Swoosh Comes to Shove
Even before the start of the season, when the Westchester High boys’ basketball team was ranked No. 1 in the nation, opposing coaches were saying it.
Westchester, with its top eight players all likely to earn college scholarships, was so much better than the rest that it belonged in a league of its own.
Now that the season has ended with a state championship and a 32-2 record, many in the City basketball coaching ranks are still talking about the Comets.
They say Westchester has an edge--corporate sponsorship--that is ruining the competitive balance of the playing court.
“What you have is professional players in high school,” said Ronald Quiette, the boys’ basketball coach at Los Angeles Jordan. “Let them all play each other. Set up two leagues: The semi-professional league, and the rest of us.”
Westchester and Santa Ana Mater Dei were among a select 15 teams in the nation that sports apparel giant Nike outfitted for free this season. For Westchester players, that meant an investment of more than $15,000. From headbands to high-tops, each Comet player received more than $1,300 in gear--including five pair of the newest top-of-the-line shoes. And there is more.
The team had its expenses to a prestigious holiday tournament in Houston paid for by a Nike affiliate. The estimated cost of that trip: $7,000. Westchester also played in three other out-of-state events last season, trips worth about $20,000 that were paid for almost entirely by organizers seeking a prominent headliner for their tournaments.
Special associations such as the one between Westchester and Nike concern high-ranking school sports administrators, who worry that the lines of fair play are being erased.
The California Interscholastic Federation, which governs athletic competition for the state’s 1,292 high schools, doesn’t have rules prohibiting such arrangements. But some might be coming in at least one of its 10 sections.
The director of the CIF’s largest section said he is tired of endorsement deals such as the ones between Nike and Westchester that seem to allow continued success for “the privileged few.”
James Staunton, commissioner of the 522-school Southern Section, said he thinks that restrictive legislation is a potential hot topic for an April 25 meeting of athletic representatives, where voting members from each of his section’s 73 leagues will be in attendance.
“The only thing we can do would be to alter our bylaws to make it impossible to do this, even if a district would accept it through their policies,” Staunton said. “If the time is right and the council can craft a rule that can at least put a damper on this, I think it would pass in a heartbeat.”
Even though Westchester is a member of the Los Angeles City Section, any policy-making decision by the Southern Section is sure to be considered by the CIF’s other regional governing bodies.
Staunton, a former high school principal, said Nike’s “selectivity” is what disturbs him. “It’s not the product; it’s how they’re doing it,” he said. “It’s run so contrary to what we’re trying to do with the kids. Their business decision interferes with our attempts to try to provide a level playing field ... and to get away from direct influence on kids.”
While most high school teams do car washes and bake sales to raise funds for equipment, uniforms and travel, Westchester, a public school, attracts all-star-caliber athletes from across the South Bay and parts of Los Angeles. The players admit they have been at least partially enticed by thousands of dollars in free apparel and paid trips to national tournaments that are attended by hundreds of college scouts.
“People who don’t play [for Westchester], they’re like, ‘Damn you’re lucky,’” said Scott Cutley, a starter for the Comets at forward. “They see our shoes. They see us traveling. They say things like, ‘I’ll sit on the end of the bench just to be a part of everything.’”
Some do. Jonathan Smith, a top player at Lawndale Leuzinger High, transferred to Westchester before this season only to become an end-of-the-bench reserve. But he doesn’t regret his choice.
“There’s a lot of exposure,” he said. “At Leuzinger, we only traveled to tournaments in the South Bay. At Westchester, we travel everywhere. The shoes, they’re nice too.”
And, he added, “We win a lot.”
Winning Tradition
In the five years they have been partners with Nike, the Comets have won four City Section championships and two state titles. Mater Dei, the other school with full sponsorship, has won Southern Section titles in 10 of the last 11 years.
Fairfax, Crenshaw, Compton Dominguez, Bellflower St. John Bosco, Santa Margarita, Santa Monica Crossroads and Glendora, which received smaller Nike contributions--most often, shoes and equipment bags--also are perennial powerhouses.
Westchester opponents think this is not a coincidence, although at all of these schools it is hard to determine what arrived first--success or Nike.
“That’s Nike’s money and they can do whatever they want with it, but it creates parity problems,” Reseda Coach Mike Wagner said. “No kid in his right mind is not going to want to go to Westchester, where they get their shoes and sweats and bags.”
The result, Wagner said, was a season played to a nearly predetermined climax. It is why a meeting of City Section coaches in October was noticeably void of the usual preseason optimism.
“Every coach in the room knew there was Westchester, Fairfax, and then 58 other schools,” Wagner said. “We all knew they’d play for the City championship.”
They were right. Westchester defeated Fairfax for the City title and then swept its way to the state Division I championship.
Wagner isn’t the only local coach who wishes Nike would share the wealth.
“Let them help all the schools, not just individual schools,” said Dave Uyeshima, coach at Hamilton High, which lost two games to Westchester by a combined 109 points.
Almost as aggravating to local coaches as the Comets’ tie to Nike is that Westchester’s banner season came courtesy of 12 players all hailing from places outside the school’s primary attendance area.
Critics say that loose transfer rules, along with Nike’s sponsorship money, encouraged a collection of star athletes to converge at Westchester, which is located within window-rattling distance of Los Angeles International Airport.
Hassan Adams, the 6-foot-4 guard who was the Comets’ best player, is attending his third high school. He is from Inglewood, as are starting point guard Ashanti Cook, sixth man Brandon Heath and reserve Bobby Brown. The others come from Santa Monica, Hawthorne, Torrance, Lawndale, Carson, Hancock Park and the Crenshaw district.
Only one month into the season, four of the Comets’ five seniors had already signed letters of intent with major-college basketball programs--Adams to Arizona, Cook to New Mexico, Heath to San Diego State and Brandon Bowman to Georgetown. At least two others--juniors Cutley and Trevor Ariza--are considered certain major-college recruits for next season.
“An all-star team,” Wagner said. “There are college teams they could beat.”
Past Penalties
Three times in the last two years Westchester has been formally accused of breaking City Section rules, and twice it has been penalized. The Comets were slapped with a year’s probation when Adams played for the team in a 2000 summer tournament before his transfer to the school was official, and 6-7 center Ashton Thomas was declared ineligible for varsity competition this season because of an improper transfer from Leuzinger.
Westchester had two transfers in its title-winning starting lineup this season--Adams and Bowman, a senior forward who transferred in as a sophomore. Neither player says he was “recruited,” although Adams acknowledges a long friendship with Westchester assistant Marlon Morton, whom he met 10 years ago while playing on the courts of St. Andrews Park in South Los Angeles.
Barbara Fiege, commissioner of athletics for the 62 high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, understands the frustration of coaches who struggle to compete with the Comets, but she stops well short of accusing Westchester of recruiting.
“When there are transfer students that go to a school, you can’t jump to that first conclusion that they were recruited by people at the school,” she said.
While critics say that a roster lacking a single player from the school’s neighborhood is evidence enough of recruiting, other coaches defend Westchester’s Ed Azzam and members of his staff by saying that top players are sophisticated enough to know which teams are equipped to offer them the most.
The winning equation isn’t complicated: Free gear + free travel = talented players, and a team entices even more top players because of the exposure it gets and the college recruiters it attracts.
Azzam said coaches who complain about his team’s partnership with Nike are expressing “sour grapes” and “maybe a little jealousy.”
“I don’t think the kids come to the school because we wear Nike or we get this or that,” he said. “Some people think they’re going to get exposure or free shoes. But I hope it’s because we teach. I’d like to think they come here because they get better and because they want to go to a program where they have the opportunity to win.”
Some of his coaching colleagues remain unconvinced.
“It’s tough when people say we’ll give you three pairs of Nikes and two sweatsuits and we’ll go to Vegas or Houston or other places,” said Travis Showalter, the recently resigned Leuzinger coach who lost Smith and Thomas to the Comets before last season. “That’s tough to compete against. There’s no way I [could] match up financially.”
Sonny Days
Shoe companies such as Nike and competitors Adidas, And 1 and Reebok, which also sponsor high school and youth basketball teams, know they are in a position to be criticized for their ties to teenage athletes. It’s a calculated risk. Forming a bond with a top high school player is potentially lucrative if that player one day signs an NBA contract and becomes a star.
Nike won’t soon forget the image of Sonny Vaccaro, a former consultant who left the company to become a prominent member of Adidas, sitting with Kobe Bryant’s family at the 1996 NBA draft. When Bryant was selected with the 13th pick, he popped out of his chair and embraced his family, then his friends, and then Vaccaro, with whom he had formed a bond during his years at Philadelphia’s Lower Merion High.
Two NBA championships with the Lakers later, Bryant still has a contract with Adidas. His “Kobe Two” shoes hit stores in February. Retail price: $130.
Adidas, Nike’s closest competitor, has a budget of about $250,000 to support partnerships with about 40 high schools nationwide, a company source said.
Nike won’t divulge what it spends on its “grass roots basketball operation”--its sponsorship of high school and age-group youth teams--but industry experts estimate that in recent years it has grown to $3 million to $4 million annually.
Tony Dorado, the director of Nike’s high school basketball operation, believes it is money well spent, especially with so many teenagers jumping directly to the NBA or into the starting lineups of major colleges. That exposure may easily be worth $3-4 million.
Most of the 150 high schools connected with Nike get free shoes, T-shirts and balls or athletic bags for each player, donations that are tied for the company’s sales and marketing strategy rather than charity.
“We’re a for-profit company,” Dorado said. “I was hired to make sound business decisions, and that’s what I do.”
Critics might howl, but one prominent sports marketing analyst said Nike and other shoe companies “are just following the tenets of capitalism. The strong survive and the good get better.”
Rick Burton, executive director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon, said, “When we look at the commercialism of youth athletics, we can’t speak about total purity. Corporations have been asked to fund and sponsor Little League teams for 40 years. We’re OK with it when it was the local Albertsons or the barber shop.”
Dorado said Nike’s deal with Westchester fits the company’s business philosophy of partnering with winners. “We’re always going to be associated with the best,” Dorado said, “whether it be Westchester or a gold-medal speedskater.”
Not Only Sports
Local administrators have been grappling for a solution almost as long as coaches have been grumbling about inequity.
Commissioner Fiege said Nike sponsored the City Section basketball championships a few years ago, but was turned down by district officials when it expressed interest in expanding its contribution. The reason: The television program “60 Minutes” had just broadcast its October 1996 investigative piece on Nike and child labor.
“It just didn’t seem like the right fit at the time,” Fiege said.
Fiege said the CIF, and its individual sections, have occasionally considered strictly regulating sports sponsorships, but decided against it for a variety of reasons.
“If you single out donations to athletic teams, what do you do about the $25,000 worth of computers IBM gives to such and such a school for their business department?” Fiege said. “Once you open those doors to discussion, it’s not as easy as one would think to keep it to athletics. You’re singling out athletes if you take a hard line and single out Adidas or Nike, but then it’s OK to accept IBM or Coca-Cola. How can I sit here and say Coca-Cola is OK and Nike isn’t? It’s murky.”
Marlene Canter, the LAUSD’s board member from Westchester’s area, District 4, said that while she was proud of the Comets’ achievements, the team’s Nike contract was an example of “overabundance.”
“On the one hand, I’m happy to have attracted Nike’s attention,” she said. “On the other hand, I’d feel much more comfortable if Nike would be looking at Westchester as a school, saying, ‘What can we do to help school [academic] achievement?’ Academics is really the ball we need to keep our eye on.”
Uyeshima, who recently completed his 18th season as Hamilton’s coach, said local administrators need to start looking at teams like Westchester with a more critical eye.
“Downtown, they don’t care,” he said, referring to Fiege and other City Section officials. “They get a team that goes to the state championship every year. It’s frustrating. It seems like they have so many schools and so many things going on, they can’t look into it.”
In addition to calling for Nike to more equally distribute its sponsorship riches, Uyeshima and others would like to see rules instituted on transfers.
Lack of Control?
From the local real estate agent who advertises in the football program, to the car dealership that has a banner on the outfield fence of the softball diamond, many high school sports programs have sponsors.
But Marie Ishida, the CIF’s executive director, said many schools don’t seem aware that there are established guidelines for accepting corporate gifts.
“We’ve tried to address in our constitution and bylaws that the school’s district determines how to divvy up that stuff so that no one group of kids gets all of it,” she said. “I’m not sure how many districts are doing that, however, or if they’re necessarily aware they should be doing that.” One CIF rule stipulates that teams are supposed to report single-source donations of $500 or more to an administrative source--most often, the school principal.
Westchester’s basketball team easily surpassed that standard--per player--but Principal Dana Perryman said the team had “established a practice” with a previous principal and that she “didn’t know that much” about the Comets’ association with Nike.
“Other than tennis shoes, I don’t know what else they gave them,” she said.
“I trust Mr. Azzam and I trust Mr. [Brian] Henderson [athletic director]. They care about the kids. I don’t think they would do anything to jeopardize them.”
Dave Goosen, whose Venice High teams never beat the Comets during his five years as coach, said the Westchester administration’s lack of institutional control makes it culpable for what he says is illegal recruiting by the basketball staff.
“They’re just willing to look the other way because when Westchester wins a state title it’s publicity for the school,” said Goosen, who resigned before the last season, in part because he was tired of being overrun by his Nike-powered foes in the Western League.
“I felt like we were going to war with sticks and stones, and Westchester and Fairfax had machine guns,” Goosen said.
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Westchester: That Championship Season
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