athletic director, said 115 boys ages 11 to 18 are at the camp, where the average stay is about nine months. Kilpatrick is one of 14 county juvenile camps, and four are walled or fenced. There are schools at three of the camps; in the others, the emphasis is on work projects. Vargas said the youths have been sent to the camp by juvenile courts “for the more serious juvenile crimes: dope selling, gang activity, aggravated assault, armed robbery.”

“They get a lot of discipline here,” he said, “and (the camp) is pretty much considered a last stop before they get to the California Youth Authority, the last stop before prison.”

But with a strong dose of athletics as well as discipline, Parra, Vargas and their probation and teaching colleagues have been trying to make it more of a transfer station where the youths can reenter society. Parra and Vargas had some success with a similar program at Camp Mendenhall, another juvenile camp. In 1978, Parra was stationed at Mendenhall in the Antelope Valley and helped establish its first basketball team. With Parra as coach, the teams played for two years in industrial leagues and had success for five more seasons after they started playing high school teams in the Small Schools Division of the CIF-Southern Section.

But Parra was transferred to Sylmar following the 1985 season. He coached at Mendenhall for one more year but was unable to keep it up because of his other work commitments. And last year was the last time that Mendenhall fielded a team.

Meanwhile, Vargas, who helped Parra coach at Mendenhall, was transferred to Kilpatrick. In 1986, Vargas, with the approval of Charles Turner, the Kilpatrick director, started a basketball program there, which has a varsity and junior varsity that play as free-lance teams in the Small Schools Division.

This year, Vargas, the Malibu camp’s athletic director, talked Parra into transferring to Kilpatrick to help with the athletic program, which has also had cross-country junior varsity teams for two years.

Why do Parra and Vargas think athletics is an important part of the rehabilitation process for juvenile offenders?

They believe youths may learn that shooting a basketball is better than using a Saturday-night special to stick up a liquor store. Or that working for team unity is better than gang rumbles.

The Kilpatrick players, nicknamed the Chiefs, seem to be learning both basketball and social lessons, say coaches whose varsities have played against them.

Matt Brennan, head coach at Cate School in Carpinteria, said Cate has played Kilpatrick for two years and that he has been more impressed with the way the Chiefs behave on the court.

“If (an opponent) gets knocked to the floor, they help you up,” Brennan said. “If you make a good shot, they say so. If you block one of their shots, they say, ‘Nice play.’ And they’re extremely talented.

“I sensed immediately that, given different circumstances, they would have the potential that any other kid would have.”

Ernest Dailey, head coach at Ribet Christian in La Canada, said the camp players “seem like regular kids to me. I thought they were sportsmanlike.

“The idea of them playing together and trying to learn (the team) concept is a step in the right direction,” said Dailey, whose team has played the Chiefs for two seasons.

He said it may be that the camp’s players had little guidance before and that “once they have some guidance, they’ll be fine when they go back out into a regular school program.” He added that he wouldn’t mind having some of the Kilpatrick players on his team, “not so much for the basketball” but to “help them along.”

“Our boys like playing them and see them as a great challenge,” said Coach Humberto Ramirez of Highland Hall in Northridge. He said Kilpatrick has beaten Highland Hall three years in a row, usually by large margins.

The Chiefs, Ramirez said, have “played by the rules, and they’ve had no problems with referees whatsoever and no problems with our players.”

Glen Bell, the Kilpatrick head basketball coach for the last two seasons, gave up coaching in 1985 after leaving Dorsey High School where his 1982 football team finished with an 11-1 record and won the Los Angeles City 3-A championship.

Bell also teaches a course in mathematics and science and another in health at Kilpatrick and has been at the camp for 18 months. He said that when he left Dorsey “I wanted to get away from coaching and get involved and stay involved with education. I wanted to see how much I would miss coaching and to spend more time with my family without a loss of income.”

So he taught at a juvenile court school at Pacific Lodge Boys Home in Woodland Hills for 18 months before transferring to Kilpatrick.

Bell said his predecessor as coach, Dan Flynn, had moved into administrative work and that Vargas had asked him to replace Flynn. Bell’s chief assistant coach is probation officer Jeff Fortes.

Bell, who spent six years as an assistant football coach at Palisades High School and another two years coaching B football and junior varsity baseball at Manual Arts High, said he had never coached basketball before Kilpatrick.

When Vargas asked him to coach basketball, he said: “I didn’t want to. But it seemed like a very positive program and they needed personnel from the school, and no one else wanted to go on the road for 20 games.”

Though the camp has a small indoor gym for practice, it has a cement floor covered with a rubber-like surface and is much smaller than the regulation, 94-by-47-foot court. There is not much room for the players, let alone spectators, and, consequently, the Chiefs play all games on the road.

Unwillingly at first, Bell has taken the road back to coaching and is glad he did.

“This is one of the most positive things I could get involved with,” he said. “It teaches so many life lessons. I have learned more about myself working with these young men than I have helped them.”

After he had boned up on coaching basketball by reading books by John Wooden and other coaches, Bell found it would not be easy to impart his new knowledge to his first team. Unlike coaches at high schools, he has only one season to work with his players because they are generally at the camp less than a year. And his most difficult task, he said, is getting them to play as a team.

Last year, he said, it was tough to get players to come out for the team because those with gang allegiances were reluctant to give them up for basketball. And some youths who did try out were subject to harassment from more hardened inmates, he added.

This year, he said, he has been able to spend more time with his players, both in the classroom and in basketball practice. Consequently he has been able to “do a lot of team building, sharing a lot of values clarification and (trying) to eliminate so many things that separate these kids: rival gangs, different neighborhoods, being inside different dorms, competition with each other within dorms.”

There are other barriers that camp youths must overcome if they want to become good athletes, students and citizens. Camp probation officers and teachers say that many of the youths never played team sports and had spotty school attendance records. Many didn’t learn much in school, camp officials say, and are far behind their peers on the outside in reading and mathematics.

But Bell said that he has seen his players progress, even boys who have been difficult cases. He spotted one boy in another class who was “a tremendous physical specimen” and talked him into trying out for basketball even though the boy had been “labeled a troublemaker and was on his last legs.”

He said the youngster “has turned around and is a team player. He doesn’t play a lot and is still learning, but he has made very good progress in academics.”

Bell’s example of one boy making strides to turn his life around is what the camp’s academic and athletic programs are striving to do for all of them.

A Times reporter asked several of the athletes, many of whom had stayed or planned to stay past their release dates to play basketball, what being on the team has meant to them.

One, whose parents are separated and who lives with his grandmother, said that it “made my time go faster.” He thinks he has become a good player and hopes “basketball will be my ticket to college.”

One of the younger players said he could have gone home but stayed to play basketball. He said he has been offered a scholarship from a private high school and plans to play basketball, football and baseball there next year.

A third, whose father is an invalid, hopes to play basketball at a junior college next season, though he will have to obtain student loans in order to go to the school and still has to finish high school.

There are people, said the last youth, who think it is not good that “guys who are incarcerated are playing basketball. But I think it is good because it gives a guy a second chance.

“You are in a probation concept, and it’s kind of mixed up with discipline. Sometimes that kind of gets me down because I wish we could be more like a high school team.”

He said, however, that Coach Bell has taught him that, even though the camp is “a negative area, you can bring something positive out of it.”

Brennan, the Cate coach, thinks Bell “has got his act together.” He senses that the Kilpatrick players “respect him a lot, that he gets the most out of them and that they enjoy playing for him.”

Parra said: “These are real tough kids, and when they’re out on the streets they learn attitudes and a philosophy (that forces them to) grow up too quickly. They want to make big money.”

When he was coaching at Camp Mendenhall, Parra said, “it would tickle me to see these tough kids being anxious before a basketball game.”

They may be models of decorum on a basketball court and work harder in the classroom at the camp, but what happens to them when they get out?

“As a vehicle for rehabilitation, it has to come from within the kid,” Vargas said. He said that if a youth returns to school after he is released and hopes to play a sport, he soon finds out that he has to attend classes and do better than failing work.

“If he doesn’t like school, he will drop out,” Vargas said. “But if sports keeps him in school and he has to study, he has a better chance of becoming a productive citizen.”

Vargas and Parra said that when one of their athletes gets out and wants to go to high school or to a junior college, they notify a coach at the school that the boy is on the way. “A coach is on the watch and will try to encourage (the released boy),” Vargas said. “It’s kind of like a buddy system.”

Parra said that most of the youths are also relocated to high schools outside their old neighborhoods, away from any ties with gangs. They also live with relatives or friends in the new school district who are willing to take the boys into their homes.

Parra said that in his five years at Camp Mendenhall, about 14 boys went back to school and played basketball and that three or four of the Kilpatrick players returned to school and played the sport.

“Our victory is not on the scoreboard but in getting the kids back into high school and seeing them become productive citizens,” Parra said. “We have no delusions that these kids are going to play pro basketball.”

Vargas said it has sometimes been difficult to get players to come out for basketball or cross-country, which is coached by John Jex III, a teacher at the camp.

Vargas tells reluctant recruits to imagine that they are small children and to try to recall the pleasure of throwing a ball when they were little. Then he tells them that they can get the same enjoyment out of basketball.

With some of them it is a tough sell, he said, adding: “Their sense of enjoyment is so distorted. Some have seen a kid get blown away and have laughed at that.”

Bell said that in his first year as basketball coach it was difficult to find players. “But once you get the first kid to come out, more will come out.

“The first year I was lucky to have 10 players. But this year almost every kid in the camp, even the 4-foot 4-inch kids, wanted part of the action.”

Financing the camp’s athletic program is a problem. Vargas said camp director Turner has been willing to “shave a bit here and a bit there” but that other funds have had to be raised from donations and that sometimes camp personnel have had to dig into their pockets.

“We drive the buses and wash the uniforms,” Vargas said. “We ask churches for donations. These kids come to us without (athletic) shoes.”

But the lack of funds does not discourage Parra and Vargas from dreaming big, and their dreams are supported by Steve Canin, an assistant to the county’s chief probation officer.

Canin said that Camp Kilpatrick has two 50-bed dormitories and that he envisions having one of the them used specifically for 50 youths who have been selected for athletic ability, who would play in CIF leagues in basketball, eight-man football, track and, possibly, volleyball.

“It would also be our objective to see that they have academic ability because we want to get them to go on to college, hopefully on scholarships, or to a junior college,” Canin said.

He said that having such an athletic-academic segment at Kilpatrick “is kind of a lofty goal. We’ve never had one before, and it will require some special kind of programs.

“Each kid will have his own tutor,” he said, adding that the program would also require legislation so that the probation department can “build good sports facilities” at the camp.

Canin, who is also the junior varsity basketball coach at Los Alamitos High School, said that the National Football League Alumni Assn. has been helping at county juvenile camps with donations of money and sporting goods and also visiting and talking to the youths. The NFL alumni, he said, are also “interested in working with us on this sports camp.”

He said that Jim Harrick, Pepperdine basketball coach, has “donated a lot of his time” working with the Kilpatrick basketball players. Canin would like to see other college coaches come to the model sports camp and talk, “not so much about basketball or football but about the discipline as well as the physical part of adjusting to playing in college.”

He said that the sports camp would have “a very heavy academic component” because the goal is to see that the youths would “go to college and make it, not just play ball. I think the maturation process in college would be great and turn these kids around after our camp experience.”

Canin said that he realizes that the plans for a model sports camp, which would not begin operating before 1989, are ambitious.

He said that reading and mathematics levels of juveniles in the camps are usually “very low” but that the athletes would receive “a lot of attention” because classes would be small and they would receive individual tutoring from volunteers. Pepperdine University, he said, has an extensive tutoring program at Kilpatrick.

He said that he also realizes that youths who are sent to the juvenile camps are “not first-timers. They usually have a profile of six previous arrests. They are not new to crime because, in most cases, (their records) don’t count all their experiences.”

Canin said there are similar sports camp programs elsewhere in the nation, and that he, Parra and Vargas are gathering information on them.

He said Los Angeles County juvenile camps have long had athletic teams that participate in church and industrial leagues, “and their behavior wherever they go is laudatory.

“The thing is that when they get out of camp they go back to the same community and the same gangs and drug problems. It’s hard for us to keep them away from that. We’re hoping to get these kids to a college outside their community.”