But Nobody Asked: Tennis Anyone? : Recreation: Residents of the Carmelitos Housing Project in Long Beach argue that money for new court might have been better spent for other athletic facilities.

When residents of the Carmelitos Housing Project heard last year that they might be getting $50,000 in grants for youth programs, they began dreaming. Some wanted to spend the money on drug counseling for the project’s youths, many of whom are in gangs. Others spoke of expanding the project’s shoestring recreation program.

May Pearl Randolph, who runs that program and lives in Carmelitos with her daughter, asked some of the 70 youths she supervises after school what they wanted. One suggested an Olympic-size gym. Others wanted weightlifting or boxing. Most boys wanted to get back a baseball field the city shut down a few years ago, because nearby owners of private homes complained about noise and stray balls.

Nobody asked for a tennis court.

But this week, to the astonishment and even fury of some Carmelitos tenants, that’s what they’re getting.

The City Council approved using a $25,000 community grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to build a tennis court and buy rackets, balls and to pay for a dozen field trips. The HUD grant is part of a new “sports club” program aimed at getting children off the streets.

But residents said the project is an example of good intentions gone sour.

“They’re bringing in these programs, but they’re not fitting the needs of the people or asking us what we want,” said Ray Fox, a Carmelitos tenant who is a member of the Los Angeles County Housing Commission.

Carmelitos, Los Angeles County’s first and oldest public housing project, is a well-kept North Long Beach complex of some 700 units that resemble landscaped townhouses. It may be one of the only housing projects in the country where tenants complain that their rosebushes are getting stolen. But in recent years the complex has dealt with increasing crime and drug problems.

Last year a neighboring school built a 10-foot-high concrete wall between its playground and the project to protect students from stray bullets.

Tenants cannot see how a tennis court will help matters.

Young tenant B.J. Cole, 13, was watching a group of boys playing football one recent evening in a space between two apartment buildings. “Tennis?” he said, wrinkling his nose and snickering. “It’s not my thing. All I see playing it are rich white people.

“Sports is funner than gangs,” Cole said. “You can get out and go to college or become a pro.”

He dreams of becoming a basketball star.

He knows of just one tennis pro: “I seen Mac, what’s his name? I saw him once on TV.”

Dorothy McAleavey fumed Tuesday at a monthly community meeting: “What the hell ya gonna do with a tennis court? Kids selling dope aren’t gonna tiptoe over to play tennis!”

McAleavey has raised six children in the project since moving there in 1973.

“I think you all goofed,” Ernestine Owens, a mother of two, told project management and a county official at the meeting. “Tennis is not a low-income-bracket thing. The people in Carmelitos cannot afford to push their children into it.”

Housing officials disagreed.

“Don’t box your children in,” pleaded Richard Vega, a coordinator with the Community Development Commission’s Housing Authority. “Don’t limit yourselves that way.”

A couple of tenants agreed with Vega. Shirley Bridges predicted that one day Carmelitos will produce a champion tennis player.

“The majority of kids here are black and Hispanic,” she said. “They should be given a chance to see what tennis is like.”

But even Bridges is angry that she and other residents were not told about the decision to build a tennis court until it was approved. City recreation and county housing officials said they decided on a tennis court in part because of the U.S. Tennis Assn. effort to bring the game to inner-city children.

Kelton Reese, manager of recreation services for city parks, said he was assured by county officials that tenants had been consulted.

However, tenants said, they were told about how the money would be used only in December--after the grant had been approved and could not be changed.

“We all squawked,” Bridges recalled.

Even Dorothy Rainey, the county’s property supervisor for the project, said she was not consulted before the HUD application was sent. And two officials involved in the process conceded, privately, that the county was so rushed to make its deadline for submitting the grant in October, 1989, that it could not get sufficient reaction from tenants.

Tenants argued that just four people can play tennis at one time and that there are already courts at nearby Scherer Park. They said money spent on a ball field or used to expand recreation programs could help more youths.

The project’s recreation program--run by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and paid for by the county--needs basic supplies, such as paint and construction paper to make Halloween pumpkins. Tenants also said picnic tables on the old baseball diamond are covered by gang graffiti and that a nearby soccer field is soggy because of drainage problems.

“We sure could use more for the kids,” Randolph said. “But tennis? I haven’t known of any kid yet who knows the game or plays. If they really wanted to help these kids, they should have put in a (baseball) diamond.”

Few children thought that tennis could keep them out of a gang.

“The guys I know who are into gangs would look at it funny if they tried tennis,” said Mae Randolph, 13, daughter of May Pearl Randolph.

But then, she conceded, she couldn’t see soccer or boxing helping her friends, either: “They’ve been in jail. That’s not helped them none.”