HARBIN, China   An enormous red-and-gold banner stretches down the gray masonry front of the No. 19 High School in this northern Chinese city, proclaiming its proudest achievement: Ninety-two percent of this year's graduates won admission to universities.
Like most Chinese high schools, No. 19 has no sports teams and no gymnasium. On the pavement outside, there are a handful of basketball hoops and a set of rusty metal parallel bars. The playground was completely empty on a recent summer afternoon.
The winners of the Nike-sponsored tournament in Harbin pose with their winnings: new Nike basketball shoes and other gear.
'The cool kids are the ones who do best at their studies,' says Niu Shibin, 18. Mr. Niu, who will be a junior in September, says he likes to play basketball, but his nearly 12 hours a day of school work leave him little time.
China's elite young athletes may be winning a lot of medals at the Olympics. But in China, organized sports still aren't really something for regular kids.
Less than 3% of Chinese secondary-school students attend schools with sports teams. Children with exceptional athletic prowess or physical attributes are pulled out of ordinary schools early on and sent to the special academies that train the country's sporting elite.
That poses a big challenge for sporting-goods companies such as Nike Inc. and Adidas AG. Both are looking to China and its 1.3 billion people to drive sales growth and both have set out to transform Chinese youth sports.
'We have to make sport accessible to children to really build a market for this business,' says Terry Rhoads, a former Nike executive who is now general manager of sports-marketing firm Zou Marketing Ltd. in Shanghai.
Across town from No. 19 High School in late July, Nike was trying to do just that. As American pop and hip-hop music pounded, high-school and college students battled on outdoor courts under a bright midday sun in a Nike-sponsored basketball tournament.
More than 400 teams competed over three days in Harbin to earn the right to play against winners from three other cities   where a total of another 1,600 teams played -- in a championship match in Shanghai.
To promote participation in sports, Nike and Adidas also have organized high-school sports leagues. They run training programs for coaches and have invested in public sports facilities. Neither company will disclose how much they spend on the programs.
Nike's high-school basketball league now includes nearly 2,500 kids at 205 schools in 20 cities across China. The company runs summer training camps where U.S. coaches tutor aspiring players. And this year, it is launching a high-school soccer league in 16 cities.
More than 30,000 high-school students in 15 cities already play soccer every year in a league sponsored by Adidas, which has also trained more than 1,500 soccer coaches. Another 8,000 players in six cities compete in the company's summer basketball league.
 'Our focus is to develop sports, to give individuals the chance to participate,' says Paul Pi, Adidas vice president of marketing for China. 'We're trying to reach more people.'
All the sports evangelism, not surprisingly, comes with a heavy dose of commercialism.
The courts used for the Nike tournament in Harbin were festooned with ads for the company's new, lightweight Hyperdunk basketball shoe, which costs about 1,200 yuan (about $175). The average annual per capita gross domestic product in Harbin in 2007 was about $3,400. Pairs were given as a prize to players on the winning teams as they were photographed for local newspapers and sports Web sites.
Next to the courts, in a giant air-conditioned tent, Nike set up a shrine to the players on the U.S. and China national basketball teams, both of which are sponsored by Nike. Among the items on display: mannequins of all the players dressed out in Nike gear.
Jin Xin, 20, a college sophomore, was touring the exhibits with a friend, both of them wearing Dallas Mavericks jerseys. Mr. Jin, a math major, says he plays basketball nearly every day, and cut class to watch the NBA finals this year. 'It's very, very cool to play basketball,' he says.
'I think Nike shoes are the best. But it is so expensive,' Mr. Jin says. 'I'm saving money. One day I will buy a pair.'
China's sporting culture is developing at 'an explosive rate,' says Charlie Denson, the Nike executive in charge of the Nike brand. China has been Nike's second-largest market after the U.S. since 2007. Sales in China topped $1 billion in Nike's latest fiscal year, which ended in June. U.S. sales for the period were $6.4 billion.
Adidas says that it expects sales in China to surpass $1 billion by 2010. This year, Adidas expects China to pass Japan and become the company's No. 2 market. The U.S. ranks first.
Much of that is the result of China's enormous size, coupled with the rapidly rising disposable income of the country's new urban middle class, which is concentrated in booming eastern cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The challenge now for sporting-goods companies is to keep the growth going. Overall sporting-goods sales in China vastly lag those in the U.S., and per-capita spending is even further behind. So companies such as Nike and Adidas remain focused on grassroots promotions.
Zou Marketing's Mr. Rhoads is hopeful that in the years after the Olympics China will start devoting more money to sports and physical education in regular schools. Many hurdles remain, though.
'There are still a lot of school administrators and parents who see sports as a frivolous waste of time,' he says. There's also the fact that schools that can afford sports programs tend to be in cities and lack the space for playing fields and other facilities.
That is the opposite of the situation in many suburban U.S. communities, where children start playing organized sports such as soccer and tee ball at an early age. Many U.S. high schools face criticism for devoting too much attention and resources to sports programs and shortchanging academics or other extracurricular activities such as music and art.
Resistance from parents and children themselves is likely to be the biggest brake. In many of China's one-child households   the result of the country's strict family-planning policies -- parents see their children's academic and professional success as critical to the family's financial survival.
Many children are under enormous pressure to do well on exams in order to get into good high schools and then good universities so that they can land secure and well-paying jobs. 'Parents are very focused on education and success in the school system,' says Mr. Pi.
'My father doesn't want me to play,' says Cai Peihan, a reedy, bespectacled middle-school student in Harbin, playing a game of H-O-R-S-E with some friends on the basketball court next to the Nike tournament. 'He thinks it will affect my studies.'
He can only play on the weekends. He typically spends eight hours a day in class, and an additional two hours every day on homework and studying. 'I wish we could play in school.'
Sportswear companies also need to persuade kids that sports are something for them and not just for an elite of state-selected athletes, with whom regular students often have a hard time identifying.
'People do feel proud of them, especially when they compete on the world stage,' says Nike's China communications director, Ginger Zhu. 'But their sense of connection with the athletes isn't there. They don't see that they have anything in common with them.'
In an effort to present athlete role-models who resonate with ordinary kids, Nike this year sponsored something it called the Kobe Mentor programs. Thirty student basketball players were chosen from around the country by coaches and Nike scouts. The players were then sent to train with Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant.
Players were eliminated, reality-show style, until 16 were left, who then spent weeks training with Mr. Bryant and his coaches. The process was turned into a six-installment television series and broadcast on the Chinese equivalent of ESPN. One of the most popular players with fans was a 5-foot-10 Beijing high-school student named Zhang Hengshan.
Nike and Adidas are also looking to tap another nascent market: white-collar workers in China's big cities, who see sports as part of the modern, urban lifestyle to which they aspire, but who didn't have the opportunity to do organized athletics as kids.
Gym membership in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is exploding. Nike sponsors exercise-dance programs of university-aged girls, and is organizing training runs, complete with coaches, for people participating in a Nike-sponsored 10-kilometer race at the end of August. Adidas sponsors gyms and conducts running clinics for people who do much of their jogging on gym treadmills.
One of the clearest signs that attitudes are changing: a rearrangement of the hierarchy in schools where basketball is taking off.
'The cool kids play basketball,' says Wang Zhuo, wearing a yellow T-shirt and clutching the hand of her 6-foot-tall, basketball playing boyfriend on the sidelines of a match at the Nike tournament in Harbin.
'Sometimes it helps guys get girlfriends,' Ms. Wang observed. 'Many of my friends like boys who play basketball.'
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