Fields of Dreams : When it comes to college scholarships, high school players learn that it takes more than athletic prowess to succeed at this game.

Richard Estrada is standing on the sidelines at the Peninsula-West Torrance football game, watching intently as the young players on the field run and pass and butt heads on the line. He’s holding a clipboard, making notations on a form after every play, but he’s actually holding much more than that in his hands.

What Estrada is holding are the dreams and futures of young men.

Estrada is a professional high school football scout. Every year he will watch 40 to 50 high school football games in the South Bay and throughout Los Angeles on behalf of an Orange County-based company called Para-Dies Scouting, assessing the players’ abilities, attitudes and potential.

His reports and those from company scouts in other Southern California areas will be assembled and sold to colleges and universities for $1,500 to $2,000 a copy, giving them an overview of what’s available in the Southern California high school football market.

For anxious high school football players who will be waiting for those college football coaches to call, a thumbs up or a thumbs down from Estrada could be a deciding factor. Each notation he makes on that clipboard can help advance--or demolish--a high school boy’s dreams of getting a “ride”--that is, a full college scholarship.

It’s big business, this quest to get a scholarship, not just in football but in other sports, for girls as well as boys. Full or partial scholarships are available in about two dozen sports, and since implementation in the 1970s of Title IX, which seeks to balance expenditures on women’s sports with men’s, the growth of women’s athletics scholarships has been explosive. In 1991, the last year for which figures are available, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. reported that about 90,000 college athletes were receiving about $468 million in full and partial scholarships--almost a third of them to women--from 540 NCAA Division I and II colleges and universities.

Although the numbers are large, the size of the athletic scholarship pie actually is small, given the huge demand for a slice of it. No one knows just how many high school athletes--and their parents--entertain dreams of getting an athletic ride. But insiders estimate that no more than 10% of high school athletes qualify for athletic scholarships, either full or partial.

Still, the South Bay has a rich history of producing great athletes. George Brett went from the diamond at El Segundo High to an almost certain spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Vince Ferragamo, a star at Banning High in Wilmington, went on to bigger stardom as the Rams’ quarterback in their 1980 NFC championship season. Former NBA great Paul Westphal played at old Aviation High in Redondo Beach, while one of the NBA stars of the 1980s, Reggie Theus, came out of Inglewood High. And the list goes on.

If it can happen to them, some parents think, maybe it can happen to my kid.

As a result, many adults go to great lengths to help their children qualify for a college athletic scholarship, which not only would ease the burden of tuition but just might turn out to be a ticket to the pros.

In the South Bay, some parents have moved into certain school districts from miles away--and up to 15 years in advance--to get their kid in the best, most high-profile athletic program for his or her sport. Others take their kids across the country to “showcase tournaments” where college coaches and recruiters can see them in action. Still others pay hundreds of dollars to companies that circulate athletic resumes among college coaches.

Some, including legendary El Segundo High School baseball coach John Stevenson, think it’s gotten out of hand.

“It has become a frenzy,” said Stevenson. “There are kids playing solely because their parents are demanding that they earn a scholarship. Kids are trying to play for the wrong reasons.”

Almost everyone connected with high school sports has a story about pushy parents screaming at their kids for supposedly blowing a scholarship by missing a layup or muffing a grounder. And yet, with the average cost of a private four-year college hovering around $14,000 (tuition, room and board) a year, who can blame a parent of a high school athlete for thinking that it certainly would be nice if Junior or Sissy could get all or even a portion of that tuition picked up by the school’s athletic department?

So the question becomes, how do you help the kid do it? How do you increase the chances that your young athlete will get financial aid?

Based on interviews with coaches, student athletes, scouts, recruiters and parents, here are some suggestions:

Make Sure the Kid Can Play

That may sound obvious, but the ability to play a sport well-- very well--is a factor some parents overlook when they start dreaming of an athletic scholarship. Simply put, they think their young athlete is better than he or she really is.

“There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on out there,” said football scout Estrada. “But you have to be realistic. Sometimes parents will come up and ask me about their kids. I can’t lie to them. If they ask me, I tell them the truth. Most of the time they’re nice about it, but sometimes they don’t want to believe me.”

Stevenson, the baseball coach at El Segundo High for 36 years, also cautions parents about the “big fish/small pond” syndrome.

“Some parents say, ‘Why can’t my kid get a scholarship, he’s an All-League player?’ ” said Stevenson. “But what are there, six teams in his league? There’s a big difference between being a great player at El Segundo High School and just being a player at USC.”

Of course, some kids--a very few--are standouts, the so-called “blue chippers.” For them, it’s not a question of whether they’re good enough to get an athletic scholarship, but which school they will grace with their presence.

Consider, for example, Inglewood High School basketball player Paul Pierce, one of America’s most wanted young men.

Under NCAA rules, recruiters aren’t permitted to contact high school players until after their junior year. Last July 1, his first day of eligibility, the 6-foot, 7-inch Pierce got more than half a dozen calls from college coaches. Since then, he’s received hundreds of calls and letters from recruiters, representing all the top college basketball programs. Pierce, who’s rated the top college prospect in California, has narrowed the list to about six, including UCLA and USC. Across the country, college basketball coaches are anxiously awaiting his decision, hoping he will choose them.

“(Coaches) call back to back to back,” said Pierce, a soft-spoken young man who just turned 17. “It gets a little hard sometimes.”

But for Pierce’s mother, Lorraine Hosey, it’s been a godsend.

“I couldn’t afford to send my kids to college,” said Hosey, whose two other sons also were athletic standouts, one getting a basketball scholarship at the University of Wyoming and the other becoming a professional baseball player. “For us, Paul’s basketball has been a blessing.”

But while his basketball abilities are undeniable, Pierce still has one more hoop to get through before he can take those abilities to the college level. He has a 2.8 grade point average, but he still has to score a 700 or better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Which brings us to an equally important requirement for getting an athletic scholarship.

Make Sure the Kid Has Good Grades

Until the early 1980s, about the only academic requirement for playing college ball was maintaining a 1.6 grade point average in your college courses--not a skull-busting requirement. In 1983, however, the NCAA started requiring high school graduates to meet minimum grade-point and SAT standards to be eligible for college scholarships. There is now a sliding scale: if you have a 2.0 GPA, you need a 900 SAT score; if your GPA is 2.5, you need a 700 SAT. And the GPA must be in 13 “core courses”--math, English, the sciences.

The rules are strict. Poor grades mean no scholarship and no play. End of story, end of dreams.

“You have to have the grades,” said Patrick Roy, coach of the Inglewood Sentinels basketball team, which had core-class requirements for its student athletes even before the NCAA instituted them. “Our priority is to put kids in school, not just to play basketball. If you don’t want to . . . work for the grades to get you into college, you’re in the wrong program.”

Says football scout Estrada: “The city of L.A. probably has the best athletes overall in Southern California, but a lot of times nobody’s pushing those kids to study and go to school. So you get a kid with maybe a high C average, but then you look at his SAT, and sorry, it’s 600--and you get 200 just for writing your name. So those kids can’t get scholarships. In the South Bay the schools are generally better, the grades are better, the SATs are higher. For a kid who’s a good but not a great player, grades can be the most important factor.”

Some kids, in fact, flip the equation, making athletics an adjunct to getting an academic scholarship instead of the other way around. Peninsula High School girls’ basketball player Katharine Foster-Keddie is an example.

“I’m using sports to get into better schools,” said Foster-Keddie, a 17-year-old six-footer who has a 3.9 GPA and recently became a semifinalist for a National Merit Scholarship. Although she’s been approached by several colleges that provide athletic scholarships, she wants to attend an Ivy League school, preferably Harvard or Yale, which do not award athletic scholarships. But she knows that being a sports standout--she also plays volleyball--could tip the admissions scales in her favor.

Foster-Keddie and her parents also recognized another important step in increasing the chances for a scholarship. That is . . . :

Make Sure the Kid Plays Where the Decision-Makers Will See Her

The South Bay features a number of powerhouse schools in certain sports: baseball (El Segundo), basketball (Inglewood), girls basketball (Peninsula), and girls and boys volleyball (Mira Costa in Manhattan Beach). Faced with limited travel budgets, especially in the so-called “non-revenue sports” such as volleyball, coaches and recruiters naturally gravitate toward the best teams, the ones with the stars and blue chippers, bypassing lesser-known programs. “It’s sort of a meat market in some respects,” said Wendell Yoshida, who coached the Peninsula Lady Panthers’ basketball team to a 1992 national championship and operates a nationally known program.”(Coaches and recruiters) are out there all the time. We’re going to Ohio this year to play in a major Christmas tournament, and there’ll be college recruiters and coaches crawling all over the place.”

But what if you don’t happen to live in the El Segundo school district, or the Palos Verdes Peninsula district, or the Inglewood district, or whatever district is tops in your kid’s sport? Well, you can do what a lot of parents--including Foster-Keddie’s--have done: Move into the district so your kid can go to school there.

“Wendell Yoshida is the best basketball coach in the area,” said Foster-Keddie’s father, Kevin Foster-Keddie. “When (Katharine) was in the fifth grade, and seemed to be showing talent in basketball, a friend said, ‘Call Yoshida.’ ”

Foster-Keddie did, sent Katharine to several of Yoshida’s summer basketball camps, and then when she was about ready to start high school, he and Katharine moved to a leased home in Rancho Palos Verdes--leaving the rest of the Foster-Keddie family back home in El Segundo.

“We made a lot of changes,” Kevin Foster-Keddie said. “It was difficult. But I believe you have to be supportive.”

Another Peninsula basketball star, Allison Fortner, a 5-foot 9-inch shooting guard who recently returned from a trip to the East Coast for a showcase tournament to show her stuff to recruiters, also is a transplant: she moved into the district from San Pedro.

Almost every other top program has players with similar stories of moving from sometimes far-flung areas into the school district. Basketball coach Roy at Inglewood has had players move into the district from Artesia, the San Fernando Valley, all over.

“They feel they need to come here to be seen by the coaches,” Roy said.

And one El Segundo resident, who asked to remain anonymous, acknowledged that he decided to move to the city 15 years ago--when his son was still in diapers--in large part because of Stevenson’s baseball program.

But what if you can’t quite uproot your entire family just to make sure your kid is in the best sports program? What if you can’t afford to fly all over the country showing off your kid at showcase tournaments? How can you get recruiters and coaches to notice you? The solution may be . . . :

Advertise, Advertise, Advertise

“Unless you’re a true blue-chipper in football or basketball, you need to market yourself,” said Tracy Jackson, president of College Prospects of America, an Ohio-based firm that contracts with student-athletes to distribute profiles of their athletic and academic statistics to colleges across the country. “It’s a dating service concept; we introduce athletes to colleges and vice versa. If they want to get married, that’s up to them.”

The oldest and largest company of its type, nine-year-old College Prospects operates through about 175 independently owned franchises in 47 states. For $650, a student can have a complete resume sent to every college athletics program in which they might legitimately be qualified to play. Jackson makes no guarantees that they’ll get a scholarship, but he says there’s a money-back guarantee that the athlete will get at least one response from a college coach.

Not everyone approves of the concept--Stevenson of El Segundo calls such services “parasites,” and even Jackson acknowledges that some fly-by-night operations have damaged the concept’s image. But the company literature is thick with testimonials from college and high school coaches and parents. And some student athletes say it’s the only way to get their names out there.

Sandra Clark of Carson, whose daughter, Leslie King, 17, is a standout girls’ softball player at Carson High School, said Leslie was hoping somebody would notice her, but nobody did. “Her coach told her about it (College Prospects), and since she signed up, she’s gotten about 25 responses.”

“The coaches are sending me questionnaires,” said Leslie, a senior who’s on the honor roll and has a 3.95 GPA. “I haven’t talked to any of them yet, but I’m hoping something will work out.”

“It wasn’t easy to come up with the money (for the service),” Clark said. “But when you consider how much college costs, we thought it was worth it.”

But perhaps the most important piece of advice on college athletic scholarships, according to almost everyone, is not to attach too much importance to them. For most kids the odds are long, the payoff often is not that great--especially from a partial scholarship--and the athletic scholarship may not jibe with the kid’s educational goals.

“Our mission (in high school athletics) is not to build college players or professional players,” said Stevenson. “Our mission is to provide an education, and athletics is part of the educational process. If a kid gets a scholarship, that’s nice, but I don’t think kids should play just for that purpose. They should play because they love to play.”

Times Staff Writer Rob Fernas contributed to this story.