Czar of the Off-Season : Issy Washington’s Slam-N-Jam Program Has Made the Summers Run By--on Hardwood--for a Decade

People wouldn’t lose much sleep, Issy Washington says, if he closed his Slam-N-Jam basketball leagues and tournaments. But Washington won’t stop running his events until kids stop coming.

Washington, 49, who says he hasn’t missed a basketball season as a player or a coach in 40 years, could be called the czar of South Bay off-season basketball.

For more than a decade, he has organized and coached nationally ranked USA/AAU Junior Olympic basketball teams of all ages out of his headquarters in Carson. His Slam-N-Jam program attracts the Southland’s best prep prospects, as well as 200 to 300 players he must turn away every summer. The Slam-N-Jam monicker is recognized around the country.

Washington, who played four years of varsity basketball at the University of Puget Sound in Seattle, says his involvement in basketball is a part-time job. He knows, however, that it requires full-time hours. A former Air Force major, he runs a small defense-contract consulting business, but when you hear him talk basketball, you’re sure it comes first.

Detractors have criticized him for making money off high school athletes by charging high entrance fees for his leagues and tournaments. Washington counters with a sigh: “Anybody who is trying to get rich off this stuff is foolish. It just isn’t worth it.”

On his mind is an $18,000 debt incurred at last year’s Reebok Slam-N-Jam National Invitational Tournament at UCLA. Washington, who directed that high-overhead fest, hopes to retire that debt with some of the proceeds from the Slam-N-Jam national tournament beginning Monday at Cal State Long Beach. Most of the proceeds will benefit Athletes for Academic Success, a nonprofit scholarship program.

The tournament, a Junior Olympic-sanctioned event, features 32 teams from around the nation, including defending champion San Francisco, two Slam-N-Jam teams Washington helped develop in Northern California and squads from Washington, D.C., Colorado, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Team Reebok, featuring South Bay standouts Zan Mason (6-7) and Sam Crawford (5-10) of Westchester High School and Inglewood High’s Harold Miner (6-4), and Wilson Jet, which sports Ed Stokes (6-10) of St. Bernard, could compete for the championship. Both received top-10 seeds.

This is the fourth annual Reebok Slam-N-Jam tourney, but it’s Washington’s sixth invitational. “They were not all perfect,” he concedes, “but if it is not run right, you will hear about it, and then you make changes.”

The Long Beach tournament comes on the heels of several all-star camps attended by many tournament players, including the Santa Barbara Super Stars Camp and the Nike All-American Camp at Princeton University.

It also runs concurrently with the Bosco Tech Summer Hoop Spectacular, a 50-team tournament beginning Monday that has Mason’s and Crawford’s Westchester team seeded first.

The Bosco Tech tourney will likely compete with Washington’s weeklong event. But with more teams from around the country, Washington says he’s assured of success.

Dissolving his Slam-N-Jam high school summer league has provided Washington more time to put together a national invitational event.

But it wasn’t merely the Long Beach tournament that persuaded him to end the summer league, a smaller version of his renowned 500-player spring league. The growing involvement of high school coaches in their players’ summer schedules told Washington that drawing players away from their coaches and toward his league would only alienate him from them in the long run.

“I am not going to do anything to compete with high school coaches,” Washington says. “They are doing this full time, and I’m part time.”

South Bay high school coaches seem to support most of Washington’s activities, probably because many of their players participate. But if a coach has at least one player attending all-star camps as well as Washington’s leagues and tournaments, the struggle for that player’s summer services has recently worsened.

The all-star camps--showcases of the nation’s top talent for the benefit of college recruiters--formerly ran throughout the summer. But this year all camps are being conducted during the last three weeks in July, leaving some coaches without their best players for many local leagues and tournaments.

“Those 21 days in July have changed everything,” says St. Bernard Coach Jim McClune. “We were scheduled to play all that time, and we have a lot of kids going to the camps.”

McClune’s all-stars include seniors Juno Armstrong and Stokes. They would normally suit up for the majority of the 20-25 games McClune likes to see his team play in July but will miss a significant number because of the camps and tournaments, such as Washington’s invitational.

McClune, however, has few qualms about Washington’s programs. At least five of his players have participated in Slam-N-Jam spring and summer leagues.

“Issy provides a valuable service,” McClune says. “I’d like to say my kids are better served by me, but if not me, better somebody than just having them on their own. As long as they are playing, they are doing something constructive and not getting in trouble.”

Rolling Hills Coach Cliff Warren, who had six players participate in the Slam-N-Jam spring league, sees other benefits from Washington’s involvement in off-season basketball.

“His leagues seem to create more interest in basketball and get kids together, white and black,” Warren says. “That is a real plus for us, in a predominantly white community, to get out and meet and play with some black players and hopefully understand them.”

Warren added that he prefers his players to work with different coaches in the off-season. “I like them to get some new ideas, because I know mine aren’t always right,” he says.

Warren, like McClune, also lost key players, including 6-4 John Hardy and 6-3 Mark Tesar, to camp and tournament play. He says his other players must use the summer to improve individually and prepare as a team for the 1989 season. He acknowledges, however, that he probably asks too much of his players by practicing every day of the summer and playing every night and weekend.

Washington not only provides players a full slate of on-court activity, he tries to steer them in positive directions off the court.

This spring he persuaded The Princeton Review, an SAT preparatory organization, to provide $695 SAT workshop scholarships for about 40 athletes in danger of missing out on college scholarships because their SAT scores fell below the NCAA requirement of 700.

The Review guarantees that each student will improve his score 100 points. Westchester’s Mason attended every class and upped his score by 300 points, according to Washington, leaving him far above the required score. Juniors who participated in this year’s workshop will be allowed to do so next year also.

Quipped Washington: “I saw what they were doing in the course, and now I think even I could pass the SAT.”

In addition to directing the recent Carson Summer Grand Finale high school tournament, Washington is coordinator of the Victoria Sports Assn., an organization that sponsors developmental basketball leagues for athletes 16 and younger. During the school year he spends most of his time developing young talent on two AAU teams that play at Carson’s Victoria Park and often travel around the country for tournaments.

This year his 15-and-under team finished fourth at the AAU Junior Olympic 15-and-under tourney in Arkansas. Carson’s Ontario Smith, 15, helped the squad improve on its fifth-place finish of a year ago.

Smith’s father, Julius Smith, was president of the Victoria Sports Assn. for five years and now coaches Midget and Pee Wee teams at Victoria Park. He says it’s easy to recognize children who associate with Washington and develop with the Victoria Sports Assn.

“I can see the way they act versus the others we don’t work with, and ours are much more mannerable,” Smith said. “They don’t just go around marking up walls.”

Adds Washington: “My programs keep kids cool in summer and take a few kids away from gangs and drugs. I like to think we’re making progress in that area because any time you can get kids’ energy applied on the basketball court and keep them out of Juvenile Court, you are accomplishing something.”

Washington, who also runs a summer league for college players at Compton College, thinks idleness is largely responsible for the prevalence of gangs, drugs and violence among young people. His solution is to keep youngsters busy with basketball. What irks him is parents and high school coaches who whine about their kids playing too much.

“People don’t talk about playing too much tennis or golf, and you just can’t have it both ways,” he says. “You can’t complain about the kids playing too much and then complain about them getting in trouble.”

Washington’s rival, American Roundball Corp. founder Rich Goldberg, agrees. Goldberg, like Washington, runs high school and college leagues and tournaments throughout the year and involves himself in developing younger talent.

“If I were a kid right now, I’d want to play all day and all night,” Goldberg says. “There really is no such thing as burnout because kids will play anyway if they don’t have a league to play in.”

The question of burnout does seem relevant, though, to players who part with their coaches and parents to participate in summer all-star camps and tournaments like Washington’s Reebok Slam-N-Jam invitational.

Says Sam Crawford, Westchester’s lightning-quick point guard, who had his May-September basketball schedule planned in April: “By the end of the summer you’re exhausted because you’ve been playing ball 12 of 24 hours every day of the summer. It’s just too much if you don’t understand why you’re doing it.”

Crawford understands why. He wants the best scholarship he can get. So, while he travels around the country three times this summer with Team Reebok--after the Long Beach tourney he’s off to the Las Vegas National High School tournament--and plays in several local tournaments with his Westchester squad, he’ll also catch up on his geometry and chemistry in summer school.

Washington will take Crawford’s team, Wilson Jet and three others to the Las Vegas tournament. The success of players such as Crawford, who have participated in Washington’s programs more than once, validate his efforts, as does that of Washington’s son Chris, who played for four years at UC Berkeley after participating in his father’s programs.

“Right now,” a smiling Issy Washington says, “Chris is looking over Pop’s shoulders so when I get tired, he can take over.”