High School Boosters Play Hardball in the Courtroom

High school football booster clubs increasingly are going beyond the traditional sis-boom-bah and Saturday car washes to support their favorite team. Nowadays, they are using lawyers.

As evidenced this week when two Orange County teams argued their playoff disqualifications in state and federal court, school and game officials face mounting pressure from such legal attempts.

“Unfortunately, this is happening all too often,” said Stan Thomas, Southern Section commissioner of the California Interscholastic Federation that regulates high school sports. “They are becoming more and more involved in litigation.”

He also said booster clubs “seem to delegate themselves as real authorities when they are not. They even bypass the principal.”

However, booster clubs see their legal forays as necessary because of what they say are inequities in the athletic governing system. But they still usually end up on the losing end of the litigation game. At least, so far.

“Whatever is necessary and not paid for by the school, we do ourselves,” said Reno Bellamy, president of the Huntington Beach High School booster club, which was in court twice this week, first winning, then losing, on behalf of its football team.

Bellamy’s group and a similar organization from Anaheim each filed suits this week to seek reinstatement of the Huntington Beach and Savanna high school football teams, respectively. Both teams had been tossed out of postseason play for using ineligible players during the regular season.

The Savanna team was stripped of its league title Tuesday and booster club members were in court the next day. They were following the game plan charted Monday by boosters of the Huntington Beach team, which was thrown out of the playoffs last Saturday.

The unsuccessful attempt to save Savanna’s best-ever football record of six victories and one tie was just part of traditional booster philosophy, said booster club president Dave Ferguson.

“The boosters is a support group, mainly,” Ferguson said. “We do whatever it takes, help any way we can, to make the (football) program better.”

But is there a limit to what boosters should be allowed to do in their effort to provide financial, physical and emotional support to programs in which their children participate?

Can boosters, in their zeal to promote school spirit, go too far?

Indeed, some booster actions have led to more than philosophical arguments.

In 1987, three Laguna Beach Unified School Board members were recalled after it was learned that the boosters club donated $3,000 to coach Cedrick W. Hardman, a former professional football player, who admitted to drug problems.

CIF officials said that the boosters club failed to formally notify the school board, even though the board members targeted in the recall were members of the boosters.

And in the Riverside Unified School District that year, the football team’s head coach was fired over misuses of booster club payments to coaches.

Both critics and staunch supporters of boosterism concede that there are few guidelines for booster club activities.

Occasionally, booster clubs go far beyond sponsoring raffles and pizza parties, violating the spirit of boosterism by engaging in practices that should be reserved for school officials, top CIF officials said Friday.

“Sometimes they (booster clubs) consider themselves an arm of the school,” Thomas said. “They are an outside entity with no rights” regarding high school athletics, he said.

Apart from bylaws drafted by booster members and school administrators, the only significant regulation regarding the clubs is a state law prohibiting them from donating money to coaches without school board approval, school and CIF officials say.

Almost anything else goes, including seeking redress in court when parents are unhappy about a decision by the CIF or league officials.

The disqualifications of Huntington Beach and Savanna were challenged, not by the school administrators or the elected school boards, but by the parents’ groups.

Members of both booster clubs maintain that they acted in the players’ and the schools’ best interest. They said that since neither school had announced plans to challenge the disqualifications, they were forced to take the matter into their own hands.

“I’m not sure (the court challenge) would have been done by the school district,” Ferguson said. “We had to take the lead.”

Savanna Principal William Wong said the boosters had invited an attorney to attend a meeting of students, parents and teachers in the school auditorium on the very day the team was ousted.

Wong said he never had a chance to go to the Anaheim Union High School District board to get approval for legal action by the school itself. When he learned the boosters had hired an attorney, Wong said, he decided it was unnecessary for the school to seek legal representation.

Wong said that when asked by a booster if the group could file suit to reinstate the team, he replied: “In our society, anybody can sue.”

Although Huntington Beach boosters won a temporary restraining order to let the Oilers back in the playoffs, the players, parents and coaches saw their hopes dashed Thursday when an appellate court overturned the decision, ruling in favor of the CIF.

The three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana, which heard the Huntington Beach case, questioned whether the booster club had legal standing to sue on behalf of the football team.

The next day, Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Julian Cimbaluk expressed similar doubts that the Savanna booster club had a right to file its suit.

Nevertheless, boosters maintain that they were within their rights to initiate the court actions.

Attorneys for Huntington Beach High boosters asked that the team be reinstated after it was learned that one Huntington Beach student played all season long, but was not living with a parent or legal guardian as required by Southern Section rules.

Savanna High boosters were fighting for reinstatement after their record was nullified because a player was a fifth-year high school student, which also made him ineligible.

“This was the worst thing that could have happened to those kids,” Ferguson said. “We felt that our case was valid.”

Both Ferguson and Bellamy defended the groups’ use of legal action as part of their overall responsibility to support the team.

Bellamy said that booster clubs should have wide latitude, short of pressuring coaches into using specific players, when it comes to answering the needs of the players.

Boosters normally raise money through selling programs at games, setting up concession booths, holding auctions and raffling off items, such as signed footballs and jerseys, Bellamy said.

The boosters also often assume responsibility for holding season-end banquets and passing out trophies. These activities, Bellamy said, are coordinated with coaches and principals.

“We are not dictatorships” as some critics have suggested, Bellamy said. “We do not tell the coaches what to do. The object (of booster participation) is to support the coaches and let them coach the kids. We don’t want them to worry about the incidentals.”

But state CIF Commissioner Thomas Byrnes said that anything more than the unofficial support and aboveboard financial assistance is subject to question.

“The boosters are very, very valuable to school programs,” Byrnes said. He added that although “99.9% of what they do is positive,” booster members occasionally overstep their bounds.

“The school boards themselves are the elected representatives,” Byrnes said. “The principals and the high school administration are responsible to (school boards) and therefore answerable for their actions. Booster clubs are not,” he said.

“In my opinion, they have no official position in terms of matters of this kind,” Byrnes continued. “It comes down to who should speak for the school. Anything else leads to chaos.”

Thomas said those who challenge CIF rules in court in the long run may jeopardize the good standing in the federation of the high school teams they are attempting to help.

Times Staff Writers Mark Landsbaum and Catherine Gewertz contributed to this report.

LAST-SECOND LOSS--Huntington Beach player’s father fails in desperate court bid to halt CIF playoff game. A40