Sports, Not Gangs

The Community Youth Gang Services in Los Angeles City and County, with four years of experience in mediating gang disputes behind it, is about to add a new strategy. It is setting up a new sports program that it hopes will make some youngsters veer away from gang membership.

Six sports clubs will be financed by a grant of nearly $350,000 from the Los Angeles Organizing Committee’s Amateur Athletic Foundation. The money is part of the Olympic surplus earmarked for youth sports programs.

The clubs will be located at existing parks and recreation facilities in East and South-Central Los Angeles, Pacoima and Altadena--areas marred by graffiti and the coats of arms of gangs, areas where the problem is at its worst.

In about three months boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 16 will be invited to play organized basketball, flag football, handball, softball and volleyball, and to compete in track and swimming. They will play against other clubs to let them get to know youngsters in other neighborhoods.

Participants need not be gang members--only 10% of the youngsters who live in gang territories are members--but gang members can participate, and any leaders who do will be encouraged to use their leadership skills as coaches and managers.

Sport is no cure-all for society’s ills. It can lead youngsters to believe that winning is everything or that athletic ability is more important than education. But the new sports clubs at least will provide an option for the would-be gang members who are known in gang neighborhoods as “want-to-bes,” and provide a forum for counseling against taking winning too seriously as well as against drug involvement and gang allegiance.

Even if the program achieves only small victories, it can reduce the number of youngsters who are recruited to replace the gangsters who get killed, who go to prison or who finally grow up and out of gang life.

Los Angeles has the largest gang population of any American city. An estimated 40,000 youths display red badges of cowardice and blue insignia of dishonor, or identify with a gang name that has meant shame for generations.

Most Southern Californians never see the horrors. Their paths never take them through hazardous territory where a bus stop is a war zone.

With the work of the Community Youth Gang Services, which is funded by the city and county, the war zones may keep shrinking as youngsters choose to join the gang on the playground.