Midnight rescue - Van Standifer and David Berg organize late-night basketball games

Nation's Business, Nov, 1989 by Bradford A. McKee

Midnight Rescue

Late-night organized basketball in a small town has lured young men from the streets to the gyms, and drug-linked crime has fallen.

In 1986, Van Standifer, then town manager of Glenarden, Md., was sure he could cut drug-related crime in his community if he could offer young people at high risk the right activity at the right time. The solution he proposed: midnight basketball.

Some people thought his idea was crazy, that he could attract neither players nor spectators to games that started late at night and ran into the early morning. But Standifer, 60, proved them wrong.

The Midnight Basketball League that he founded is booming. He designed it to appeal to the age group most likely to be involved in drug use and drug-related crime, and he scheduled games during the high-risk hours for such illegal activity. Players must be 17 to 21, and no game may begin before 10 p.m.

The league has grown to 172 young men on 14 teams playing at two gymnasiums, and standing-room-only crowds provide strong community support to the players. The town's drug-related crime has dropped by almost half.

Help from the town's businesses was essential for the league's growth. More than 40 companies--most of them small firms--contribute up to $1,500 each to the league every year, and some sponsor their own teams. The league's budget was only $2,000 in 1986. This year's budget, which pays for uniforms, officials, trophies, security, and insurance, was about $90,000. Standifer, a federal-government retiree, now devotes full time to running the league as a volunteer.

When he conceived the league, Standifer says, most companies "didn't even want to talk to me." The business people couldn't understand why the games had to start at 10 o'clock, he recalls. Given the response of young people and the public, Standifer says, nobody complains about the late center-jump time any more.

The program "has kind of snowballed in the last four years," says Laurence V. Hill, a retired Postal Service manager and member of the league's advisory board. More than two dozen other communities have expressed interest in starting similar programs.

Standifer came up with his idea after receiving a report from the police chief in December 1985 about rising crime in Glenarden, a town of about 5,500 people, near Washington, D.C. Drug-related crimes--mostly assaults, burglaries, robberies, and vandalism, and most committed by men under 25 during early-morning hours--had risen 60 percent over 1984, even during the usually quieter winter months.

"It wasn't even warm yet, and I thought, `What's going to happen when it gets to be summer?'" Standifer says. In the following months, he formulated plans for the midnight games. By summer he had drawn a number of "troubled, idle" teens--many of them drop-outs or unemployed--away from the potential drug market and onto the basketball court. Standifer says expelling drug dealers from the community is a police problem, but "to concentrate on the [drug] market, that's our problem."

David G. Berg, a Lutheran minister in Ellicott City, Md., near Baltimore, says the league not only gets young people off the streets during high-crime hours but also gives them an escape route from the cycle of crime and drugs. Berg, who helps Standifer promote the league, is a consultant to the Mark Vogel Companies, a Washington real-estate developer that has given major support to the league. Describing the league as "player-centered, not sport-centered," Berg says it gives players role models and boosts each individual's self-image. With Berg's help, 21-year-old player Mark Holmes of Seabrook, Md., found a job with a local office-cleaning company. He says Berg's interest in the players helps them "forgo any bad habit that has them leaning in the wrong direction."

Business leaders who fund the league now feel they have a hand in fighting drugs directly. Richard Weiser, chairman of the board of Tri Equity Corp., a real-estate development company in the northern Virginia area near Washington, says sponsoring his team, the Tri Equity Hoopsters, has made him aware of how his company can help solve local drug problems. "I can't think of a better way to spend money," Weiser says. "Very few programs have had such a dramatic effect on decreasing crime. It should be saying something to people."

PHOTO : Basketball-league founder Van Standifer, left, and volunteer promoter David Berg say the

PHOTO : late-night games help young people.