Youth Footballizzle Doggie Nizzle

Am I doing this right? Are my izzles in the right places? Can I get a ruling here? Anyway...

Things are never as easy as they seem for Snoop Dogg. Two years after volunteering to coach his son’s youth football team, the Rowland Raiders, the notorious rapper/producer/blunt artisan broke off from the established Orange County Junior All-American Football Conference (OCJAAFC for short—as if that helps) to create his own youth football league without any of the financial and territorial limitations that hamstrung the Raiders and their bretheren in the OCJAAFC. The new league, modestly dubbed the Snoop Youth Football League, has since been charged by parents and administrators with stealing players from the more established leagues with promises of—no, not weed and hos—unfettered, unrivaled and undeniable coolness:

"I played against him, and then he wanted me on his team, so he called my mom," says Derrick, 11. "I switched teams."

"It was so cool," remembers Duon Rucker, who also came to the Rowland Raiders from Long Beach as a 10-year-old last year. "Everybody at school was all over me, 'Are you about to go with Snoop? Can you get me his autograph?' Everybody wanted to get a picture of me and him together."

And then there was the bus.

"It's a mini-school bus," Derrick says, "and it had TVs in it where we watched our games from last week."

"Yeah," Duon enthuses, "and everywhere we went, you could hear us coming down the street, we had like hydraulics from all the bass! We listened to Snoop's music — our theme song was 'Drop It Like It's Hot.' "

Last year's Rowland Raiders team of 8- to 10-year-olds, with Snoop as offensive and defensive coordinator and his older son playing quarterback, steamrolled through the season unbeaten. At the team's awards banquet, the coach gave each player a DVD of team games with a special Snoop Dogg tribute to the Raiders bumping in the background.

Then, for the second year in a row, Snoop culled the best players for an all-star team to represent the Rowland Raiders in the youth football postseason. They bused out to play other California all-star teams before heading to Jacksonville, Fla., to compete in the final competition and brainchild of their coach — the "Snooperbowl" — a day before Super Bowl XXXIX.

More than 15,000 fans crowded in to watch the Raiders play the Jacksonville Junior All Stars (or perhaps to watch halftime performer Snoop), and the team from Rowland didn't disappoint. On the way home, Raiders all-stars lugged custom trophies donated by Tiffany & Co.

And yet, despite the team’s overwhelming success (and free gin and juice bar at all home games) some local parents and administrators are pissed at Snoop for taking the region’s best players and leaving the “less cool” leagues to die a slow death, choked by the weighty albatross of such arcane concepts as “humility” and “tradition” and “community”:

Many families and even some coaches hopped aboard, while chapter loyalists wondered aloud if last season's pageantry had been orchestrated to "steal our kids."

"I think what [Snoop] did is just so shallow," says Sandy Gonzales, a sales executive who has two boys on Rowland Raiders football squads and a girl in cheerleading. "He came here just so that he could take away from us what we'd taken many years to establish."

In Compton, chapter President Toni Smith fielded calls from confused parents "asking me why the Compton Titans have folded and are now the Compton Vikings," she says. The Vikings are the local Snoop chapter. The Titans, in fact, are still fielding teams. But Compton's usual 12 teams are down to five — and Smith's son is among the kids left without a squad.

Even Snoop's alma mater, the Long Beach Poly Junior Jackrabbits, is struggling to stay afloat. "This has affected us in a terrible way," says Sarah L. Morrison, chapter president for 27 years. "I don't know if our program will exist after this season."

Oh boo hoo, Sarah L. Morrison! Wah-wah, Toni Smith! Mebbe if you all weren’t so busy whining to LAT reporters, you could spend your time pimping your Subaru with some 8-ball rims and X-Box consoles to actually appeal to the kids! Y’know, KIDS. They’re what it’s all about anyway, you selfish bastards!

Ed. Note: Oh yes, in case there was any doubt, there will be a movie about this. Starring Snoop. As himself. Thanks a lot, Fox.