Getting Wayward Teenagers Back on Track, on the Field

The girls are clustered around the starting line, peeling off their warmups and stretching their legs for the race. “Ladies,” the starter calls, waving them to their spots. “Remember to remove your jewelry. No earrings, rings ... no jewelry allowed.”

A laugh emerges from the center of the crowd. “Jewelry?” chortles a member of the Lady Royals of Scott Academy. “I haven’t worn jewelry in six months. I’m in jail!” she said. The other runners--girls from tony private schools--smile, some wide-eyed, as they remove their earrings and necklaces.

The starter gun sounds, and the girls take off, the distinctions between them lost in the blur of a dozen pairs of pounding feet. The Lady Royals are the last to round the track, staggering in well behind the others.

But in the stands, their parents cheer victory, not defeat. “I am so proud of you!” one mother shouts, leaning over the railing and reaching down, as if she could embrace her child. A dad waves a stopwatch with Olympic fervor. “Three seconds!” he yells to his daughter, who plops down on the grass to untie her shoes. “You’re three seconds faster than last week!”

I was at the track meet to cheer on my daughter but had spent much of that afternoon studying the Lady Royals and wondering where they were from. The other teams--Harvard-Westlake, Oaks Christian--and my daughter’s high school I recognized. But Scott Academy? What kind of private school is that, I wondered. And why did their athletes seem so ... well, un-athletic, fumbling to set their blocks, bouncing as they ran, chatting more enthusiastically about the snack bar menu than the competition on the track?

The “academy,” it turns out, is actually Camp Scott, a boot camp in Saugus for wayward girls, part of the Los Angeles County Probation Department’s network of camps for delinquent juveniles. And the Lady Royals represent a new dimension in rehabilitation--the realization that sports can have the same redemptive power for girls that they often do for boys.

For more than a decade, sports have been a part of the probation department’s program for boys. Camp Kilpatrick in Malibu has teams in basketball, baseball, football, soccer and track competing in the California Interscholastic Federation against small independent and religious schools.

Many Kilpatrick alums say the opportunity to play on camp teams helped turn their lives around. Some did well enough to earn college scholarships. For others, lessons learned in sports translated to a new sense of self-respect and responsibility when they returned home.

Not that there aren’t occasional problems. Last spring, the star of the Kilpatrick basketball team slipped away after he was allowed to play in an all-star game in Long Beach. The high school senior, who was nearing the end of his one-year camp term, went on the lam after telling a game official he was going to the locker room.

But Art Gonzalez, who coaches Kilpatrick’s track team, said his squad hasn’t had that kind of trouble. “Most of the kids really appreciate the opportunity to be in the spotlight. This doesn’t have the glory of football or basketball, so these guys learn to support each other.”

Scott’s athletic director, Karon Howell, said track has been particularly good for her girls, as well. “You can see the growth as the season goes on. They’re learning how to deal with stress, with disappointment, how to start something and stick with it until you finish, about hard work and self-discipline.

“A lot of these girls are in here because they have trouble with authority,” Howell said. “In track, you’ve got a coach always riding you, pushing you, giving you instructions. That’s not easy for them. But they’re learning not to take it personally, to understand that the coach is trying to make you better, not hammer down and be critical of you.”

In track, it’s you against the clock or tape. Practice hard and, over time, you can sprint faster, jump farther, throw harder, run more laps without collapsing. It’s the sort of measurable improvement that has often been lacking in these girls’ lives.

The weekly track meets provide them with unique chances for camaraderie with kids from different backgrounds, of different sensibilities. And the private-school teams are enriched as well by their contact with kids from circumstances so different from their own. “Track is the only sport where you come down to the infield and talk, hang around with other athletes, while you’re competing,” said Gonzalez.

Already, Howell said, the girls from Camp Scott have benefited. “At our first track meet, a girl from Brentwood [private school] befriended one of our girls. She was helping her with the shotput and they just sort of hit it off. They hung out pretty much the whole time. The Brentwood girl bought some food and came over and shared it with my team.

“Things like that happen, and I see my girls just opening up, seeing new possibilities.”

If it’s been good for the girls, it’s been great for their parents. “They see their daughters, who may have always been in trouble, in a whole different light when they’re at a meet,” Howell said. “They love to see their daughters competing. They come out and cheer, they encourage the girls. And that’s exactly what these girls need.”

And if there is a silver lining to incarceration, it might be that if they hadn’t landed in jail, few of these girls would ever have played a sport or been on a team. Now, some will head back home with a different vision of themselves, a new sense of accomplishment. In that is the thrill of victory.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.