COVER STORY : Field of Dreams : Athletes Competing for Scholarships Play High-Stakes Game

Richard Estrada is standing on the sidelines at the St. John Bosco-St. Paul football game in Bellflower, watching intently as the players on the field run and pass and butt heads on the line. He holds 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 athletes.

Estrada is a professional high school football scout. For the last six years, Estrada has worked for an Orange County-based scouting company, attending 40 to 50 high school football games throughout Los Angeles County to assess players’ abilities, attitudes and potential.

His reports, and those from other company scouts in Southern California, 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 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. 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 athletic scholarships has been explosive. In 1991, the last year for which figures are available, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. reported that 90,000 athletes were receiving about $468 million in full and partial scholarships--almost one-third of them to women--from more than 500 NCAA Division I and II colleges and universities.

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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 full scholarships. But insiders estimate that no more than 10% of high school athletes qualify for athletic scholarships, either full or partial.

Still, Long Beach and the surrounding areas have a rich tradition of producing great athletes. Dozens have become baseball stars, including Wilson High School teammates Bobby Grich and Jeff Burroughs. Grich was an all-star second baseman with the Baltimore Orioles and the California Angels. Burroughs was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1974 with the Texas Rangers. Shane Mack, who graduated from Gahr High in Cerritos, attended UCLA, made the 1984 U.S. Olympic baseball team and played for the Minnesota Twins’ 1991 World Series champions.

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 costs but just might turn out to be a ticket to the pros.

Some parents move their children into certain school districts from miles away to get them in the best, most high-profile athletic programs for their sport.

Some even take their kids across the country to “showcase tournaments,” where college coaches and recruiters can see them in action.

Other parents pay hundreds of dollars to companies that circulate athletic resumes among college coaches.

Legendary El Segundo High School baseball Coach John Stevenson thinks that parents’ aggressiveness has 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. Yet, with the average cost of a private four-year college hovering around $14,000 a year, including tuition, room and board, who can blame a parent 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.”

Roger Williams, basketball coach at La Mirada High for 17 years, thinks that parents often look through rose-colored glasses.

“They sometimes think their kids are better than they really are,” said Williams, who has seen a couple of players leave La Mirada for what they thought were greener pastures, only to fail to earn a scholarship. “It’s like, ‘Hey, my kid was an all-star in Little League.’ Well this isn’t Little League any longer. You have to perform.”

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, Long Beach Polytechnic High School’s standout football lineman Brandon Whiting. At 6-foot-3, 260 pounds, Whiting had his pick of Pac-10 schools. He chose California over Stanford, and is starting at defensive tackle as a freshman this fall.

Then there was Artesia basketball star Charles O’Bannon, who was recognized as one of the finest college prospects in the nation while still in middle school. In his senior year, the 6-foot, 7-inch high school All-American received offers from more than 100 schools. O’Bannon finally chose UCLA, where he starts alongside brother Ed O’Bannon, who also had been the object of an intense recruiting battle.

The athletic talent possessed by the O’Bannons and Whiting are undeniable. But the trio also did well in the classroom, something that not all athletes accomplish.

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 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.

Denver Broncos running back Leonard Russell, the National Football League offensive player of the year in 1991, had his pick of colleges when he graduated from Long Beach Poly in 1987. He accepted a scholarship from Arizona State, but soon found that he had shortchanged himself in high school by not studying.

“As far as the academics, I knew I wasn’t as disciplined in the classroom as I was on the football field,” Russell once said in an interview.

That’s true at many high schools, it seems. Says 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.”

Russell graduated from Poly with a 1.8 GPA, which made him ineligible to play for Arizona State his freshman year. He wound up playing football at Mt. San Antonio College, a junior college in Walnut. In two seasons he boosted his GPA, and graduated with an associate’s degree. He earned back his scholarship at Arizona State. After one season with the Sun Devils, Russell was selected by the New England Patriots in the first round of the NFL draft.

Some kids flip the equation, making athletics an adjunct to getting an academic scholarship.

Peninsula High School girls’ basketball player Katharine Foster-Keddie, a 17-year-old 6-footer who has a 3.9 GPA, 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. Those schools 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

Because of shrinking travel budgets, especially in the so-called “non-revenue sports” such as volleyball and softball, recruiters gravitate to the best teams, the ones with the stars and blue chippers, bypassing lesser-known programs.

But what if you don’t happen to live in a district that is tops in your child’s sport?

You can do what a lot of parents do: Move into the district so your child can go to school there.

The O’Bannons’ parents, Ed and Madeline O’Bannon, moved the family in the mid-1980s from South-Central Los Angeles to a home in Cerritos within the Artesia High School attendance area. Basketball, they say, didn’t figure totally in their decision to move, but the move allowed their sons to play for coach Wayne Merino, one of the most successful basketball coaches in the area.

Then there are those youths who move on their own.

Enrico Bozman, a standout running back at Bellflower High in 1992, moved in with the parents of his girlfriend last year, was given a hardship transfer clearance by local athletic officials, and starred at Los Alamitos High, where coach John Barnes has built a football dynasty.

Almost every top program has players with similar stories of moving from sometimes far-flung areas into the school district.

Basketball coach Patrick Roy at Inglewood High School 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.

Not everyone can pick up and move, though. Some parents find a distant relative or friend and send their kid to live there during weekdays. Some simply list a relative’s address so their kids can attend school.

Paramount football Coach Ken Sutch, a 20-year veteran, frowns on moving a kid for the sake of sports.

“They need to be settled, have friends,” he said. “When kids jump around from place to place, all they have is that one focus, and that makes them a pretty narrow person. That’s a real danger.”

In addition to concentrating on high school powerhouses, recruiters spend a lot of time scouting spring and summer leagues and privately funded club teams.

In girls’ sports, such as volleyball and soccer, the vast majority of college scholarships awarded are based on an athlete’s performance with private club teams or in private tournaments, according to Brian Gimmillaro, coach of the Cal State Long Beach women’s volleyball team, the defending national champions. The 20th annual UC Davis summer volleyball tournament, for example, drew more than 7,000 athletes and more than 100 college coaches and scouts in June.

But what if you can’t quite uproot your entire family just to make sure your son or daughter is in the best sports program? What if you can’t afford to fly all over the country showing off your child 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 statistics and academic record 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, 9-year-old College Prospects operates through about 175 independently owned franchises in 47 states. For $650, student athletes can have a complete resume sent to every college athletic 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--coach 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 softball player at Carson High School, said the girl 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 King, 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 student’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 Writers Paul McLeod and Rob Fernas contributed to this story.