kris
08-18-2005, 02:01 PM
[URL=http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/chitribts/20050818/ts_chicagotrib/leagueofhisowncreateswaves[/URL]
The sun is setting a burnished orange, and three groups of children jog across the football field in their pads and helmets to the sideline. It's quitting time on a pleasant summer evening, no school for a while yet, but 10-year-old Xavier Bernal isn't grinning.
For more than four decades, this field at Rowland Heights High School has teemed with footballers age 5 to 14. But last year's nine squads of Rowland Heights Raiders have dwindled to barely three, and the cheerleading team has gone from 80 girls to nine. To hear Xavier tell it, blame falls squarely on the league's most famous former coach.
"I'm mad at Coach Snoop," he says. "He was so cool; he told me to play my heart out and to play everything I've got. But now I just want to ask him, why did he take all our players?"
Rapper Snoop Dogg rocked Southern California's youth football world two years ago when he volunteered as a Rowland Raiders "daddy coach," and again last month when he broke from the franchise to start his own conference: Snoop Youth Football.
Some parents and coaches describe him as a Pied Piper luring footballers away from long-established teams with his song "Drop It Like It's Hot" blasting from a school bus pimped out with enough bass, TV screens and gadgetry to persuade any kid to sell out the old for the new.
And the Raiders aren't the only team in the Orange County Junior All American Football conference to feel the screws; Long Beach and Compton teams report similar hemorrhaging.
While parents and coaches in the old conference accuse the rapper and his agents of a campaign of sabotage and misinformation, Snoop's people call the furor sour grapes over a new league that they say will better serve urban communities and help keep kids out of gangs.
Snoop, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, has deep roots in youth football, having played for the Long Beach Poly Junior Jackrabbits. "It taught me how to work with other kids," he says, "how to have a relationship, how to learn. My coach taught me about religion as well as football, about keeping God in everything we did."
So two years ago, with Snoop's two boys old enough to play league ball, he enrolled them in the Rowland Raiders program and signed on as an offensive coordinator.
`He acted like a dad'
League commissioner Bob Barna got "some e-mails from parents, saying, `How dare you let somebody like that be with our youth?'" Barna says. "But did he bring anything negative? No. He acted like a dad."
As that first year came to a close, some of the league's all-stars received recruitment calls from the rapper, asking them to join the Raiders the following season. The league allows a team to take 15 percent of its players from outside its immediate area, says Barna, and to recruit without limit in cities where no team exists.
Snoop took full advantage, nabbing players like Derrick Marbrough from Long Beach. "I played against him, and then he wanted me on his team, so he called my mom," says Derrick, now 11. "I switched teams."
"It was so cool," remembers Duon Rucker, who shipped in to the Rowland Raiders from Long Beach as a 10-year-old. "Everybody at school was all over me, `Are you about to go with Snoop? Can you get me his autograph?'"
And then there was the bus.
"It's a mini-school bus," Derrick says, "and it had TVs in it where we watched our games from last week."
"Yeah," Duon enthuses, "and everywhere we went, you could hear us coming down the street, we had like hydraulics from all the bass! We listened to Snoop's music--our theme song was `Drop It Like It's Hot.'"
Last year's Rowland Raiders team of 8- to 10-year-olds, with Snoop as offensive and defensive coordinator and his older son playing quarterback, was unbeaten. At a banquet, the coach gave each player a DVD of team games with a special Snoop Dogg tribute.
Then, for the second year in a row, Snoop culled the best players for an all-star team to represent the Rowland Raiders in the postseason. They bused out to play other California all-star footballers before heading to Jacksonville, Fla., to compete in the brainchild of their coach--the "Snooperbowl"--a day before Super Bowl XXXIX.
More than 15,000 fans crowded in to watch the Raiders play the Jacksonville Junior All Stars (or perhaps to watch halftime performer Snoop), and the team from Rowland didn't disappoint. On the way home, Raiders all-stars lugged custom trophies donated by Tiffany & Co.
Snoop's critics say he gave his players jerseys, letter jackets and championship rings, ignoring rules stipulating that if any team in a division gets new equipment, every team does.
"After he won his first league championship game, he went out and bought scooters for everybody," says Frank Romero, the Raiders' president. "He never said anything to the league, never asked permission."
Snoop had complaints of his own. The residency requirements seemed too strict. He was also bothered by the $175 fee per child for the Rowland program, which he says kept poorer families out.
"It's so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs," Snoop says. "We should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics."
Starting a league
About midway through last year's season, it hit Snoop: "I don't have to go against the system," he remembers thinking. "The best thing to do would be to create my own league, as opposed to me being used and them getting a lot of the credit."
After the season, top players in the Orange County conference received phone calls asking them to join Snoop Youth Football, which has no residency rules and cheaper rates--$100 for the first child in a family, half price for any others, with cleats and pads included. Many families and even some coaches hopped aboard, while others loyal to their chapters wondered aloud if all of last season's pageantry had been orchestrated to "steal our kids."
"He came here just so that he could take away from us what we'd taken many years to establish," says Rowland Raiders parent Sandy Gonzales.
Even Snoop's alma mater, the Long Beach Poly Junior Jackrabbits, is struggling to stay afloat. "I don't know if our program will exist after this season," says Sarah Morrison, chapter president for 27 years.
To Snoop's charge that Orange County youth football is too expensive, Morrison says, "Our organization has never turned a kid away who cannot pay."
Orange County coaches point out that although they welcome any kid, Snoop's league holds tryouts to sign up the best players, hurting the feelings of those rejected. Al Brown, an official of the new league, says tryouts are a safety measure to make sure that kids who shouldn't play tackle football don't.
Snoop Youth Football will be well-financed. The rapper is performing at a benefit concert for the league Aug. 25 along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ice Cube. League sponsors include Amp'd Mobile, a cell phone provider that is offering cash in the mid-six figures and has talked about giving phones to Snoop's players.
Snoop's Rowland Raiders team from last year will soon star in its own video game, and Sony is making a movie called "Coach Snoop," starring Snoop.
I think Snoop is giving those kids a lot of cool opportunities and being very generous with his time and money. He's also made the league more competitive with tryouts and an AS game.
The article is obviously slanted to me. The picture of Snoop was him smoking at a concert and manages to overshadow Snoop's initiative with biased complaints from bitter parents, league officials.
The sun is setting a burnished orange, and three groups of children jog across the football field in their pads and helmets to the sideline. It's quitting time on a pleasant summer evening, no school for a while yet, but 10-year-old Xavier Bernal isn't grinning.
For more than four decades, this field at Rowland Heights High School has teemed with footballers age 5 to 14. But last year's nine squads of Rowland Heights Raiders have dwindled to barely three, and the cheerleading team has gone from 80 girls to nine. To hear Xavier tell it, blame falls squarely on the league's most famous former coach.
"I'm mad at Coach Snoop," he says. "He was so cool; he told me to play my heart out and to play everything I've got. But now I just want to ask him, why did he take all our players?"
Rapper Snoop Dogg rocked Southern California's youth football world two years ago when he volunteered as a Rowland Raiders "daddy coach," and again last month when he broke from the franchise to start his own conference: Snoop Youth Football.
Some parents and coaches describe him as a Pied Piper luring footballers away from long-established teams with his song "Drop It Like It's Hot" blasting from a school bus pimped out with enough bass, TV screens and gadgetry to persuade any kid to sell out the old for the new.
And the Raiders aren't the only team in the Orange County Junior All American Football conference to feel the screws; Long Beach and Compton teams report similar hemorrhaging.
While parents and coaches in the old conference accuse the rapper and his agents of a campaign of sabotage and misinformation, Snoop's people call the furor sour grapes over a new league that they say will better serve urban communities and help keep kids out of gangs.
Snoop, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, has deep roots in youth football, having played for the Long Beach Poly Junior Jackrabbits. "It taught me how to work with other kids," he says, "how to have a relationship, how to learn. My coach taught me about religion as well as football, about keeping God in everything we did."
So two years ago, with Snoop's two boys old enough to play league ball, he enrolled them in the Rowland Raiders program and signed on as an offensive coordinator.
`He acted like a dad'
League commissioner Bob Barna got "some e-mails from parents, saying, `How dare you let somebody like that be with our youth?'" Barna says. "But did he bring anything negative? No. He acted like a dad."
As that first year came to a close, some of the league's all-stars received recruitment calls from the rapper, asking them to join the Raiders the following season. The league allows a team to take 15 percent of its players from outside its immediate area, says Barna, and to recruit without limit in cities where no team exists.
Snoop took full advantage, nabbing players like Derrick Marbrough from Long Beach. "I played against him, and then he wanted me on his team, so he called my mom," says Derrick, now 11. "I switched teams."
"It was so cool," remembers Duon Rucker, who shipped in to the Rowland Raiders from Long Beach as a 10-year-old. "Everybody at school was all over me, `Are you about to go with Snoop? Can you get me his autograph?'"
And then there was the bus.
"It's a mini-school bus," Derrick says, "and it had TVs in it where we watched our games from last week."
"Yeah," Duon enthuses, "and everywhere we went, you could hear us coming down the street, we had like hydraulics from all the bass! We listened to Snoop's music--our theme song was `Drop It Like It's Hot.'"
Last year's Rowland Raiders team of 8- to 10-year-olds, with Snoop as offensive and defensive coordinator and his older son playing quarterback, was unbeaten. At a banquet, the coach gave each player a DVD of team games with a special Snoop Dogg tribute.
Then, for the second year in a row, Snoop culled the best players for an all-star team to represent the Rowland Raiders in the postseason. They bused out to play other California all-star footballers before heading to Jacksonville, Fla., to compete in the brainchild of their coach--the "Snooperbowl"--a day before Super Bowl XXXIX.
More than 15,000 fans crowded in to watch the Raiders play the Jacksonville Junior All Stars (or perhaps to watch halftime performer Snoop), and the team from Rowland didn't disappoint. On the way home, Raiders all-stars lugged custom trophies donated by Tiffany & Co.
Snoop's critics say he gave his players jerseys, letter jackets and championship rings, ignoring rules stipulating that if any team in a division gets new equipment, every team does.
"After he won his first league championship game, he went out and bought scooters for everybody," says Frank Romero, the Raiders' president. "He never said anything to the league, never asked permission."
Snoop had complaints of his own. The residency requirements seemed too strict. He was also bothered by the $175 fee per child for the Rowland program, which he says kept poorer families out.
"It's so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs," Snoop says. "We should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics."
Starting a league
About midway through last year's season, it hit Snoop: "I don't have to go against the system," he remembers thinking. "The best thing to do would be to create my own league, as opposed to me being used and them getting a lot of the credit."
After the season, top players in the Orange County conference received phone calls asking them to join Snoop Youth Football, which has no residency rules and cheaper rates--$100 for the first child in a family, half price for any others, with cleats and pads included. Many families and even some coaches hopped aboard, while others loyal to their chapters wondered aloud if all of last season's pageantry had been orchestrated to "steal our kids."
"He came here just so that he could take away from us what we'd taken many years to establish," says Rowland Raiders parent Sandy Gonzales.
Even Snoop's alma mater, the Long Beach Poly Junior Jackrabbits, is struggling to stay afloat. "I don't know if our program will exist after this season," says Sarah Morrison, chapter president for 27 years.
To Snoop's charge that Orange County youth football is too expensive, Morrison says, "Our organization has never turned a kid away who cannot pay."
Orange County coaches point out that although they welcome any kid, Snoop's league holds tryouts to sign up the best players, hurting the feelings of those rejected. Al Brown, an official of the new league, says tryouts are a safety measure to make sure that kids who shouldn't play tackle football don't.
Snoop Youth Football will be well-financed. The rapper is performing at a benefit concert for the league Aug. 25 along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ice Cube. League sponsors include Amp'd Mobile, a cell phone provider that is offering cash in the mid-six figures and has talked about giving phones to Snoop's players.
Snoop's Rowland Raiders team from last year will soon star in its own video game, and Sony is making a movie called "Coach Snoop," starring Snoop.
I think Snoop is giving those kids a lot of cool opportunities and being very generous with his time and money. He's also made the league more competitive with tryouts and an AS game.
The article is obviously slanted to me. The picture of Snoop was him smoking at a concert and manages to overshadow Snoop's initiative with biased complaints from bitter parents, league officials.