(Huffington Post) LOS ANGELES — Football has long been the athletic stepchild at inner-city Crenshaw High School. Trophy cases are crammed with basketball awards. Gym walls are lined with hoops championship flags.
But the football team is undefeated this season and headed for the California state championship bowl game this weekend, and the coach attributes part of the success to an unlikely off-field source: rapper Snoop Dogg.
Nine of this year’s Crenshaw High School Cougars went through the 5-year-old Snoop Youth Football League, representing the first crop of varsity players to cut their teeth in the program. The league has produced standouts at other schools, but none has more players or a better record than Crenshaw.
I love it when one of our own gives back to the community. Everybody knows Snoop Dogg as the pot-smoking rapper, so when he turns father-figure coach to kids in the inner city, spending over a million dollars of his own money to give them football, it’s great public relations for marijuana without even having to mention it.
But further along into the article there is this portion that really lifts me up:
But the league soon caught on, especially when fathers with criminal records learned they could coach, unlike most other youth sports. Broadus, himself a former gang member, has several convictions for drugs and weapons offenses, and if the league didn’t allow ex-cons, there wouldn’t be enough coaches.
The coaching exception has also reconnected boys with their dads, or at least with positive male role models in neighborhoods where fathers are often behind bars or otherwise absent.
The dads, many of them members of the rival Bloods and Crips, must agree to leave their gang disputes away from the field.
It got me to thinking about all of the opportunities that we are denied once we’re caught with marijuana and given the “drug criminal” stamp on our lifelong record. With all the kids that could use more interaction with positive adult role models, it seems a shame that getting caught with weed twenty years ago could prevent a father from being his son’s Pop Warner football coach.
