COLUMN ONE : School Sports Veer Off Track : Boys athletics programs--and performance on the field--suffer as budget cuts, home pressures and crime take a toll.

Sitting in glass cases at virtually every high school in America are trophies for outstanding track and field performances.

At Tulare High in Central California are 1948-vintage awards of Bob Mathias, a decathlete who became the youngest track and field winner in Olympic history. At Wichita East High in south-central Kansas are the 1964 mementos of Jim Ryun, the first high school student to break the four-minute mile. At Baker High in northeast Florida are honors for sprinter Houston McTear, considered the world’s fastest human in 1975.

These plaques and statuettes stood for years as testaments to the ever-increasing speed and agility of teen-age boys. Last year, the record-breaking came to a halt.

For the first time in more than five decades, no national records were set for boys outdoor track in the United States.

This is the latest and perhaps most startling signal that teen-age boys generally are not running as fast or jumping as high as generations past. Starting in the late 1970s, there has been a slow and subtle deterioration of boys athletics in school districts nationwide.

The number of boys participating in basketball, wrestling and swimming has declined by about a third, according to the National Federation of State High School Assns.

In some sports, entire programs have been dismantled because of budget cuts. Thirty years ago, Southern California had some of the top male gymnasts in the country. Today, there is not a single boys gymnastics program in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

When it comes to high school sports today, “a lot of people are watching instead of doing,” said Jack Shepard, editor of “High School Track,” a national compilation of boys records. “If the trends don’t change, we may not have much to watch, either.”

A shortage of coaches, changes in enrollment patterns, rising crime and increased emphasis on girls sports have affected boys participation and performance on courts and playing fields.

“Too many youngsters today are missing out on the camaraderie, the competition, the sense of values--all the things that sports have traditionally provided young people,” said Vern Seefeldt, a sports researcher at Michigan State University.

The teen-agers who drop out or are excluded from sports often are not gifted athletes but are eager to compete and are humiliated when they do not get a chance.

One young man at Long Beach Polytechnic hoped to play linebacker on the freshman team last fall. But his family did not return from summer vacation until a week after practice had started.

By the time he got to school and was cleared for the team, all the gear had been issued, and he had to sit out the season.

“I lifted weights to try to stay in shape for next year,” he said. “But, look, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s embarrassing not to play.”

Fiscal problems are squeezing children out of many athletic programs. In Los Angeles, the school district cut its athletic budget 20% in August, eliminating practice games, Saturday playoffs and preseason scrimmages. Most schools in the district also had to abolish at least one sport and get rid of all junior varsity teams.

The elimination of JV teams was “devastating,” said Robert Francola, varsity football coach at Kennedy High in Granada Hills, an upscale community in the San Fernando Valley. “It meant that the bigger kids who were too big for the B team but not good enough for varsity couldn’t play any longer,” he said.

Middle-class youths often have easier access than poor children to public parks and private clubs. As a result, relatively affluent teen-agers are affected less by cuts in public school athletic budgets.

When the Los Angeles district shut down the last of its boys gymnastics programs last year, Dermot Kiernan and his students were beneficiaries. Kiernan operates Junior Gym, a private gymnastics school in West Los Angeles. At little or no cost, he received abandoned balance beams, mats and other equipment from the district.

Nationwide, the number of teen-age boys who compete on high school teams dropped from 4.4 million in 1977 to 3.4 million last year--a decline of nearly 22%.

A nearly equivalent drop-off in school enrollment does not fully explain the decline. Most high schools, regardless of enrollment trends, field a varsity basketball or football team with a relatively constant number of players. Much of the decline in team participation occurs, experts say, when athletic programs are cut or lose popularity with students.

While California high school enrollment rose 12% between 1972-73 and 1991-92, boys’ participation in athletics dropped 11%, according to the state Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation.

School officials statewide fear that longtime neglect of athletic programs and recent budget cuts will take their toll.

“If things continue as they are now, athletics could go the way of art and music--just slowly disappear from more and more youngsters’ lives,” said Hal Harkness, director of interscholastic athletics for the Los Angeles district.

In Orange County, school officials say freshman and sophomore teams have been merged to save money on coaching staffs. And for the first time, parents are being forced to pay fees for the buses that transport their teen-agers to games.

In team sports, coaches are seeing signs of deterioration in performance whether their players are drawn from poor, inner-city neighborhoods or affluent suburbs.

“Compared to when I was in school (in the 1970s), today’s football players are much bigger and stronger,” said Paul Knox, football coach at Dorsey High in South-Central Los Angeles. “Our line this year was just huge. But there were not as many of them. Also, for obvious reasons--the streets and parks are not as safe--kids don’t play as much sandlot or street ball. So while they may come with skill and conditioning and size, they do not have the knowledge that comes from playing a lot.”

It is difficult to compare football or basketball players from one generation to the next. But in track and field, performance can be objectively timed and measured.

Instead of breaking records every four or five years, as was typical, high school track and field contenders in California are setting records only about once a decade, Harkness said.

It is not that youngsters have reached the outer limits of human potential and endurance, he added. In “natural” events, such as sprints, where innate ability is a key factor, youngsters are continuing to set records at a reasonable pace.

However, many boys who run distance races, put the shot or participate in other events that require more technical coaching are performing at levels of 30 or 40 years ago, Harkness said.

That is true not only in California, but also in the nation as a whole.

“In 1992, no national boys high school records recognized by Track & Field News were set in outdoor track,” Shepard said. “The last time we failed to set new records was 1935. Only three times since 1915, when record-keeping began--1917, 1922 and 1935--have we failed to set new records. It could be that we’ll see that 1992 was a freak year, but if we get two or three years with no new records, that would be significant and would certainly confirm what we have suspected”--that performance is declining.

Sometimes a winning athlete can have such outstanding marks that his record will distort overall trends in an event, said Shepard, who is also men’s high school editor of Track & Field News. To see how well the top tier, not just the single best competitor, has been doing, Shepard looked at the 10th-, 30th- and 50th-best performances in a variety of events over the past 32 years.

Last year, he found, it took one second longer for the 10th-best high school runner in the country to run the mile than it did three decades earlier. In the shotput, the 10th-best mark in 1992 was only half an inch above the level established in 1965. In the long jump, the 10th-best mark was almost an inch below that of seven years ago.

In California, immigration has been cited as a factor in the decline of interest in some of the country’s most popular sports.

“A large number of young people are attending schools here who don’t have the background or the interest in American sports,” said Harkness of the Los Angeles school district. “Why, there are schools in this city with such large Hispanic populations they can barely field football teams any longer. And while a lot of those kids may want to play soccer, there aren’t enough coaches for them.”

Hank Johnson is the varsity football coach at Jefferson High, a working-class, largely Latino school in South-Central Los Angeles. “What’s sad are the reasons you hear today why kids aren’t going out for sports,” he said. “Their parents tell them they have to earn more to buy shoes or help with the family expenses.”

A shortage of coaches has been one of the biggest problems facing high school athletics. Physical education teachers traditionally have doubled as high school coaches, but the number of mandatory PE classes has plummeted in recent years as every state except one--Illinois--has done away with them, according to a U.S. Public Health Service survey last summer.

Many of today’s coaches are what are known as “walk-on” or “rent-a-coaches”--parents or former athletes who have little, if any, contact with students during the school day.

“When the coaches were also the PE teachers they would collar a student and say: ‘I think I can make you a good track man,’ ” Shepard said. “Now they cannot.”

One example of the impact of a full-time physical education teacher involves former all-pro tight end Kellen Winslow of the San Diego Chargers. Winslow did not play football until his senior year in high school in St. Louis, when he was persuaded to leave gym class and try out for the team. Until then, he recently told a Chicago newspaper columnist, he had assumed that “everybody could catch a ball with one hand.”

Pressures at home and from friends have hampered youngsters’ performances and forced some out of sports prematurely.

Practically every coach has a horror story to tell about an athlete who has been lost to the streets, said Kye Courtney, a track and football coach for 25 years and now athletic director at Hawthorne High.

“Some of the best sprinters in this state are either dead or in prison,” Courtney said. One of his former students, Henry Thomas, was one of the state’s greatest high school sprinters in the mid-1980s and holds the fastest mark in the 100- and 400-meter races. But shortly after Thomas left Hawthorne for UCLA, he was arrested, and is serving several life sentences for robbery and kidnaping.

Last spring, Offord Rollins IV, a student at Wasco High near Bakersfield, was convicted of murdering his girlfriend. He is the state’s indoor triple jump champion.

Crime has plagued sports in other, more subtle ways.

When games are played in the evening in the inner city, family and friends are often afraid to go for fear of being shot or robbed.

The most highly publicized incidents in Los Angeles happened in 1991 when Banning High School refused to play its longtime rival Dorsey because of two apparent gang-related shootings within less than a month near Dorsey’s Jackie Robinson Stadium.

Because of such fears at city schools all over the country, booster clubs have had less success raising money, which has meant further cuts in athletic programs.

Johnson said he had only enough money to suit up 40 football players this season at Jefferson High, although he would have suited up 60 or 70 if he had $300 per student for equipment. In California schools, as in most districts nationwide, sports gear is not included in state education budgets and must be paid for with donations and ticket sales.

In some cities, the private sector has tried to compensate.

In Detroit and Chicago, professional athletes have joined to provide funds to keep public school athletic programs afloat.

In Los Angeles, the Amateur Athletic Foundation has spent about $43 million in leftover funds from the 1984 Summer Olympics trying to improve sports for minority youths and other youngsters who live in poor, crime-infested neighborhoods.

One foundation-supported program, Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI), was started by baseball scout John T. Young, who found that the national pastime increasingly has become a white, middle-class sport.

“There are too few opportunities for too many kids,” said Anita DeFrantz, president of the foundation and the first African-American woman to compete on the U.S. Olympic rowing team. “There is so much that needs to be done.”

The Decline of High School Sports (BullDog Edition, A30)

Boys’ participation in high school athletics has dropped by about 22%, from a high of 4.4 million in 1977-78 to 3.4 million in 1991-92. A few sports, including soccer, lacrosse and crew, rose dramatically in popularity over the past decade and a half, but budget cuts, enrollment declines and other factors have brought about sizable drops in participation in many popular sports.

TOP 10 BOYS’ SPORTS

SPORT 1977-78 1991-92 % CHANGE Football 1,074,973 912,845 -15 Basketball 764,602 518,127 -32 Baseball 432,853 433,684 0 Track and Field 706,892 417,451 -41 Soccer 141,070 236,082 +67 Wrestling 338,328 229,908 -32 Cross Country 206,587 154,119 -25 Tennis 170,653 145,374 -15 Golf 135,844 132,847 -2 Swimming, Diving 106,498 79,998 -25

*

Girls’ participation in high school sports rose more than 600% between 1971-72 and 1977-78, from 294,015 to nearly 2.1 million. The increase was the result of Title IX, federal legislation that bans discrimination against females in school sports. Because of recent shortages of coaches and drops in enrollment, girls’ participation has dropped 7% since 1977-78.

TOP 10 GIRLS’ SPORTS

SPORT 1977-78 1991-92 % CHANGE Basketball 537,810 391,612 -27 Track and Field 466,093 327,183 -30 Volleyball 326,091 293,948 -10 Softball* 179,739 221,150 +23 Tennis 147,365 139,433 -5 Soccer 17,970 135,302 +653 Cross Country 53,726 110,409 +106 Swimming, Diving 88,062 93,490 +6 Field Hockey 66,174 49,160 -26 Golf 25,134 42,368 +67

* fast pitch

Source: National Federation of State High School Assns.