SAN GABRIEL VALLEY / COVER STORY : Trying for a Sporting Chance : To Beat the High Cost of College, There’s Nothing Like an Athletic Scholarship

Richard Estrada is standing on the sidelines at the Bishop Amat-Fontana High School football game, watching intently as Bishop Amat star Daylon McCutcheon intercepts a pass and runs 70 yards for a touchdown.

“His All-American status is holding up pretty well,” Estrada mutters into the cold night air, speaking about the young running and defensive back. “He definitely showed his running ability with that play.”

He’s holding a clipboard and making notations on a form after every play, but Estrada actually carries much more than that in his hands.

Estrada is holding the dreams and futures of young men.

Estrada is a professional high school football scout. Every year, he watches 40 to 50 high school football games in the San Gabriel Valley and throughout Los Angeles on behalf of a firm called Para-Dies Scouting, assessing the players’ abilities, attitudes and potential.

His reports and those from other Southern California scouts are 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 players 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 scholarship quest, in all sports-- for girls as well as boys. Full or partial scholarships are available in about 24 sports, and since implementation in the 1970s of Title IX, which seeks to put women’s sports on even spending with men’s, the growth of women’s athletic scholarships has been explosive.

In 1991, the last year for which figures were 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 scholarship pie actually is small, given the huge demand for a slice of it. No one knows how many high school students and their parents dream of athletic rides. But insiders estimate that only 10% qualify for athletic scholarships.

Still, the San Gabriel Valley has a history of producing great athletes. Jack Clark went from the diamond at Azusa High to become a Major League Baseball All Star. Kermit Johnson and James McAlister, known as “The Blair Pair” because they went to Blair High in Pasadena, went on to play at UCLA and in the NFL. Pat Haden, quarterback for the Rams and USC, graduated from Bishop Amat in La Puente. Former Laker star Michael Cooper played at Pasadena High School, and one of the NBA stars of the 1990s, Stacey Augmon, came out of Muir High in Pasadena.

If it can happen to them, some parents think, maybe it can happen to their kids.

Many adults go to great lengths to help their children get an athletic scholarship, which eases the tuition burden and could be a ticket to the pros.

Some San Gabriel Valley parents drive miles to get their kid in the best, most high-profile athletic program for his or her sport. Others drive cross-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.

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Some, including Bishop Amat High School basketball coach Alex Acosta, wonder if things have gone too far.

“It’s out of control,” Acosta says. “A lot of these kids start participating in a sport because they think they have a chance to receive a scholarship. It used to be you played as an extracurricular activity. Now for every team there’s four kids who are here to get a scholarship.”

Acosta cites a 14-year-old girl he coaches who just made the junior varsity basketball team. “She’s never played a game in her life, and she came up to me and said, ‘Do you think I’m going to be good enough to get a scholarship?’ ”

Craig Wallenbrock of Arcadia, who scouts for the Cleveland Indians, blames it on what he calls “the Texas cheerleader moms.”

“It’s much more competitive than it was, and we sign more kids out of high school,” Wallenbrock says. “But one of the biggest problems you have to deal with is parents who are pretty unrealistic.”

Almost everyone in 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 (for tuition, room and board) a year, who can blame a parent for thinking it 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. 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,” says football scout Estrada. “But you have to be realistic. Parents . . . ask me about their kids. I can’t lie to them. . . . I tell them the truth. Most of the time they’re nice about it, but sometimes they don’t want to believe me.”

Jim Brownfield, football coach at Muir High School in Pasadena for many years, also cautions parents about the “big fish/small pond” syndrome.

“There’s a big difference between being a great player at Muir and just being a player at USC,” Brownfield says.

Very few kids 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 rather which school they will grace with their presence.

Consider, for example, track athlete Heather Sumptner of Muir High, who is ranked third nationally for high school students in the 100-meter dash.

Under NCAA rules, recruiters aren’t permitted to contact high school players until after their junior year. But since her first day of eligibility, the soft-spoken 17-year-old senior has received hundreds of calls and letters from recruiters, representing all the top college women’s track programs in the nation.

Sumptner, who trains on weights and distance running in the off-season, has narrowed the list to a handful, mainly in the Sunbelt. Across the country, college track coaches are anxiously awaiting her decision, hoping she will choose them.

“I get about 15 calls a week, and sometimes one will call and another will be on the line, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, is that another recruiter? Tell him you’re going to my school,’ ” Heather says.

The young athlete, who runs a three-mile stretch of Lake Avenue with her father three times a week, says things are getting more intense as the year progresses. Some college coaches even get their star athletes to write to her.

“We get letters that say, ‘We’ve been watching you since ninth grade . . .’ but I don’t let it stress me out,” Heather says.

George Sumptner spotted his daughter’s potential when she was an 11-year-old soccer player and has nurtured it ever since with daily coaching and father-daughter workouts. Aware of the fragility of teen talent, however, Sumptner also watched his daughter closely to make sure she didn’t burn out by running too much, competing in too many meets or letting the pressure get to her. At the same time, her talent has been a godsend.

“College is so expensive, and with (the high cost of) tuition, it wouldn’t have been easy,” says George Sumptner, whose son won an academic scholarship to Hampton University in Virginia.

Although many students have undeniable athletic abilities, they must jump through another hoop before taking those abilities to college. 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 scholarships. There is now a sliding scale: If you have a 2.0 GPA, you need a 900 combined SAT score; if your GPA is 2.5, you need a 700 SAT. And the GPA must be in “core courses” of math, English, the sciences.

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

Says football scout Estrada: “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 San Gabriel Valley, the schools are generally better, the grades are better and the SATs are higher, coaches say. For a kid who’s good but not great as a player, grades can be the most important factor.

Some kids, in fact, flip the equation, making athletics an adjunct to getting an academic scholarship. La Canada High School’s outstanding basketball player this year, Charlie Petit, is an example.

“Extra-curricular activities like sports is one of the main things (colleges) look for,” says Petit, an 18-year-old who stands 6 foot 1, has a 3.9 GPA and wants to study premed.

Although he’s been approached by several colleges that provide athletic scholarships, Petit wants to attend an Ivy League school, preferably Harvard or Yale, which do not award them. But he knows that being a sports standout could tip the admissions scales in his favor. Already, he is being courted. Admissions officials from the University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy League school, recently flew out to meet with him.

Parents can also take another important step in increasing the chances for a scholarship. That is:

Make Sure the Kid Plays Where the Decision-Makers Will Look

The San Gabriel Valley features a number of powerhouse schools in certain sports: football at Bishop Amat, basketball at Glendora, track at Muir and badminton at Mark Keppel in Alhambra (yes, there are scholarships for badminton too). Faced with limited travel budgets--especially in the so-called non-revenue sports such as volleyball, which don’t pay for themselves through game tickets and concessions--coaches and recruiters gravitate toward the best teams, the ones with the stars and blue chippers, bypassing lesser-known programs.

High school coaches say games featuring these showcase teams can be meat markets, crawling with recruiters, agents and college coaches, as well as nervous kids and parents. At the Bishop Amat-Fontana game, Greg Dies, the founder and owner of Para-Dies Scouting, showed up with Estrada to film the game and take notes.

“This (Bishop Amat) is the No. 1 team in the nation. We like to have as many guys here as we can, especially since colleges can’t come out and see all the games all year long,” Dies says.

Adds Estrada: “You have to look at their level of intensity, how they’re playing, whether they’re hustling, how they’re doing mentally as they come off the field. Colleges want a kid with a good attitude, not a kid that’s . . . making excuses if something goes wrong.”

But what if you don’t happen to live in the Pasadena school district, or whatever district is tops in your child’s sport? With open enrollment in most school districts, that doesn’t matter too much anymore, provided you are willing to drive your child across the San Gabriel Valley.

In the case of Bishop Amat, a parochial school, crossing district lines has always been a possibility. Consider Kory Minor, a 17-year-old All-American football player at Bishop Amat who is being recruited by colleges around the nation. He lives in La Verne but commutes four cities away to La Puente each day.

Minor and his mother say they were drawn by Bishop Amat’s extraordinary football team, and although the blue-chipper is assured of a full scholarship to college, he already is thinking ahead.

“You’re not going to play football forever, just as long as you’re blessed, so academics always comes first for me,” says Minor, who wants to study business law in college and become a sports agent.

Minor’s blue-chip teammate McCutcheon, son of former Los Angeles Rams running back Lawrence McCutcheon, lives in Rowland Heights but also opted to commute to La Puente to attend school.

“My mom had heard about the football team, and she thought that coming and playing at Bishop and the teams they play against would give me more of a challenge,” McCutcheon says.

The gamble has paid off: McCutcheon is virtually assured a full college ride.

But what if you can’t make the sacrifices necessary to ensure 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

“Unless you’re a true blue-chipper in football or basketball, you need to market yourself,” says 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, 9-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 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. Mike LeDuc, who coaches the basketball team at Glendora High School, says such organizations “are just using kids to make money”; many others worry that 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.

James Urquidi, a standout baseball player at Arcadia High School, says he hoped somebody would notice him, but the offers weren’t rolling in. His coach at the time, Mike Stubins, recommended he try College Prospects.

“We hadn’t been getting quite as many colleges looking at me, and my coach didn’t understand why, so we thought it would be a good way for my name to get out,” Urquidi says.

Urquidi’s family saw the fee as a reasonable investment for big potential returns.

“Even if you get a quarter scholarship, that’s still $5,000 or so a year,” Urquidi says.

The young athlete has already received several letters of interest from colleges, says his mother, Katherine Urquidi.

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 might not jibe with the kid’s educational goals.

“I tell my kids that getting an education is the most important thing,” Bishop Amat basketball coach Acosta says. “They’re here because we have a good football program, but while they’re playing and trying to get those scholarships, they also have a great opportunity to get a great education.”