A Battle for Hearts and Soles

By LISA DILLMAN, ERIC SHEPARD and GEORGE DOHRMANN

March 16, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

For archrivals Nike and Adidas, the heavy artillery is a barrage of flashy, MTV-like commercials featuring NBA stars. But the foot soldiers in the nation’s high-stakes shoe wars are high school basketball players.

From major urban centers to wealthy suburban enclaves, hundreds of elite high school teams wear expensive, cutting-edge shoes and other athletic gear supplied for free by companies battling for supremacy in the multibillion-dollar industry.

The gifts flow from a corporate marketing strategy designed to increase visibility at every level of organized sports. Millions of dollars in equipment, and sometimes money, is legally donated without contracts and often without oversight from school or athletic federation officials.

The number of these sponsorships has risen along with the stature of prep basketball: High school games are increasingly on cable TV, and Kobe Bryant of the Lakers and Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves are proof that high school stars can leap directly to the NBA.

Shoe companies usually target teams that are title contenders or that have rising stars who may later play in college or the pros.

Nike, the industry giant, gives shoes, uniforms, other equipment and sometimes money to about 100 high school programs across the country, including eight in Southern California. Adidas is trying to close the gap by distributing shoes to 150 to 200 schools, three in Los Angeles County.

Reebok, Converse and a new company, Kani, are competing, but less actively.

In an era of tight budgets, the sponsorships are welcomed and even sought by some coaches.

But they have spawned criticism about the harmful effects of commercialization on young athletes and the creation of a class system that gives elite players and schools a competitive edge.

Even the man who led Nike’s charge into the high schools has misgivings.

Sonny Vaccaro, now director of Adidas basketball programs, said high schools have become a commercial battlefront because companies cannot afford to retreat from the teen segment of the U.S. athletic shoe market.

“To play the game, you have to have a loaded gun,” said Vaccaro, who joined Adidas about four years ago. “Sponsoring high schools helps me and [Adidas] remain visible to the people who are going to buy our product. Unfortunately, we have brought the kids into this. . . . We’ve made them the pawns in this fight and that’s not right.

“Absolutely it is ruining the parity in high school basketball,” he said. “But the alternative is to stop. And [Nike] is not going to do that . . . and I won’t stop.”

Nike officials say high school sponsorships are an outgrowth of what the company does at other levels of sport--reward excellence.

“The worst thing that ever happened to athletics is this thing about how it’s got to be a level playing field,” said former USC basketball coach George Raveling, a Nike consultant who helps oversee its prep sports program. “It is ludicrous for anybody who is living in the United States to think that everything is equality.”

Agreements, not Contracts

Almost two decades ago, the shoe companies made their initial foray into the high schools--in the Washington, D.C., area.

DeMatha Catholic High, a longtime powerhouse coached by the venerable Morgan Wooten, received gear in the late 1970s from Pony, which has faded out of the basketball shoe wars.

In 1984, the year Nike started summer basketball camps for high school players, the company also entered into its first school sponsorship, supplying shoes to Dunbar High in Baltimore. Then the trend took off and moved west.

In addition to shoes, players received athletic bags, warmups, socks and caps. Their coaches often got money for tournament fees, travel and other team expenses.

None of the companies have written contracts with the schools or the coaches, The Times found. Instead, they make oral agreements with the coaches. Company officials would not disclose how much they spend on these programs but said it is a fraction of their multimillion-dollar marketing budgets.

For the teams, status now turns on not just trophies in display cases, but on sponsorship deals with prestigious companies.

During a recent first-round playoff game, seven-time state champ Crenshaw--a Nike-sponsored school--was outfitted in new Nike shoes. Players from Crenshaw’s opponent, Taft High in Woodland Hills, had four different logos on their footwear.

The contrast did not go unnoticed, according to Taft Coach Mark Drucker. “A Crenshaw cheerleader had asked [one player] why his team wasn’t all wearing the same tennis shoes. She wanted to know why our team wasn’t all wearing Nikes like Crenshaw.”

Free shoes do more than enhance a team’s image. Considering that first-rate basketball shoes can cost about $100, the financial benefit can be immense, especially for teams that must dip into school funds to help players with footwear.

This season, Kani gave the Crenshaw girls team three pairs of shoes for each player, a potential savings of as much as $300 per player. If a school gets free warmups and other accessories, the windfall is even greater.

In one Nike deal reported by a New York newspaper last year, the coach of St. Patrick’s High School in Elizabeth, N.J., was wooed from Adidas by an offer of $20,000 for his program.

Money like that would be a godsend to Banning High in Wilmington, whose boys team’s budget was $2,500 this past season. The team was able to afford to attend a Sacramento tournament only after raising money through a free-throw-a-thon.

Banning Coach Marc Paez said his players are fully aware that Crenshaw is a Nike school. “It’s a matter of the rich getting richer and the poor not getting the opportunities,” he said.

“Getting free shoes and free warmups would . . . allow us to use our budget for other necessities. And it would help attract players in the community.”

Armand Thomas, a 6-foot-6 sophomore at Crenshaw, said he was aware of the school’s relationship with Nike before he enrolled. “Being sponsored by Nike is a big deal,” he said. “Players out in the community know about the [free] shoes. It adds to the basketball legacy here.

“When you’re looking around for a school, getting a free pair of shoes is a big deal. It’s one less thing to worry about.”

The sponsorship agreements commonly provide at least two pairs per player per season, and sometimes four or more.

Because of the informal arrangements between coaches and the companies, school officials often are left out of the loop. At Crenshaw, Principal Yvonne Noble said she was embarrassed that she did not know the details of Nike’s arrangement with Coach Willie West.

“I guess I need to talk to my coach and find out how this all works,” she said.

Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District and the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school sports, also said they were unaware of the extent of sponsorship deals.

The individual packages appear to fall under a $25,000 limit on each private donation to schools in the Los Angeles district. Any amount above that must be approved by the Board of Education.

The district also has a policy that donations should not provide substantial advantage in educational benefits to some schools without providing them to others. “Certainly issues [regarding the equity policy] would be raised” by the sponsorships, district spokesman Shel Ehrlich said.

Barbara Fiege, who is in charge of the CIF City Section, which encompasses L.A. Unified, said she is troubled by the sponsorships.

“There is an unwritten policy in our district that [corporate] partnerships are for the benefit of teams and schools but not for individuals,” she said. “I don’t think anyone could argue that we’re bordering on [problems with] morals and ethics here.”

Nike spokeswoman Vizhier Corpuz acknowledged that the sponsorships are virtually unregulated and present at least potential problems because Nike does not know how coaches distribute thousands of dollars in equipment and sometimes money.

“We feel that national standards should be set to help protect the eligibility of student athletes and to ensure that our funds are being used for the intended purpose,” she said.

The CIF has no rules prohibiting companies from sponsoring teams. In addition, the CIF itself benefits from its association with shoe companies and other corporate sponsors.

The federation receives $500,000 a year from Arco am/pm, which gets top billing at playoff events. In addition, the Southern Section of the CIF, which encompasses most of Southern California excluding L.A. Unified and San Diego County, receives money and products from other sponsors.

Nike, for example, provided $15,000 to help finance the Southern Section basketball finals this month and was allowed to prominently display its swoosh logo at the games. A Nike executive helped hand out awards to the players.

These alliances, said Southern Section Commissioner Dean Crowley, have been formed as a matter of survival, “which is why you haven’t seen any policies prohibiting such relationships.”

The spoils in the shoe wars are immense. In the United States alone, $11.4 billion was spent on athletic shoes in 1995--a total of nearly 351 million pairs, according to the Athletic Footwear Assn.

But it is difficult to quantify how many pairs of shoes are sold as a result of the high school sponsorships, which represent only a small portion of the companies’ overall marketing budgets.

Billions at Stake

Nike, with annual global net sales of more than $6 billion, spends an estimated $800 million on advertising, endorsements and marketing worldwide, said John Horan of Sports Goods Intelligence, which tracks the shoe industry for retailers.

“The bottom line is, they’re not throwing money away on this,” Horan said.

The courtship of shoe companies and individual schools is not always one-sided. Often, Nike or Adidas make the first contact with a coach, especially if the team is a prominent one. Sometimes the coaches seek out equipment from the companies too.

A representative for Reebok, which sponsors three teams in Los Angeles County, said he gets dozens of calls a day from coaches in the West before the start of basketball season. Each team receives about 30 pairs of free shoes, and in return coaches are asked to encourage their non-varsity players to buy Reebok--a common arrangement.

Unlike Nike, Adidas does not pay money to high school programs, although it pays coaches $400 to work at the company’s annual summer camp, Vaccaro said.

He acknowledged that Adidas--like the other companies--tends to seek out the best basketball teams and players for its sponsorships.

Raveling said Nike does not always select schools with top players.

“About 60% of the schools that we sponsor are not in the caliber of a Mater Dei [of Santa Ana] or Crenshaw,” he said of the two highly successful teams. “No, we just don’t do it because of the stars.”

All eight of the local teams sponsored by Nike have at least one player who attended a Nike summer camp or competed on a company-sponsored all-star team in local youth leagues. And the deals are not confined to public schools or poor neighborhoods.

Until identical twins Jason and Jarron Collins enrolled in 1993, Harvard-Westlake High School in North Hollywood had never posed a serious threat in basketball.

The 6-foot-10 twins led the school in 1996 to its first state title--the first time Nike outfitted the team. Most of the students attending the private school, where tuition costs $12,500 a year, can probably afford pricey athletic gear.

Coach Greg Hilliard acknowledged that the sponsorship is based on the presence of the Collins twins. “It makes perfect business sense because kids around here will see what shoes Jason and Jarron are wearing and will want to go out and buy the same thing,” he said. “When Jason and Jarron are gone, I don’t expect Nike to stick around.

“Nike is operating as a business. They want to market star players.”

Other coaches realize that they probably will lose their shoe deals after top players leave. That happened to St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in Alameda after Jason Kidd graduated. (He later starred at UC Berkeley and went to the NBA.)

And the coaches of current prep standouts Baron Davis of Crossroads High in Santa Monica and Schea Cotton of St. John Bosco High in Bellflower expect the same thing.

“I doubt we’d be getting this deal without Schea,” said Coach Brian Breslin.

Recruiting Top Players

The shoe companies sometimes go to great lengths to bring a prominent player into the fold.

Stromile Swift, a 6-foot-8 junior at Fair Park High in Shreveport, La., attracted Nike’s attention with his play at the Adidas national summer camp last year. Soon after school started, Nike dispatched Raveling and Don Crenshaw, the top officials in the company’s high school basketball division, to woo him from Adidas.

The Nike officials offered to outfit Swift’s high school team in shoes, uniforms and other equipment, according to school athletic director Husher Calhoun.

“They said they were really involved in the North . . . but they wanted to expand to the South,” Calhoun said. “They said they were looking for a school with a high-profile player that was located in a socially deprived area and that was in the South. We fit all three.”

Fair Park High School accepted a Nike sponsorship--and Calhoun said Swift plans to play next summer for an all-star team recently sponsored by Nike.

“Stromile was a big part of the deal,” said Mike Theus, coach of the all-star team. “We did some marketing and selling [of Nike] on him.”

Nike officials did not respond to inquiries about the matter.

Duke University law professor John Weistart, a critic of corporate sponsorships in collegiate athletics, contends that “at the high school level, the case for leveling the playing field is even stronger.”

High school sports officials should be concerned, Weistart said, that student athletes eventually will become walking billboards.

“Where are we heading? . . . We are fairly in the grips of commercialism at every level of sports activity.

“If Nike ever figured out there was money to be made at the Little League level, they would be there.”

Monday: Shoe wars in the youth leagues.

Times staff writers Bill Dwyre and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz and researcher Paul Singleton contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Footwear of Champions

Here are USA Today’s top 12 high school boys’ basketball teams as of March 10, along with their shoe sponsors:

School: Sponsor

1. Manual, Peoria, Ill.: Adidas

2. La Salle, Manhattan, N.Y.: Adidas

3. Thornton, Harvey, Ill.: Nike

4. St. John’s at Prospect Hall, Frederick, Md.: Nike

5. Harvard-Westlake, North Hollywood: Nike

6. Miami Senior, Miami, Fla.: Adidas

7. St. Anthony, Jersey City, N.J.: Reebok

8. Mount Zion Christian, Durham, N.C.: Adidas

9. St. Patrick’s, Elizabeth, N.J.: Nike

10. St. Edward, Lakewood, Ohio: none

11. John Marshall, Richmond, Va.: Nike

12. Mater Dei, Santa Ana: Nike

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Foot Soldiers in the Shoe Wars

As part of marketing strategies, some major athletic equipment companies--and a new company, Kani Inc.--sponsor high school basketball programs, providing shoes, other equipment and sometimes money. This map identifies local teams and their sponsors:

[A] ADIDAS (All boys’ teams)

* Inglewood

* Long Beach Poly

* Lynwood

****

[K] KANI

* Crenshaw, girls

* Dorsey, boys

* Morningside in Inglewood, boys

* Locke, boys

* Los Angeles, boys

* Manual Arts, boys and girls