Rapper Clears the Field
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 High School in Rowland Heights has teemed with football players ages 5 to 14, so many jostling Rowland Raiders that each of the program's age divisions overran the next. But last year's nine squads have dwindled to three, and the usually robust cheerleading squad has gone from 80 girls to nine.
To hear Xavier tell it, blame falls squarely on the youth football league's most famous and controversial 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?"
Walking with Xavier toward the parking lot, parents and coaches describe rapper Snoop Dogg as a modern-day Pied Piper luring football players 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.
Snoop rocked the youth football world two years ago when he volunteered as a Rowland Raiders "daddy coach," and then again last month when he broke from the franchise to start his own conference. 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, also in competition with Snoop's new league, report similar hemorrhaging.
And as Snoop talks of expanding the Snoop Youth Football League beyond its initial eight Southern California chapters, parents and coaches in the old conference accuse him and his agents of mounting a campaign of sabotage and misinformation.
Snoop's camp calls the furor sour grapes over its new league, which it says will be more effective and will better serve cash-strapped urban communities.
What's clear is that there's more at stake than football: Both practical goals, such as gang prevention and scholastic achievement, and more amorphous concepts, such as tradition and community, pervade dialogue at either end.
