Bucking for an Advantage

For the money she spent ensuring that her two daughters excelled at softball, Tommie Alcaraz could have paid for a two-bedroom condo or four years at Princeton--with money left over for a top-shelf Volvo.

By the time the girls graduated from high school, Alcaraz and her husband, a construction superintendent, had dropped $161,000. On hitting, running and pitching coaches, sometimes four at a time. On club fees, road trips, cleats and bats. On what parents call “the machine.”

Fueled by egos and dreams of scholarships and stardom, the sports that children once played purely for fun have turned into a high-pressure, big-money pursuit.

No longer do suburbia’s top child athletes skimp by on the sales of chocolate bars and raffle tickets or heed the shooting advice of volunteer dads. Today’s youth teams bear the earmarks--good and bad--of the pros.

“It’s lots and lots of money and lots and lots of time,” says Alcaraz, a bank employee from Irvine. “You don’t realize it at the time . . . but you could have paid for any college you wanted.”

Agents charge upward of $1,000 to market lanky 15-year-old point guards to college recruiters. Specialty coaches teach 6-year-olds jumping exercises, 7-year-olds footwork, 10-year-olds mental toughness, all for hourly fees that can top $150.

An informal survey found 3,500 baseball and softball “experts” teaching kids as young as 3--for a fee--to hit, pitch and throw in Southern California.

Most experts consider Southern California one of the hottest markets in the country for youth sports. And within the region, Orange County--with its affluent suburbs and nationally recognized teams--is widely acknowledged as ground zero. Within a nine-mile radius of Mission Viejo there are a dozen soccer clubs serving second-graders to high school seniors. The largest has an annual budget approaching $700,000.

The head coaches of such teams, attracted through nationwide searches or culled from the ranks of retired British pros, can earn upward of $90,000 a year--$32,000 more than the coaches of UCLA’s men’s and women’s soccer teams.

Parents who can afford the entry fees to the top echelons of youth sport are effectively buying a competitive advantage that kids themselves call “the edge.”

“Everything has changed,” says Ty Cobb, who coaches youth football in Anaheim, though his name evokes baseball. “Money means power. Money is the world. It opens every door.”

Last year, Southern California parents spent an estimated $1 billion training, toning and toughening their children to compete in this new era of youth sports. That’s more than everyone in the country spent at Starbucks last year.

The Times calculated the figure after interviewing more than 250 parents, players, coaches and league officials in eight Southern California counties. It includes money spent enrolling nearly 1 million children in recreational and elite club teams and the estimated costs of travel, equipment and specialty coaches. Established team sports were included, but not individual sports such as tennis or golf, or fast-growing team sports such as roller hockey for which college scholarships are not offered.

Parents, to be sure, still sign up their children for old-fashioned reasons, and feel there are clearly benefits to having a child involved in athletics. An Orange County poll conducted for The Times found that 90% of parents said playing competitive sports helps children become confident and more fit.

All the money poured into youth sports is also producing more and better athletes than ever before. Some say today’s teenage jocks have the skills of college players 10 years ago. And those elite players are more likely than ever to be products of suburbia.

But many people--even some coaches who are profiting from the youth sports boom--have begun to question if the skyrocketing demand for “the edge” and the willingness to pay for it are corrupting sports and, more important, the families and children involved in them.

“More, more, more. It’s gone completely nuts,” says Michael Severson, administrator of Bobby Sox Fastpitch Softball on the West Coast. “People are losing sight of what’s important in life. . . . It’s not fun anymore.”

A High Price for Excellence

Alcaraz says that she would do it all again--that she would finance the never-ending demand for the newest equipment and the sports gurus who pushed her daughters’ pitches to 60 mph.

Like many parents, Alcaraz considers it the price she had to pay for her daughters to excel. One daughter earned a softball scholarship to the University of Hawaii, while the other starred at Woodbridge High in Irvine and now plays for Saddleback College.

But she concedes that she and her family had persistent questions about whether they were doing the right thing.

“There would be times when they would say ‘I have no life,’ ” she says of her girls. “But they really did have a life. They enjoyed it. When their performance was good, they felt good about themselves. They knew the practice had paid off.”

Today, most college scouts and recruiters no longer go to high schools; for most sports they shop for prospects exclusively at “showcase” tournaments of privately run club teams. The path to college programs runs through these teams, selected via rigorous tryouts, and the cost of joining can be more than $3,000 a year.

“I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but if you’re not doing it, your competition is,” says Irvine speed trainer Kevin McNair, who teaches children as young as 9 to run faster, for fees he won’t reveal.

Parents pay these fees to buy top-flight coaches with collegiate connections and access to pristine green fields, glossy gyms and the gleam of success.

In youth soccer alone, dozens of Southern California clubs now have annual budgets of more than $250,000. In 1997, the Saddleback Valley Soccer Club in Lake Forest, now known as the West Coast Futbol Club, brought in $669,431, according to tax records. That’s $30,000 more than the budgets of UCLA’s men’s and women’s soccer teams combined. Nearly $260,000 of West Coast’s budget went to coaching fees; another $100,000 went to flags, nets and other supplies. The players are ages 8 to 19.

Last year, West Coast’s corporate sponsors--Taco Bell, Sparkletts, Clarion Car Audio and Canon Computer Systems--chipped in as much as $20,000 worth of products and financial support apiece, coaching director Bobby Bruch says, and Adidas kicked in equipment.

Local tournaments, with entrance fees of about $500 a team, can fatten the coffers even more. North Huntington Beach Futbol Club’s annual Labor Day event brings in about $200,000, the club’s treasurer says. The San Diego Surf Cup’s two annual youth soccer tournaments brought in more than $680,000 in 1997, drawing 468 teams and nearly 100,000 spectators. An economic impact study showed the tournaments poured $10.5 million into the local economy--as much as a regional NCAA basketball tournament.

Extensive Search for Coaches

Club team board members, generally parents, conduct nationwide, even worldwide searches for full-time coaches with a pedigree. “Everyone wants a Brit,” snorts one parent, shaking his head at the abundance of former English soccer pros coaching suburban California kids.

Billy McNicol, a former Scottish pro who was coaching a team in Utah, was hired by the Mission Viejo Soccer Club after a rival team lured away its coaching director. The position, McNicol says, will pay him as much as $90,000 to coach players as young as 8.

“I didn’t apply for it--it kind of fell in my lap,” he says. “California offers me 12 months working at my craft. The number of kids available to you down here is incredible.”

To keep such jobs, many coaches stoop to guerrilla tactics. In south Orange County--perhaps the nation’s hottest youth soccer region--professional coaches from a dozen private clubs routinely descend on the “everyone plays” recreational soccer games of 7- and 8-year-olds, maneuvering for recruits to carry their clubs in the future.

“We all give our pitch to parents and have professional fliers and brochures, and obviously the majority of these parents are very ignorant” about the demands of club soccer, says Tad Bobek, a coach for the Southern California Blues, one of the top girls soccer teams in the country.

“They want to do the best for their kids, and they’re not equipped,” he says. “I sympathize with the parents. It’s hell.”

This transition from recreational sport to business is spurred in part by the enticement of college scholarships.

When offered a range of reasons why they enrolled their child in sports in the Times poll, one in five Orange County parents selected “fun” or “learn to be a team player.” Only 1% of parents chose “get a scholarship.”

But interviews with hundreds of parents, coaches and trainers show that as parents and children become more involved in “the machine,” the focus changes.

“In Bobby Sox, every kid that wants to play, plays,” says Severson, the girls softball organization’s West Coast administrator. “Then as girls progress . . . the parents get involved and they get them going to this pitching coach and that coach. They think they’re going to get this scholarship.”

But Severson and other officials and coaches say many of these parents fail to realize that few athletes receive a completely free ride.

While more than 87,500 athletic scholarships were offered by 580 NCAA colleges in the 1997-98 school year, many of these were partial aid packages, sometimes paying only a few hundred dollars of an athlete’s college fees.

While gender equity has increased the number of scholarships for women, and scholarships remain more obtainable in less popular sports, the chance of a scholarship in a marquee sport such as basketball, football, volleyball or baseball at a prestigious university is slim.

Some say as many as 30 million children participate in youth sports nationwide. If that is true, there are as many as 343 for every scholarship offered.

“The world,” explains Blair Socci, 12, a volleyball player in Laguna Beach who has trained with a conditioning coach twice a week for two years, “is a competitive place.”

Making Sure Their Children Are Seen

Some parents flatly admit that they are no longer paying for their children to build self-esteem or have fun. They’re paying for exposure to college coaches and professional scouts.

“There is a lot of pressure on parents to make sure their kids are seen,” says Jan Trotter of San Dimas, whose daughter Chelsea, a basketball star, once played on three club teams at once. “We went through club teams like some families go through underwear.”

In 1998, a youth softball team in Orange County imported choice pitchers from Reno and Oklahoma City--girls who didn’t meet their “teammates” until the national championship tournament, which they won. In some cases, it’s not even about winning anymore. Some tournaments are strictly about preening for college recruiters; once the recruiters leave, players leave too, even with championship medals on the line.

“It’s ‘Get me exposure. Get me a scholarship,’ ” says Don Ebert, a former U.S. national soccer team captain and coaching director for the Irvine Strikers, one of the state’s top club teams.

And when the pushing and prodding, team hopping and coach shopping don’t work, athletes increasingly end up in the offices of sports psychologists like Darrell Burnett. For about $100 an hour, the Laguna Niguel practitioner counsels children as young as 9 through rough spots in their game and helps them undo the stress of their $500-a-week regimen of specialty coaching. Often he faces a parental mandate to make a child a winner.

“I spend a lot of time with my parents getting them to realistically assess chances,” says Burnett, a former addiction counselor and author of the 1993 book “Youth, Sports & Self-Esteem: A Guide for Parents.” “I never dreamed there would be a market for this.”

High school sports have been greatly affected by club sports. Not that long ago, an eager novice could secure a spot on a school roster--at least a seat on the bench or a couple of late innings in right field.

Now only those athletes with extraordinary talent are sure to grab a place, because of the intense competition to play.

Parents often find out too late that the thousands they’ve invested in foreign coaches, high-priced clubs and private trainers doesn’t guarantee their child a spot on even a junior high school team.

Two years ago, 65 club players tried out for the freshman-sophomore volleyball team at Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High, which meant that 50 club players--supposedly the best of the best--couldn’t make the school team.

“Now think about the girl who played at her parochial middle school and just wanders in, saying, ‘Sure, I’d like to be a part of the Mater Dei tradition,’ ” says Charlie Brande, head coach of the Orange County Volleyball Club, one of the most successful in the country. “It’s too late.”

Showcases for Players

It’s almost 10 p.m. on a Saturday at the Long Beach City College gym.

Inside, Bob Gottlieb, director of the Anaheim-based Branch West Basketball Academy, paces in front of the subs lining his bench, exhorting the teenagers on the court, who lead 57-32. The 59-year-old coach, with the gray tinge of a man who spends most hours under the fluorescent lights of a gym, is a familiar sight at such exposure tournaments--so called because club teams pay hundreds of dollars to participate, knowing that college coaches, including UCLA’s Steve Lavin, in this case, make up much of the sparse audience.

Lavin says these tournaments are more popular than ever in Southern California because they are showcasing the best basketball recruiting class since the famed 1975 class, which included future NBA players David Greenwood, Bill Laimbeer and Reggie Theus.

Top-shelf basketball programs like those at the University of North Carolina and the University of Connecticut are “camped out” in Southern California, hoping to lure prospects. “We can get in our car and drive down the 405 and see 10 of the top 30 kids in the country,” Lavin says. “For us, it’s ideal.”

At these showcases, Gottlieb traffics in promises of “the edge,” the inside track to scholarships, the coveted whisper in the ear of college coaches at big-name schools.

“No one else has the relationships and credibility I have,” Gottlieb says. “If I recommend a kid, they will look at the kid. If I send a film, they look at the film.”

Parents say that while his coaching is valuable, what they consider priceless is the packet of paper curled up in his hand as Gottlieb squeezes college coaches’ palms at tournaments.

The packet contains glowing profiles of his players. Gottlieb is effectively an agent: For a fee--he won’t say how much, but his colleagues say it can exceed $1,000 per player--Gottlieb will represent high school basketball players searching for a college scholarship.

“He can handle and play some point [guard], he can drive, is a very good defender and is just a very good all around player,” reads Gottlieb’s scouting report on Chris Carpenter, a recent graduate of Douglas High School in Juneau, Alaska, and one of Gottlieb’s clients. “Films are available.”

Gottlieb tries to match “under-recruited” players with college coaches who have a scholarship to spare. He works on retainer, taking a small fee up front and then demanding more if he lands the deal.

“You only pay a significant amount to me if I get it done,” he said.

Crayton Smith of Jackson Hole, Wyo., has enough faith in Gottlieb’s wizardry that he’s not only paying the coach a significant amount, but also sending him his son full-time.

Smith’s 6-foot-5 son Morgan, who graduated from high school last spring, moved into Gottlieb’s Orange home in October. For the next year, Smith will sleep in one of the bedrooms vacated by Gottlieb’s grown children and embark on an intense training regimen while Gottlieb shops for a scholarship. Crayton Smith, an entertainment and talent agency consultant, says the program will cost more than $12,000.

“I am totally overseeing his development as an athlete,” Gottlieb says. “He will be treated like a son.”

Inside Blair Field, a Long Beach stadium that has seen its share of baseball, Alan Kramer watches as his 11-year-old, Joshua, begins his hitting lesson.

“This is as pure as it gets,” he says. Yet in this father’s eyes purity of sport does not exclude high-cost coaching and high-tech gizmos.

“Who cares about Little League? The goal is for him to be one of the best when he’s in high school,” Kramer, a Garden Grove office supplies salesman, says as his son begins his $55-an-hour session. “Look at his back legs. That’s almost perfect form.”

Joe Magno, a director of the All American Baseball Academy, tosses blue, yellow and red balls toward Joshua, who pounds them with a “Lightning Stick,” a metallic contraption that looks like a skinny canoe paddle with holes in it. Magno, who says he sold 1,000 of them last year for a total of about $65,000, says the stick improves fast-twitch muscle control and bat speed. The inspiration for it, he says, came to him in a dream. It’s one of a host of pricey devices for sale on the academy’s Web site.

Pitching Dreams of Stardom

Magno says his academy gives more than 4,500 private lessons a year--at more than $200 per month per student--and ushers more than 2,000 kids into its camps, including one on Santa Catalina Island, grossing $550,000 from those pursuits alone.

“We’ve just tapped the surface,” Magno says as he rattles off his financial stats. “This is a good living.”

In action, Magno pitches not only his products, but also dreams of stardom.

During another lesson, 13-year-old Daniel Stephenson, a Torrance freshman who hopes to play ball at USC, tells Magno he isn’t sure which position he should specialize in while trying to land a spot on his high school team.

“He’s good at shortstop and he’s good at catcher,” his father, Rod, tells Magno.

“Catching is the easiest path to a college scholarship and a pro contract,” Magno says. “Shortstops are a dime a dozen.”

Rod Stephenson hesitates--”I’m talking about high school,” he protests--but his son, captivated by even the mention of a pro contract, is dancing behind Magno, stage-whispering “Catcher! Catcher!”

“The thing about being a catcher is that you’ve got to have a great arm,” Magno says. “So we’ll have to start on a development program for your arm.”

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Times staff writer Bill Shaikin contributed to this story.