Student Scores Backer for Girls’ Team

As they took the court Friday night, the girls on Crenshaw High’s varsity basketball team were looking sharp in uniforms, matching shoes and warmups. Each player had a sports bag too.

For all of that they can thank a classmate who didn’t even make the varsity team.

Amelia Landreth is a junior with good grades and no interest in forging a career as an athlete. But she does want to go to college and thought an extracurricular activity would improve her chances.

So last fall she went out for the basketball team -- and didn’t like what she found.

The Nike-sponsored Crenshaw High boys’ team, for years one of the strongest in the city, had new shoes, warmups and gear.

The girls had nothing.

“I thought, ‘Something has to be done,’ ” said Landreth, 16, who plays for Crenshaw’s junior varsity. “That’s total inequality. It hit me the first time I got on the team. I was shocked. It’s just not fair.”

Landreth set out to change things. The girls, she decided, would have their own sponsor, and she would find it.

Landreth began cold-calling businesses using the phone book -- three hours a day, every evening, from home.

“I got a lot of turndowns,” she said. “A lot of rejections. I did not give up. I did not give up.”

A month passed. Then Landreth picked up a seemingly out-of-place company newsletter in the lobby of her church. It wasn’t exactly Nike, but she decided to call the company: Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘n Waffles.

Roscoe’s has five restaurants in the Los Angeles area -- one in Watts, a few miles from Crenshaw -- and is active in community philanthropy.

Among other good works, it annually sponsors the “Peace Bowl” football game between Fremont and Locke high schools. The restaurant makes a deal: It provides dinner for both teams as long as there are no gang confrontations before, during or after the game.

Jai Rich, the chain’s marketing director, said Roscoe’s is used to helping local groups, but not used to teenagers leading the charge. She was impressed by Landreth’s persistence.

“She said, ‘If you tell me you can’t do it, I’m not going to go away quietly,’ ” Rich recalled. “ ‘I’m going to let you know my story.’ ”

When Rich told her that an adult had to be involved in negotiations, Landreth enlisted the help of Kimberly Moore, whose daughter plays for the Crenshaw varsity team.

Moore had helped the team raise funds the previous three years, most often by selling advertisements in the game program and organizing candy and bake sales. She’d tried writing letters to Nike, Reebok and Adidas and said she had always been rejected.

While sizable sponsorship agreements between sports apparel companies and top boys’ basketball teams are commonplace -- there are hundreds of such deals nationwide and dozens in Southern California -- they are rare in girls’ basketball. The largest sponsorship check written to the Crenshaw girls’ program before this year was $200, from a landscaping company.

The check from Roscoe’s was for $5,000. “We give what we can afford at the time, [but] we’re hoping this will be an ongoing thing,” Rich said.

The girls needed every penny.

The school annually provides $1,200 for the girls’ basketball team, which is quickly swallowed up -- and surpassed -- by tournament entry fees and transportation costs.

“The last couple of years, we’ve struggled getting funds for basketball shoes, uniforms, Gatorade,” Moore said. “Inner-city schools don’t get enough support from the community to run their programs.”

Willie West, coach of Crenshaw’s boys’ team, declined to divulge details of his program’s deal with Nike.

But Gary McKnight, coach of the Southland’s top-ranked boys’ team from Santa Ana Mater Dei, another Nike-supported group, said his varsity team receives new uniforms every three years, new shoes and warmups annually, plus a donation toward a tournament it hosts.

“You cannot run a program on a budget the high school gives you,” McKnight said.

The Crenshaw High contribution by Roscoe’s, he said, “is huge.”

For its generosity, Roscoe’s gets a sign advertising its restaurants posted in the Crenshaw gym.

There was a point when Moore feared the Roscoe’s deal might fall through, largely because the chain’s chief executive, Herb Hudson, was out of town.

Moore went so far as to meet with the players and warn them that they might have to “go to Plan B, which is sell more candy.”

But after that meeting, Landreth pulled her aside and comforted her.

“She said, ‘I’m not going to let that happen,’ ” Moore recalled. “She said that after putting all that work in, we can’t let it die like that. [Then] she made about 10 phone calls.”

While varsity team members were completely outfitted for their 57-32 victory against Venice High, Landreth and her junior varsity teammates only got a pair of shoes. But she’s working on it, having recently secured $100 from a mortgage company.