Anita L. DeFrantz
President, LA84 Foundation, Kids in Sports

Born October 4, 1952, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Anita Lucette DeFrantz is president and a director of the LA84 Foundation (formerly the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles), a private foundation seeded by the $93 million surplus of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. LA84 provides grants for Southern California youth sports organizations and maintains the largest sports library in North America. She is also president and director of Kids in Sports, Los Angeles, a non-profit public charity created in 1994 to foster youth in sports and to educate the volunteers and coaches that serve them.

Anita DeFrantz brings passion to all of her avocations: youth in sports, sports research and media, rowing, the International Olympic Committee, the US Olympic organizations, and the law. The mission of the LA84 Foundation is “to serve youth through sport and to increase knowledge of sport and its impact on people’s lives.” The mission of Kids in Sports LA is “Building communities, one team at a time.” These are also the personal missions of Anita DeFrantz.

A national- and world-class champion rower, Ms. DeFrantz was one of hundreds of Olympians denied the opportunity to “go for the gold” in the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games because of the boycott by President Jimmy Carter. Tapping her strong sense of fairness and justice as a lawyer, Ms. DeFrantz publicly defied the President’s boycott, filed suit against the US Olympic Committee (USOC)—of which she was a member—arguing that the USOC could vote to send American teams to compete in Moscow in spite of the administration’s boycott. She said that the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 barred anyone from denying an athlete’s right to compete in the Olympic Games, that athletes alone had the right, the authority, and the power to determine if they would participate in the games or not.

In April 1980, Ms. DeFrantz made an impassioned speech before the USOC, but it voted to support the boycott. She next filed suit against the USOC to force them to allow the athletes to compete, but the case was dismissed. (DeFrantz v. United States Olympic Comm., 492 F. Supp. 1181 [D.D.C. 1980]). While she did not win in the courts, she won the respect of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and was honored in July 1980 with the Bronze Medal of the Olympic Order in recognition of her leadership role in challenging the boycott.

In 1986, she was elected as a member of the IOC, making Ms. DeFrantz not only the first African-American but also the first American woman to serve on the committee. Ms. DeFrantz remains a voting member until she is eighty. She was named a member of the IOC Executive Board [1992–2001]. In 1997 she became the organization’s first female vice president, a position she held until 2001. From 1989 to 1994 she served on the IOC’s Summer Program Commission, which determines what sports will be included in Olympic competition. In 1995, she became chair of the IOC’s Women and Sports Commission. She is credited with getting women’s softball and soccer added to the Olympic ticket. She serves on the Juridical Commission of the IOC, which is made up of lawyers, and on the Finance Commission, which reviews the investments and spending plans.

In addition to her extensive nonprofit contributions, since 1998 Ms. DeFrantz has been a director of Western Asset, an investment fund in Pasadena, California. She has been a director at OBN Holdings, a film, media, and television holding company based in Los Angeles, since 2003.

Elizabeth Ghaffari: You are both an Olympian and a lawyer. How did you come to follow these two paths?

Anita DeFrantz: I was offered an academic scholarship by Connecticut College, in New London, Connecticut, where I graduated in 1974 [BA in political philosophy, with honors].

A chance meeting with rowing coach Bart Gulong in my sophomore year at Connecticut began my life-long interest in rowing. I was on the Connecticut rowing team, the US women’s rowing team [1975–1980], and was team captain and a member of the bronze-medal-winning women’s rowing team at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.

I chose law because I wanted to speak the language of power. In the mid seventies, there was no question that those who spoke law spoke the language of power. One needed only to think back to what was happening in the mid-1970s with the Watergate trials and the decisions that people in power were making. Many of those people had law backgrounds. That’s why I thought it would be wise to learn this special language—one that has served me well throughout my career. Sometimes I forget that I’m an attorney, and other people sometimes forget, too. When I need to bring out that credential, it’s quite helpful.

Ghaffari: What was your first job after graduation, and how important were your first jobs?

DeFrantz: My first job after law school was as staff attorney at the Juvenile Law Center of Philadelphia [1977–1979], which was only in its second year when I joined it. Working on behalf of children is something that I longed to do. I have always believed that the way we treat children is a reflection of how we treat ourselves. And, too often, the picture is not pretty.

Anyway, I saw a listing for the job on a bulletin board and just bicycled over there wearing my running shoes. I thought nothing of it—I didn’t have any other shoes to wear. Evidently, they were quite taken with the fact that I appeared at the interview with running shoes. I guess I was a good enough match because I was hired and began work that summer.

The Juvenile Law Center is a wonderful institution that does remarkable things—from institutional litigation to, most recently, joining in the Supreme Court case that recognized that you cannot put a child in jail for life. That decision also recognized that peoples’ brains do not finish development until they’re in their early twenties, so deciding that a child of fifteen could be responsible as an adult is not quite correct.

Ghaffari: How did you come to challenge President Carter about the 1980 boycott of the Olympic Games?

DeFrantz: After the Montreal Games, before my third year of law school, I asked my coach if he thought I could be an Olympic gold medalist. I already had the wonderful experience of being a bronze medalist. The only reason to compete again would be to try for the elusive gold medal. He said, yes, he thought I had it in me to do that. I decided to commit four more years to training and competition. Whatever happened in 1980 would be the end of my rowing career—after that, I would move forward into whatever my legal career might offer.

In order to have no regrets for 1980, I decided in the fall of 1979 to take a leave of absence and train at Princeton University with the coach of the women’s Olympic rowing team. In January 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced that, in response to the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.

I was at a friend’s birthday party in a bar that evening, and noticed that the President of the United States was about to make an announcement. So, I went over and listened. He said, “If they [the Soviets] don’t leave [Afghanistan], we won’t send our spectators and athletes.” I realized that there was a lack of understanding about how the Olympic movement worked if he thought there was some kind of central sending-office for spectators and athletes. It worried me deeply.

Ghaffari: How did this change your life?

DeFrantz: At the time, I was pretty naïve. After all, who was I? I was just the seventh seat in a bronze-medal-winning, eight-woman rowing team. Just one person among 260 million people. But, I believed that his decision was wrong. I believed that only an athlete who had earned the right to be an Olympian for the 1980 team was the only person who could decide to compete or not. We were private citizens. Not one penny of federal money supported us. To me, the notion that we were suddenly to be commanded by the President of the United States was just rubbish. We were individual citizens pursuing our own goals. And somehow, we were metamorphosed into being the only solution to [object to the] sixty thousand troops on a border that the Soviet Union shared with Afghanistan. That, to me, made no sense.

The boycott was, in one way, masterful politics. There were barely five hundred of us Olympians, plus our families and coaches—a tiny number of people directly affected by this decision. But, our lives forever would be changed by this decision. The lives of those athletes who never competed in the Olympic Games were especially impacted—they were never actually Olympians. They could always say they were members of the US 1980 Olympic team. But they don’t exist in the list of Olympians that the IOC maintains. That’s a terrible thing to do to them.

Ghaffari: When did you begin to reject conventional career wisdom and why?

DeFrantz: Do you mean—do I think I’ve been right? Am I willing to take the case to those people I think are wrong? Well, there we have it, don’t we? Even as a child, I was troubled by injustice and things that just didn’t seem right.

I probably got that growing up in the wonderful family I had. My parents had been involved in the civil rights movement at Indiana University [Bloomington]. My mother, Anita Page DeFrantz, had been one of five women who integrated the student housing. My father, Robert David DeFrantz, was president of the campus chapter of the NAACP. His father, Faburn E. DeFrantz, Sr., had been the executive director of the Senate Avenue YMCA,¹ which was an important gathering place for the African-American community.

They had an annual speaker series called the Monster Meetings, which under his leadership became one of the nation’s most highly-respected public forums, hosting the leaders of the African-American community at that time, who would come and speak. He met W. E. B. DuBois, George Washington Carver, and Langston Hughes—those [men] and other leaders in art, science, and industry who gave presentations at the Monster Meetings of the Senate Avenue YMCA.

My grandfather also had been active in helping Indiana University let an African American play on their NCAA basketball team following Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough in baseball in 1947. He helped the president of Indiana University, Herman Wells, and the basketball coach, Branch McCracken, understand how important it was to let this talent play. After an earlier unsuccessful attempt, they finally succeeded in getting Bill Garrett to play as the first African-American basketball player in the Big Ten athletic conference following his graduation from high school [the year Garrett’s team won the Indiana State Basketball Championship].

Before that era, my great-grandfather, Alonzo DeFrantz, was part of the Exodusters,² which made it possible for emancipated black people to migrate to Kansas after Reconstruction. Alonzo DeFrantz reportedly helped over two hundred Tennessee transplants relocate to Dunlap Colony, Kansas, in the 1880s, and made it possible for them to select and put down payments on small farms. At one time, he was secretary/treasurer and later president of the Pap Singleton organization.

So I have a long tradition in my family of fighting for what we believe to be the right thing to do.

Ghaffari: Which explains your work on behalf of the Amateur Sports Act and your challenge of Jimmy Carter over the 1980 Olympic Games.

DeFrantz: I had testified before Congress in support of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which established the US Olympic Committee, the national governing bodies for each Olympic sport, and important legal protections for individual athletes. This Act resolved a territorial battle that had gone on for years between the two amateur athletic organizations. The Amateur Athletic Union had represented the U.S in international competition matters and, generally, regulated amateur sports. The National Collegiate Athletic Association [NCAA] was a semi-voluntary association of institutions, conferences, organizations, and individuals that had organized US college- and university-level athletic programs.

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Later, I guess I caught the attention of the media in 1980 when a journalist called me and asked for a comment on the President’s statement that “We will not be going to Moscow for the Olympic Games.” My response was, “What does he mean ‘we’? Where were we when I was freezing a part of my anatomy off in training? What does he mean, ‘We will not be going?’” I guess I was the first athlete to suggest that it was not a decision of someone else—that it should be my decision, once I made the team. That’s what brought me to the attention of the public. That really had its bad times too, because I received a lot of hate mail and many, really mean things were said.

Ghaffari: When did you become part of the Olympic organization?

DeFrantz: In 1976, I was selected to the US Olympic rowing team. Shortly thereafter, I was chosen as captain of the women’s rowing team. Then, I was elected a member of the USOC’s Athletes’ Advisory Council [AAC]. I was elected to the USOC board of directors in the same year. Then in January 1977, I became one of two athletes named to the USOC executive board. The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee [LAOOC] was created in 1978 to plan and prepare for the 1984 Summer Games. The USOC had a certain number of members to represent them on the LAOOC board. By then, I was vice chair of the AAC. Since my term on the USOC executive board could continue through the LA Olympic Games, I became one of the nominees proposed by the USOC to the LAOOC board.

Ghaffari: What was your role on the USOC board? On the LAOOC board?

DeFrantz: As a member of the LAOOC Board, I was representing the USOC and looking after the needs of the athletes as the 1984 Olympic Games were being organized.

The USOC Board was huge [120 persons]. The women’s 1976 Olympic rowing team had elected me to serve on the Athletes Advisory Committee, which in turn elected me to serve on the USOC Board of Directors. I am not sure how I was elected to the Executive Committee of the USOC. I was at a US rowing committee meeting when one of the people there, after taking a phone call, announced that I had been elected to the Executive Committee of the Board.

I hope I was helpful on the USOC board. I hope I asked good questions about decisions that were made to be sure they made really good sense. I know I helped and was a part of the decision-making to sell the house in New York and move to Colorado Springs.

Ghaffari: What was that about?

DeFrantz: In 1977, the USOC relocated its headquarters from New York City in order to establish Olympic-caliber training facilities and a new national headquarters in Colorado Springs. The USOC built a new Olympic Training Center (OTC) on thirty-five acres of the former Ent Air Force Base. It became the USOC administrative headquarters in July 1978. We sold “the old Olympic House” for $5 million. They called it “the tidy, patrician, Ivy League-dominated Olympic House” located at 57 Park Avenue at East 37th Street in the Murray Hill section of New York. It was built in 1909 for a New York socialite, Adelaide Townsend Douglas, reportedly the mistress of the building’s financier, J. Pierpoint Morgan.

I joined the staff of the LAOOC as an assistant vice president in 1981 and was responsible for planning the three Olympic Villages, where the athletes live during the Olympic Games. In 1984, I became a vice president and was made the chief administrator for the Village on the campus of the University of Southern California [USC].

I’ve been a member of the USOC since 1976 except for an eighteen-month hiatus. At one point, I thought I’d finished my time on the USOC in February 1985. Then in 1986, I was elected to the IOC and then re-joined the USOC as required by the IOC.

Ghaffari: How did you get the LA84 Foundation job?

DeFrantz: I was already working at the Foundation when the current president, Dr. Stanton Wheeler, decided to return to Yale. The Board members knew me from my work for the LAOOC and recognized that I had a passion for the work at hand.

The USOC had a special relationship in that it was the financial guarantor of the 1984 Olympic Games. The City of Los Angeles was not. A deal was made in 1979 between the LAOOC and the USOC whereby the USOC pledged to cover the LAOOC deficits, if any. Any surplus was to be allocated 60 percent to the USOC.³ The remaining 40 percent would stay in Southern California. The 1984 games produced a $225 million surplus. Southern California was to receive $93 million for youth sports. That initially seeded the Amateur Athletic Foundation [AAF], a private foundation, in 1985, which became the LA84 Foundation in 2006.

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The first head of the foundation, Dr. Wheeler, had been on the faculty of Yale Law School. He was one of the few professors at a law school who did not have a law degree. He was a sociologist. His was fascinated with issues like juvenile delinquency. In 1985, he took a two-year leave of absence to serve as president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles. But, he missed the academic community, and he’s also a jazz musician, if the truth be known. So, he returned to New York and the position came open.

Ghaffari: Were you trying to solve a problem? Address an unmet need? Do something “good”? Fix something “broken”?

DeFrantz: I wanted to lead this institution. I believe that sport is a powerful force for good. I was senior vice president of the foundation and applied for the head position. We all had to do that because this was a job that a lot of people wanted. I got it. For me I could not have dreamed the job would fit so perfectly with my beliefs and goals that I would like to accomplish in life.

It is exactly what I believe in. Our mission is to serve youth through sport by enhancing the knowledge of sport’s role in society. I’ve long believed, ever since living in the Olympic Village, that there is a tremendous power that sport has. Living there taught me that the world could live in peace together. That experience, along with my childhood interest in fairness and justice, all came together. While the work at the Juvenile Law Center was remarkable, I wanted to be able to reach a lot more kids with something good and positive in their lives than we could through the litigation process. The foundation was the perfect place for me.

In June 2006, the foundation adopted the name LA84 Foundation to establish a unique identity and honor the spirit of the 1984 Olympic Games, which created the foundation’s endowment.

Ghaffari: What are the most satisfying parts of your work with the LA84 Foundation?

DeFrantz: Seeing other people become successful. Whether it’s a child who’s learned a skill on the field of play or someone who’s discovered that she can be part of a team and her teammates don’t have to be her very best friends to be able to work together, which is so important for girls today. That is one of the very important reasons for girls to take part in team sports. This is an opportunity, every day, to mentor young women and men as they look for their role in the larger world.

Ghaffari: Do participants go on to become major athletes?

DeFrantz: Not so much, but sport enriches their lives. We see some studies that say that people are better citizens when they are part of a team. We haven’t actually subsidized those studies ourselves, but we know of them. We have chosen not to spend our money that way. It costs a lot to do those studies. You have to do longitudinal studies. But we know, and believe, and have found that people are better citizens when they’ve had a chance to be a part of a team. A lot of these kids will come back and support the next generation. They come back and volunteer to coach and undertake other tasks. Having a chance to be a part of something larger than yourself is really important. And sports provide that.

Ghaffari: What was the most satisfying opportunity you encountered in your career?

DeFrantz: I once had the opportunity to present a gold medal to a young woman at the Olympic Games who had started her career in sports in a program that the LA84 Foundation had created. It was extraordinary—both knowing how she had gotten her start and that she had done the remarkable work to become an Olympian. I felt very special to be able to present her gold medal to her and tell her that she would forever be “First and Olympic Champion.”

I think that sport is not well understood. We don’t pay enough attention to that. It is a great, unexplored part of what we are and how we live in this world. Sport needs a great deal more investigation. To me, sport is the mind directing the body through the dimensions of time and space. We humans enjoy doing sport, talking about sport, watching sport. We are the only species who would set up hurdles and then race across them to see who can get there first. I’ve seen ants use twigs to get across a puddle, but I’ve never seen them line them up to race across.

We speak of being in the zone of excellence in sport. How do we get there? If we understood it in sport, could we get there in other parts of our daily lives? Then of course, there are the other parts of sports—the ethical questions that arise. Are sports based on situational ethics? Are there certain ground rules of ethics for sports to exist? Do we have to agree to abide by a set of rules or sports won’t work? Why are we willing to do that to play a game? Does that mean we should be able to do that to play life? There is so much to the world of sport, and we do so little with it. So, for me, there’s a whole world yet to be explored in relation to sport.

Ghaffari: What is your strategy for identifying and capturing opportunities at either organization?

DeFrantz: I used The LA84 Foundation to create the idea of opening sports clubs in 1989 to provide community-led, after-school sports programs for kids in underserved areas of LA County. In 1994, it became Kids in Sports, Los Angeles, a nonprofit seeded initially with funds from the foundation. On an annual basis, though, we have to fundraise to bring in about $1 million to operate their programs. So we’re looking for ways to endear ourselves to the people who will write checks. We do that by finding ways for the kids to tell their stories about what sports mean to them so that more people will support them and the remarkable work our volunteers and coaches do for young people in sport. Their motto is “Serving communities one team at a time.”

At the LA84 Foundation, we believe in “the TLC of sport”—teaching, learning, and competition. For us, the coaching is really the teaching part of the program. Our coaching programs are called the Art of Coaching. We have a lot of our workshops and workbooks on our web site. Our web site⁴ is very extensive. We’re very proud of that—we were one of the first web sites to go up around the world.

For Kids in Sports LA, the donation button on the web site has worked okay, but we have to promote it on a regular basis. For the foundation, we don’t want to miss any opportunity for people to make gifts to us. Having the donation button there is important.

We finally have a feature where you can make a gift with a credit card. It costs a lot to set up such a program. We try not to create a cost line unless we’re really going to benefit from it. We didn’t want to spend the money on credit card fees where we would have to explain to the donors that, if you gave a gift, only a certain percentage of their donated dollar would go to the foundation and the rest went to service the credit card feature.

Ghaffari: What is the greatest challenge in your work?

DeFrantz: Media coverage of women’s sports is a critical area. There’s the sports page, which I consider primarily for betting. Sad, but true, I think. Why on earth isn’t there more and better coverage of women’s sports? Why is this long-term discrimination allowed to continue?

My responsibility in the Olympic movement has been to solve the problem of women in sport, and I’m proud to say that we have managed to make sure that every sport on the program of the Olympic Games is available to both men and to women. That just happened with the London Olympic Games. Women’s participation percentages are exemplary in both winter and summer Olympic Games. That was all accomplished very quietly and not at all painfully. If we can have gender equity in the two weeks of the Olympic Games, we can do it any time.

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The foundation did studies of newspaper and television coverage of women in sports in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Early on, that research provided some unique lessons about televised coverage of women in sports. Women were infantilized in the finals of US Tennis Open. The women were given little girl names—Chrissy and Martina. For the men, it was Agassi and Sampras. Chrissy could never “own” anything. Sampras could be a manager, an owner, all sorts of thing—he was a fully formed human being.

Our research also looked at coverage of the Final Four basketball tournament. At the opening collage for men, trumpets were blaring and the athletes looked like giants with camera shots taken from the floor upward. For the women, literally it was a lullaby—pictures were of little girls on swings. These were just normal girls, and then they decided to play basketball. For the men’s games, there were five to seven cameras, but only three cameras for the women. The number of statistics put up for the women were a fraction of those for the men. For the men’s game, it always was The National Championship. For the women, it was the Women’s National Championship. The diminutive was always used for the women. Ticket prices were always lower for the women’s game compared to the men’s game. It drives me nuts, among other things.

Ghaffari: How are you handling this challenge?

DeFrantz: All we can do is present the facts and demonstrate how to think critically about these issues. Representatives of the media are making these conscious choices. The first time we did a study on televised media, we looked at local television and newspapers, and the results were fractions of coverage for women. The media executives always said that people don’t ask for it. But how can people ask for something they don’t know about? It’s illogical.

Ghaffari: What did you learn from these experiences?

DeFrantz: When we did our first research, I met with the presidents of the sports networks. We had some wild discussions. To their credit, each of them asked for one hundred copies of our first report. For a while, it was better listening to the coverage. It made a difference that you could hear. They used our information. But now, it’s returned to the old way it was. They say they cannot discriminate. It just gets imbedded. Until someone tells them that it is not to be allowed, it just continues.

We did follow-up studies three times, and then a lot of other organizations began doing similar research—taking a similar approach. We haven’t been able to afford to continue doing them, but we are pleased that more research like this is being done around the world. Our own studies remain available on our web site.

Certainly, the thing that delights me today is that girls believe they have access to sports, and they should. In my day, we had to struggle for it. We were always accepting some second-class position for no reason other than that we accepted it.

Now, I’m grateful for Title IX. I want today’s women and men to understand the history of women in sport so that we will never have to repeat it. Yet, almost every month there are cases lodged against Title IX trying to break it. I mean, really—equal educational opportunity. What is hard to understand about that? I mean really? Why wouldn’t you want that for all your children?

Ghaffari: What job/boss had the biggest impact on you, and what did the experience teach you?

DeFrantz: Working for Peter Ueberroth at the LAOOC had an enormous impact on my life. He made us recognize that we had to be perfect for the athletes of the world. The challenges that that knowledge presented helped me understand my potential for leadership.

The LAOOC was faced with giving the games back if we didn’t find a solution that the IOC would accept. A lot of people worked hard to come up with the idea that the USOC would be the financial guarantor—almost a ludicrous idea—because the USOC only had about $5 million in assets itself. The USOC and the LAOOC invested in an insurance contract worth another $50 million. But that wasn’t near enough to guarantee the games—the LA 1984 Olympic Games were going to be a project of over $750 million, on a good day. Fortunately, Los Angeles had many facilities already in existence.

We had a great leader, a tremendous leader, in Peter Ueberroth. And Harry Usher was his Number Two man—he was just brilliant. Peter had the vision, and Harry knew where everything was. He was just amazing. They hired a lot of people who were willing to work really hard to create a surplus to support sport in the US. With the right leaders, it just worked.

Ghaffari: Who were the mentors who directly influenced your work?

DeFrantz: Jewel Plumber Cobb, whom I first met as dean of Connecticut College and researcher in melanoma, certainly was a mentor. She came up to me one day asking if I was related to Bobbie and Fay DeFrantz, Jr., my father and uncle. They had met as teenagers. She took an interest in me, always asking how my studies were going. Later she moved to Douglass College [a women’s college at Rutgers University], was dean and professor of biological sciences there when I was training at Princeton. Before I moved out to Los Angeles, she became president of California State University at Fullerton. I always knew that she was there, sort of expecting me to reach my full potential.

Then, of course, there was my mother, Anita Page DeFrantz, who was just a remarkable woman. She went from being born into poverty to having her doctorate degree and teaching at the graduate level at the University of San Francisco. She earned her bachelor of arts and master of arts from Indiana University and a doctorate in communications from the University of Pittsburgh in 1975. She became one of the first African-American speech pathologists working with aphasia patients at the Indiana University Medical Center, and later joined the faculty of the University of San Francisco Graduate School of Education, where she began its program in International Multicultural Education and was a professor emeritus of the university. She just passed away in 2008.

My dad passed away just before the games in 1984. It was very strange. I must have known. I had worked until almost midnight that night, getting everything ready. We had a philosophy that you should be ready for someone else to take over at any time because you only get one shot at the Games. So, you can’t pretend that someone couldn’t just come over and come in and take over your work. I’d had a staff meeting the next day, so I was prepared for that. Little did I know that I would be gone for a few days.

Ghaffari: What are some of the key strategy decisions you made that are working out for you?

DeFrantz: I work on crafting consensus around an idea. That way people can feel that they are a part of the decision-making process and are more likely to be involved with creating a successful implementation of an idea. People ask me if I fight for an idea, and I respond that—rather than fight—I work to convince others that the idea is valuable.

We’ve learned a lot from our interesting research projects. We’ll teach pretty much anyone who comes in the door how to be a good coach. If you can get ten people together, we can provide a coaching clinic. If you’re in track and field, we have higher levels of clinics with specialties. We do specialty clinics in long-distance running in track and field, soccer, and volleyball.

We’ve found that there are so many so-called experts in basketball. We had one project where we had enough kids to establish a league, then divided the coaches and kids into two groups. Half of the coaches received feedback from the kids about their experiences being coached. The other half did not get feedback about their coaching—they were more dictatorial. The idea was to find out what would happen—which kids would do well? To my great delight, although it was a small sample, the kids that gave coaches feedback did as well if not better than the kids in the dictatorial coaching situation.

We are doing another study where the coaches are asked to have only certain amounts of feedback. What are the different kinds of things they can say to their athletes? And we’ll find out what works. That’s one of the wonderful things that we can do. We can undertake studies to look at how coaching is done, for example.

We’re also doing a project on a new way to prevent the head injuries that are endemic in football. We’re working on a different way of tackling as a different way to solve the problem of head injuries among youth. The helmet only works to keep all the parts in place once you have the problem. It doesn’t solve the issue of preventing concussions or spinal injuries. It was never designed to deal with any of that. We’re looking for ways to avoid the injuries that typical, head tackling produces.

Ghaffari: How do you decide what to study?

DeFrantz: Our Education Services department is headed by Wayne Wilson. He has his doctorate, but he doesn’t like to use that. But, I like to. He pretty much comes up with most of the research projects, although it’s a collaborative process. Wayne, and Patrick Escobar, who is our vice president for grants and programs and an attorney, were giving me a presentation earlier today on a project to get more Latinas in the world of sport. It’s a wonderful place to work, if I do say so myself. Here you can propose new ideas to work on, share it, and build on it interdepartmentally.

Ghaffari: What is your strategic plan? Do you expect the LA84 Foundation to become a larger entity?

DeFrantz: It would be wonderful if the foundation could have a larger endowment, but that’s hard to do. It’s difficult to keep the endowment growing, because we are a private foundation. If we were a public charity, we could do fundraisers and ask people to support us. As a private foundation, there are some limits through the IRS. Contributions have a less beneficial tax effect for the individual donors when they’re giving to a private foundation as opposed to a public charity.

We have received most [98 percent] of our income from our investments. Since the late 1990s, the financial markets have not been as predictable as before. There was the dot-com bust in 2000 and then the financial meltdown beginning in 2008. Bonds used to go in the opposite direction of the stocks, but there is no guarantee of that anymore.

The size of our endowment struggles when the financial worlds shift like that. So we work our way back as best we can, and we continue to serve. It’s just about having a good, solid investment plan that serves your needs so that you can have the funds available when you need them.

Ghaffari: Do you work with partners to reach your goals?

DeFrantz: We have been making partnerships with others—both public and private entities. We partner with civic pools for our summer swim programs. We partner with four or five municipalities to provide the summer swim program and then produce a culminating event in swimming, synchronized swimming, and diving or water polo. So the kids learn to swim and they get to take part in a competition.

In some cases, we partner with corporations. For the past three years, we’ve been working with Nike to renovate and create new play sites. They’ve been great partners with us in that. We’re always looking to partner with other corporations if there’s a project or a program that makes sense for us. We’ll work with them to help them understand it and understand how it will benefit them.

Ghaffari: What are some of your major internal problems or competitive challenges?

DeFrantz: Our biggest challenge is that we’re a regional foundation and our reach is Southern California—the same counties that hosted the LA Olympic Games. So, our expenditure of funds is limited to just this area. Most corporations want to give to an entity with a national reach. That’s been the greatest challenge for us actually in getting them to support our programs. Although so many of our programs could be replicated throughout the country. My hope is that we could do more of that work because we have built excellent structures that could easily be put into place practically anywhere in the country.

An example of a national effort might be the opportunity to associate with Michelle Obama’s “Keep Moving” program. We would hope so. Her program is far more general and accepts almost anything. Our research tells us that, while it is important for anyone to want to move, kids are more purpose-driven. They are more interested in the fact that movement means something. So, that, while it’s great to be able to do sit-ups and pushups, it’s better to say that “If you do this many sit-ups or push-ups, then you’ll be better at volleyball or some other sport.” At least that’s what we’ve found over the years.

Part of the way that we teach people how to coach is for them to recognize that, even more than the competitive spirit, kids appreciate having fun. If you don’t make it fun, you will not have athletes to coach. We’ve learned that many people who coach have just been given a clipboard and a whistle and told, “Now, you’re a coach.” Then they delve back into their own experiences, which may not have been happy, and they make the same mistakes that were made in their lives.

That’s why we started teaching people how to coach in January 1986 with our own coaching program. We knew that it was very important. I’m really proud of how many people we’ve reached—around 68,000 in total. In the last three years, we’ve reached 8,000 people a year. At some point, we might tap out because there are just so many coaches needed each year. But, as people age or their children age out, there is a constant need.

Ghaffari: What is your succession planning strategy?

DeFrantz: I’ve been thinking about that. In ten years, I will definitely not be here, but it’s up to the board, any day between now and ten years, to make that decision. I don’t know. I still believe that we have a lot to do in the area of education on what sports is and what it provides, and I’d like to focus more on that. I would like for us to find ways for the endowment to grow. Maybe we can do that with gifts from people who are leaving this mortal coil. And to have more people understand the great value of sports.

Ghaffari: How do you manage senior managers and key partners in the organization?

DeFrantz: I believe that everyone has a great deal to offer. My management style is based on respecting each person and letting them know what I expect from them.

In terms of headcount, we have seventeen full-time employees at the foundation and Kids in Sports has seven full-time people. We have a huge volunteer base. We have a lot of consultants who work with us to help train people to coach. At any point in time, we would have four hundred people working on projects. Volunteers would be the largest percentage.

The number and size of Kids in Sports’ clubs fluctuates. Today, we have thirteen clubs reaching about seven thousand children and about two thousand adults help that process. Sports clubs have a lot of volunteers. Sometimes a club will close up shop, but then the kids can go to another club.

Ghaffari: How do you define success?

DeFrantz: Success is hard to define. If anything, I guess I define my success as other people being successful—people that I’ve maybe helped or haven’t hindered. I remember in coaching, one of the main things is to not get in their way. I’m about helping others—I think that’s why we’re here on the face of this earth, that’s why there’s more than one person here. We’re supposed to help one another. If people have a great idea that I can help with, that’s fine. I hope I have some great ideas that other people would like to help with too. To move forward in ways that benefit everyone.

Ghaffari: How do you manage family expectations or commitments?

DeFrantz: I’m not married. I have three million children in Southern California that I take care of.

Ghaffari: What key advice would you give to other women—especially young women?

DeFrantz: I urge them to ask for help. We forget about that too often. We’re forced to forget about it. We are admonished to be strong and to be able to do it all, all by yourself. But you need to ask for help. And you need to ask more than one person so you can select among the advice that you do get.

Even more important, I tell them you have to think critically. If something doesn’t sound quite right, it probably is not right. Too often we just listen to things and accept them without challenge. All the ads that constantly assail us are not true. We have to stop just taking in what’s being given to us and begin to be more critical about what we hear.

Ghaffari: Would you give any different advice to men?

DeFrantz: Absolutely I’d give the same advice, but I know it’s harder for women because there are so many more messages being given to women only that suggest you’d better not ask because you’ll get what you deserve. There are all sorts of horrible messages being given to women from the media.

The sports pages—the national editions—are the most irritating ones. Often when I’m speaking in another country, I look at their national sports page and too often there—nada—no coverage of women in sports. Not a word. I know there are women taking part in sports, because they are doing that every day, but there is no media coverage of them.

Ghaffari: Would you do anything differently if you were starting out today?

DeFrantz: How can one answer that question? Life’s been good. I’ve had some great challenges and great opportunities. I’ve been able to share a lot. I’ve taken it as it’s come. I would have loved to have my Mom or my Dad with me today, but those things are beyond my ability.

Would I do anything differently? The one regret I have about 1980 was that I couldn’t sit with President Carter to explain to him that there were better ways to deal with that issue. Just as I predicted, the Soviets and Eastern European competitors said we were just ashamed that we would be defeated on Soviet grounds. If you’re not there, you cannot be heard. Why would we do that?

Ghaffari: Tell me about your election as a director of the investment fund Western Asset. It’s a private board of directors, right?

DeFrantz: One member of that board thought that I could be helpful in what they were doing. I met the principals there, and they agreed to nominate me. Then, I was elected by the shareholders starting in 1998. So far, I’ve been re-elected by the shareholders every year.

It has been a positive experience. I’ve learned a lot, and I think I’ve been able to add the common person’s touch to the decision-making there, which is important. That’s why you have a board of directors—you want to hear from them. It’s five to seven members, all of them inside. So many things are changing there.

Ghaffari: And what about OBN Holdings, where you are also on the board?

DeFrantz: OBN Holdings is a film, TV, and media holding company that has gone through tough times getting the funds they’ve needed to carry out the projects they wanted to do. What’s interesting is that they have bought several companies, one in Mexico and a couple in China.

They diversified again in product lines. I wanted them to do more in the entertainment area. Among one of their projects was getting the “oldies but goodies,” helping them re-launch [artists’] singles. They did one project with The Four Tops, where they helped produce a show that became a video show and relaunched [The Four Tops’] music very successfully. That’s a good thing to do now that Baby Boomers want to hear the old vocalists they heard as youths. Just as they were trying to get that going, the market’s investments in IPOs just dried up. Timing is so important.

Ghaffari: Where do you see yourself in the next five to ten years?

DeFrantz: In five to ten years, the LA84 Foundation will be viewed as the premier center of thought for youth sport and for sport in general. We have created this institution, and I know that I will move away leaving it as a strong independent organization serving the Southern California community and the world.

I will find another place to use my skills and my passion for making certain that children have a fair chance for success in the world.

I have received so many wonderful experiences in life. I want to continue to share what I have learned. Perhaps I will become a professor, following in my mother’s footsteps. I am certain that I will have many years to give back to the world the many gifts I have received.