COLUMN ONE : Sports as a Second Language : Immigrant students around the Southland are using athletics to hurdle social barriers and adapt to American culture.

Soi Hoang will graduate from Verdugo Hills High School in June, and he hopes to play college volleyball someday. If he does well, he could make an All-American team.

That would be a new experience for Hoang, who played on a high school team with students of just about every nationality except Americans.

Verdugo Hills finished second in its division of the city playoffs this spring with a team made up entirely of players from Vietnam, China and the Philippines. And none of the eight Latino players on the junior varsity even lived in this country a year ago.

If the United States is a melting pot, the pot has boiled over in Southern California. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, which includes Verdugo Hills High, students speak more than 83 languages and dialects.

In such an environment, school officials say, sports have become invaluable in the process of acculturation. Not only can sports draw students to class and help keep them there, but they also provide a way around the social, cultural and linguistic obstacles facing new immigrants.

“Athletics are one of the easiest ways to break down the barriers,” said Lou Ramirez, the athletic director at Birmingham High, a Los Angeles Unified School District campus in Van Nuys with a large non-English-speaking enrollment. “There’s no question that athletics is the best deal. It’s an international language. The kids get to know each other better. They come to depend on each other.

“Once they get a little confidence in one thing, it carries over into others.”

Ramon Salcido, an associate professor of social work at USC and an adviser to Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente), believes sports can also alter perceptions and boost self-esteem.

“Let’s say I’m a recent immigrant, and people don’t like the way I talk and they don’t like the way I look,” Salcido explained. “But when I’m out there on the soccer field, hey, I’m a hero. I’m someone important.

“It’s important for mental health and social health.”

Varant Vartabedian, athletic director at Holy Martyrs High School in Encino, believes this is especially true for immigrants whose homelands are at war or struggling with civil unrest. Dealing with uncertainties about friends and relatives left behind, he said, can be more difficult than learning a new language or style of dress.

Nearly half the students at Holy Martyrs, which is affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church, come from strife-torn countries such as Lebanon, Iran and Syria. Vartabedian says involvement in sports “takes their minds off other things.”

“The way of life here is so different,” said Vartabedian, who emigrated from Lebanon 12 years ago. “The majority of the students, until they get used to it, they are depressed. They feel something missing.”

Sports, Vartabedian said, can fill that void.

“With a team, they feel like they are something important rather than just being a student in a school somewhere,” he said. “It’s something special.”

Although other methods of cultural integration--such as classes, church and social groups--are available for most students, experts say sports have one important advantage: relevance to the life students knew before.

“English as a second language programs assist in socialization and give (students) something to strive for,” Salcido said. “But the only way they can find something of social relevance, something that reminds them of home, is often through sports.”

The highly acclaimed Eastman Project, named for the East Los Angeles elementary school where it was founded, was built around that concept. Using sports, art and music, the program seeks to draw ethnic and non-ethnic students together and hold their interest through a creative break in the academic schedule.

Los Angeles school district officials, alarmed at the growing dropout rate among ethnic students, are counting on such creative approaches. The district has seen its Latino enrollment nearly quadruple in the last two decades; today 62% of the district’s students are Latino. But with the Latino dropout rate at 40% nationally, officials fear the district could lose many of those students before graduation.

Outlying school districts are beginning to confront similar problems as large immigrant populations spread to suburban areas such as the San Gabriel Valley, Glendale and Ventura County.

“A lot of the kids . . . find themselves lost in the classroom,” said Rudy Campos, who left a teaching and coaching position at Oxnard High last year to sell real estate. “(But) I saw a lot of changes in personalities and their attitude toward school on the soccer field.”

Campos remembers experiencing many of the same feelings when he and his family left Mexico and moved to Monterey Park more than 20 years ago.

“My experience was culture shock,” said Campos, who was 13 at the time. “I didn’t speak a word of English. I didn’t know what anyone was saying.”

Fortunately, he remembered to bring a soccer ball--and with that he began to find himself.

“A lot of kids played kickball, and that was a natural for me,” he said. “That kind of broke the ice.”

Campos followed soccer to East Los Angeles College and eventually wound up at Whittier College on an athletic scholarship, graduating with a degree in life sciences.

“It was a big deal to get a scholarship to college, to go to a private college and live on campus,” Campos said. “Sports was the thing that motivated me to continue in school. It was an incentive for me.”

But the link between athletics and academics can be a tenuous one, and moves to strengthen it can be controversial.

Students in the Los Angeles school district, for example, must maintain a C average to be eligible for extracurricular activities. Although that may lead some students to take their studies seriously, others struggling with the language often find the challenge too demanding.

“I have mixed feelings about that (the C requirement),” said James Diego Vigil, an associate professor of anthropology at USC and an expert in minority affairs. “I know a lot of the athletes have the ability to achieve that. But there are some kids who, for some reason or another, cannot abide by that requirement.

“We have to find a way to integrate those kids.”

Such a task is often easier on the athletic field than in the classroom, coaches, teachers and athletes say, because the most obvious obstacle, language, is more easily negotiated in sports.

“People talk fast and they’re hard to understand,” said Dragan Jovanowski, a tennis player at North Hollywood High and a native of Yugoslavia. “But when you play tennis, you only count the points.”

At Oxnard High, Campos made the process of acculturation part of his team’s daily regimen by refusing to speak Spanish during practice. That proved to be a break with tradition, but Campos believes his players benefited from it when they got back to the classroom.

“In the past, most of the other coaches were walk-on coaches who really didn’t understand the academic end of it,” Campos said. “They always spoke to the kids in Spanish. (But) I wanted to get them familiar with what they would encounter.”

Campos’ soccer players, most of them immigrants from Mexico, were already familiar with their sport. However, with the growth in ethnic diversity among recent immigrants, that’s not always the case.

Edvin Babayova, a Times All-Valley and All-City Section football player from Van Nuys High, played soccer as a youngster and didn’t see his first football game until coming to the United States from Italy six years ago. His first gridiron was an asphalt street in the New York City borough of Queens.

“It was weird,” Babayova, 19, said of the experience. “The ball was a different shape, and all the rules, they didn’t make sense to me. The first time someone threw the ball to me, I didn’t run or move or anything. I think I threw it back.”

But football was popular. Everyone played football, and Babayova didn’t want to stand out by refusing to play.

“I felt that in being part of a team, I would belong,” he said. “The team is a lot like being with your brothers. I knew there was no going back (to Italy). I knew I would make it.”

At Alhambra High, a recent wave of immigrants from Southeast Asia has turned the school’s athletic program upside down. The school, which once fielded a strong football team, has struggled in the sport recently. The Moors, as the team is named, won just four games in each of the last two seasons and, last fall, had to combine the freshman and sophomore teams because there weren’t enough students to form two squads.

In badminton, however, the school has evolved into a power in its region, reaching the playoff semifinals. One of its girls’ doubles teams, meanwhile, won the section title.

The change in Alhambra’s athletic direction reflects a larger change in the community, which has absorbed a large number of Asian immigrants since the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

“The athletic program changes as the athletes change,” Alhambra Athletic Director Steve Kemp said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of making a conscious effort to change the emphasis. Kids coming in with different abilities and different interest make that change.”

Nevertheless, they can put a strain on a school’s athletic program and a premium on creative thinking. Kemp actively courts students with athletic talent once they enroll at Alhambra, and the approach has paid off. Students at Alhambra have apparently adapted to their new environment faster and have made consistently high scores on standardized academic tests. And at the same time, in basketball and badminton, Alhambra’s teams have become among Southern California’s best.

Samuel Mark, an associate vice president of civic and community affairs at USC, says academic achievement can be linked to participation in athletics, especially in the case of immigrant students.

“(Sports) provides an area where students can feel good about themselves, and that carries over into academics,” he said. “It serves as a way to boost self-esteem.”

Those who work most closely with the athletes, as coaches and as teachers, insist that the benefits enrich the school as well as the students.

“Sometimes it’s more challenging, but I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Dino Stirpe, the volleyball coach at Verdugo Hills High. “They (the immigrant students) bring so much to the school.”

It’s clear that the students are beginning to feel more comfortable.

“Right now, I think of myself as an American,” said Babayova, the football player from Van Nuys. “I play an American game and I believe in the American dream.”