On-Field Winners, Off-Field Citizens : Football: Camp Kilpatrick turns juvenile delinquents into ballplayers in hopes they will become constructive members of society.

Morris (Mo) Freedman coaches the unbeaten Camp Kilpatrick Mustangs, who play eight-man high school football and do all the things other players do except go home after practice.

That’s because the Mustangs are certified juvenile delinquents, first-time offenders incarcerated for five or six months at the fenced-in county facility in the rugged Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu.

Freedman, starting center on UCLA’s Rose Bowl winner in 1966 and coach at Encino Crespi High in 1975-76, is trying to take hooligans--mostly gang members who have never played football or worked within a system--and turn them into good citizens by “teaching them the values and work ethics of athletics,” he said one day recently before practice.

It’s still too early to tell if the football program--in its second year--will accomplish its goals over a long period of time, but early results are dramatic. The return rate for nonplaying offenders at the camp is 75%, but nearly all 24 members of last year’s team have stayed out of trouble. Only two, including one of the stars, have been rearrested, and one player was killed in an apparent drug-related homicide.

Freedman, 44, sees irony in the camp’s football program. The recent antisocial acts committed by mainstream area high school football players--criminal charges filed against them range from assault to kidnaping--seem to suggest that some football programs “are doing the opposite of what we want to do,” Freedman said.

Freedman is so keyed up about that role reversal that he used it in a recent pregame pep talk.

“It’s fabulous information for our kids to know,” he said. “For the first time in their lives, they’re acting normally and normal kids are acting irrationally.”

But the transition from gang member to disciplined team player isn’t smooth for the players or the coaches at Camp Kilpatrick. The team consists of drug dealers, street fighters, petty thieves, tough guys who never took orders from anybody, “The Dirty Dozen” in the making. They’re wild, potentially dangerous, previously incorrigible and, Freedman said, experts at avoiding responsibility and commitment.

“It takes a lot of energy to coach them,” he said. “They can be very manipulative.”

The players, who have all volunteered to play, arrive in June or July and are put into dorms with the rest of the 100 or so inmates. Their heads are shaved, they are issued standard gray sweat shirts and blue pants, and they are taught to march single-file across the enclosed grounds, hands clasped behind their back. To be eligible to play CIF football, the players--none of whom have achieved their actual grade levels--attend class and have to maintain a 2.0 average.

The team dresses in a dark gym with no lockers, benches or showers. Equipment is secondhand, some donated by UCLA and Canyon High in Santa Clarita, or bought with money provided by the NFL Alumni Assn. and the Malibu Optimists Club.

The first football practice is memorable, partly because Freedman has to start with “this is a football” basics.

“They’re very reluctant to accept coaching,” Freedman said. “They consider it criticism. Any time an adult raises his voice to them, they think they’re being scolded. And, if you want to show them how to do something, you can’t put your hands on them. They don’t react well to that.”

Before teaching them to work together, Freedman and his assistants--Howard Gold, Sean Porter and Alex Williams--have to defuse the tensions among rival gang members.

“We eliminate the gang mentality,” Freedman said. “We tell them, ‘You are now part of this program. You are now Mustangs. Expectations of you are very high.’ That’s something they’ve never heard before.”

Freedman also tells the players that there is no backing out. They are Mustangs for the duration.

“Most of these kids operate on the sour-grape principle of life,” he said. “They’d want to get kicked off the team just to say they don’t care.

“Our first season, we kicked off three starters because their behavior wasn’t acceptable. That’s not what we wanted to do this year. We told the players, ‘You cannot quit or be kicked off.’ They’d never completed anything in their lives, but they would complete this.”

Last year’s team was 7-2-1 and made the Southern Section playoffs, and this year’s team has also made the playoffs and will play at Templeton tonight in the first round.

But Freedman won’t ever be able to build on a previous team’s success. Unless a player gets arrested again and winds up back at Kilpatrick, the Mustangs will never have returning lettermen or senior experience.

“Even getting a kid to get into the proper football stance is a job,” Freedman said. “I’m embarrassed to say this, but in our fourth or fifth game this year, one of our players ran into the punt returner, who had signaled for a fair catch. It wasn’t a malicious thing. He just didn’t know the rule and it had never dawned on us to explain it.

“We had another kid, an offensive lineman, who couldn’t distinguish between pass and run until our third game.”

Freedman measures progress in inches. “Any improvement they make is a quantum leap that is exhilarating to see,” he said.

At UCLA, Freedman didn’t emerge as a starter until Tommy Prothro became coach in 1965. Prothro was able to reach Freedman, who had been an “angry kid” growing up in West L.A.

“Tommy showed me how a good coach could affect your life,” he said. “I could see what it did to me.”

Freedman decided to leave regular high school coaching in 1980 and work with troubled kids. “I thought it would be a nice change for me,” he said. “I found I was able to relate well and deal with delinquents. I could confront them in a non-threatening way.”

A year ago, he was working at Central Juvenile Hall and was able to transfer to Kilpatrick--much closer to his Woodland Hills home--because the camp needed an experienced coach. He also works at the camp as a teacher.

At the beginning of this season, Freedman and the other coaches pulled out all the cliches: Work hard in practice to succeed in games. Take pride in yourself and the team. The team is No. 1. Football is a metaphor for life.

The players were skeptical.

“We didn’t think it would work,” said defensive tackle Wayne Edwards, who was sent to probation camp for strong-armed robbery. But the results surprised them.

The Mustangs’ first win of the season was an opening-game 80-0 blowout against La Verne Lutheran, but the game that made them believe the cliches--and in themselves--was a 48-46 win over Brentwood High, the defending Southern Section Eight-Man Large Division champion that eliminated Kilpatrick from last year’s playoffs.

Now, the Mustangs (8-0) are Big Men in Camp--role models for the younger inmates--and genuine team players.

Curt Amundson, Kilpatrick’s sports director who began a similar basketball program five years ago at the camp, has always had trouble scheduling opponents, for obvious reasons: Expose our kids to troublemakers? Are you kidding? They’d steal us blind, probably cheat and play dirty.

But Amundson credits Faith Baptist and Brentwood with taking chances on the Mustangs, who didn’t let the camp down.

“Their kids are very polite, say ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ don’t talk back to the officials and leave the locker room spotless,” Brentwood’s Coach Pat Brown said. “Last year, when we beat them in the playoffs, the majority of their kids had tears in their eyes. These are street kids, but they cared.”

Football will end soon for the players and they will leave Kilpatrick, heading back to the streets. Will the lessons stay with them?

“Our lives have been turned upside down,” Edwards said. “All of us have the attitude now that we can do whatever we want. The gang (members) want to take this opportunity they’ve given us. It’s time to stop messing around.”

Tayon Blockman, a star quarterback even at 5-foot-6, has averaged three touchdowns a game and more than 11 yards a carry. Recently he ran for 252 yards in Kilpatrick’s 41-30 win over Faith Baptist. With a year of high school eligibility left, he is “looking forward to finishing,” said Blockman, who was sent to camp for selling drugs.

“I know I have the ability to play sports and that’s what I want to do,” he said.