In Bell, a whole different game

Just before kickoff, the players gathered around Anthony Mendoza, a senior linebacker who broke his leg in a game earlier in the season.

“For the next 48 minutes,” Mendoza shouted, pounding his crutches as exclamation points, “I want nothing but all-out game! Until your wheels fall off! Until these lights go out!”

Down in the locker room, as the clacking of cleats on concrete died down, Coach Frank Medina pointed to a whiteboard with one word on it: “Playoffs.” A win would keep their season alive; a loss would end it. The coach took the low-key approach: “Make something happen tonight, gentlemen,” he said.

Pre-game speeches are as American as Friday night football. But those calls to arms earlier this month carried particular resonance: The Bell High School Eagles have had the bad fortune this season to represent a community whose name has become synonymous with greed and corruption.

At their first game, a sign in the opposing stands greeted the players with: “Here Come The Crooks.” When the team tried to raise money by attending a TV show taping, a comedian poked fun at Bell so relentlessly that Medina had to warn the guy: “Don’t degrade my kids.”

As a coach, Medina’s job this year has been to keep his team focused on football.

But as a teacher whose subjects include history and government, he’s also had another important task: to teach students that what happened in Bell’s City Hall, making the city an object of ugly headlines, should be a wakeup call to its citizens.

High standards

Bell High School, part of Los Angeles Unified, opened 95 years ago and today has about 4,400 students. Medina works out of Room 210, where the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights hang on the wall. Nearly 200 students come through that classroom every day, parking themselves in one of the 40 gray metal desks.

As the first bell sounded at 7:20 one recent morning, Medina, 33, sipped his morning coffee and waited for the students to settle down. His field uniform is a track suit in the Eagles’ gray and purple, with “Bell Football” stitched on the front. In the classroom, he prefers dark jeans, dress shoes and a collared shirt on his 6-foot-2, 225-pound frame.

He has high standards in the classroom, and several of his players are college-bound.

“He’s built quite a few kids up,” said Mary Ann Cruz Jackson, one of the school’s deans of students, who added that he commands respect.

“It’s ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’” she said.

The lesson that recent morning was on democracy, and how its power is derived from the people.

“If we don’t like the government, we can what?” Medina asked.

“Change it,” a few students said.

“But you can’t change it if you don’t know it’s what?” he replied.

“Messed up,” they said.

“And when you find out it’s messed up, guess what?” he asked.

“Too late,” they said.

“It’s kind of too late already, right?” he continued. “Isn’t that what’s happening here in this city?”

The students nodded.

Later, he said that in the long run, the scandal may have been good for Bell. “Sometimes you need something negative to call attention to something that should’ve received attention a long time ago,” he said. “If this doesn’t wake you up, I don’t know what will.”

The scandal, in which current and former Bell city officials made enormous salaries and are accused of overcharging businesses and residents $5.6 million in taxes, has cast a shadow on many in this community, not least the Eagles football team.

The team budget of $15,000, half of what it was four decades ago, must be supplemented with donations and fundraisers. Several businesses that once helped the team, including a burger shop and a bowling alley, pulled their support this year, citing the overall economy and the trickle-down effect of the City Hall scandal. Another regular donor, a towing company that relied on city contracts, is going out of business.

Players sell churros at school to pay for painting yard lines on the field. To raise money for equipment this year, Medina took the team to the taping of a TV show that promised to pay audience members $10 apiece.

“This comedian was making fun of us, [saying] our politicians stole money, and he kept on going, so Medina had to shut him up,” said Mendoza, the linebacker.

A team falters

A poster inside the Eagles locker room celebrates their 1994 Los Angeles City 3A Championship. “Why Not Us?” it reads. But the team has had only one winning season since 2004.

Medina believed this year’s team was the most talented he’d had in six years as coach here, and the Eagles seemed to prove the point by winning their first three games. But then the team began to falter. Players pulled pranks. When Medina cracked down, nine starters turned in their jerseys — and then changed their mind, to the relief of their coach.

“It’s simple math: You give a kid three more hours here,” Medina said, pointing to the field, “that’s three less hours on the street.”

Medina knows a few things about keeping kids out of trouble. Within a one-mile stretch of Watts where he grew up, rival street gangs waged war. Gunfire was background noise. High school sports gave structure to Medina’s life. He went to UC Santa Barbara, graduated and became a teacher. He and his wife, Ariana, who attended Bell High School, live in Downey with their two children.

‘Just a game’

The Eagles took a 5-4 record into their final regular-season game, against Jordan High School, Medina’s alma mater. They led 10-7 at halftime, and in the locker room, Medina exhorted them to “go out there and control this game!”

It wasn’t to be. A mishandled snap on a field goal try and an interception late in the game helped give Jordan a 21-10 win. After the game, a few players cried. One punched a locker.

“It’s just a game, just football,” Medina told them. “Now you have the game of life coming up, and that’s way more important than this. Trust me.”

As the players gathered for a final huddle, Walter Lara, a senior, spoke up. “From all of us, thank you, coaches,” he said, fighting tears. “We put you through a lot … but you were always there for us.”

As Medina smiled, his team gathered for one last cheer.

“One, two, three … Bell!”

“One, two, three … Pride!”

baxter.holmes@latimes.com