L.A. Games : Taft Prepares for Foray Into 4-A by Developing Precision Aerial Attack

Tom Stevenson does a little handiwork on the side to supplement his income over the summer. When he is not involved with the nuts and bolts of coaching the Taft High football team, he is pounding with hammer and nail as a cabinetmaker.

And while Stevenson is well-acquainted with tongue-and-groove, when he started speaking of his passing game in the spring, most people assumed he was speaking tongue in cheek.

After all, Taft passed for all of 400 yards and three touchdowns last season. That is a one-year total. Not for a week, not for a month. No one need remind Stevenson that one Valley quarterback, Jeremy Leach of Granada Hills, passed for 366 yards and five touchdowns in one game .

Granada Hills is a City Section 4-A Division team, however. Ground-oriented Taft was firmly rooted last season in the 3-A Sunset League, which the Toreadors won with a 4-1 record. Taft was 8-3 overall.

A realignment, however, has placed the Toreadors in the more competitive 4-A Division--the upper echelon, where a team cannot have high hopes without putting the ball in the air.

“It’s pretty simple,” Taft senior quarterback Rich Cosentino said. “To compete at this level we have to throw more.”

In Taft’s case, more would appear to be the definitive relative term. More might be 10 passes a game. Or less.

“Heck, we threw the ball last year,” said backfield coach Hal Lambert, who assists Stevenson after serving as head coach at Taft for 21 years. “I mean, we threw it enough. We probably passed five or six times a game, and if you complete four of those, that’s plenty.”

But the early returns are in, and judging by the plentiful supply of wins, it seems that the Toreadors’ new offensive scheme is taking shape.

Taft finished second in the recent L. A. Games seven-on-seven football competition, winning five games and advancing to the final before falling to Canyon, 26-19, Sunday at El Camino College.

Even though Taft lost, it was the only team in the competition to score more than one touchdown against Canyon. And in a 25-18 win over Arlington in the semifinals, Cosentino completed his first 12 passes--two fewer than he completed all of last season.

Perhaps the magnitude of Taft’s hot streak, which included a 13-6 upset win in the quarterfinals over Carson--ranked No. 1 in the nation most of last season--can most easily be gauged by a look at last year’s statistics.

As a junior, Cosentino (5-9, 160) completed 14 of 48 passes for 242 yards and 1 touchdown. In all, counting halfback options and the statistics of senior quarterback Jon Thompson, Taft racked up 403 passing yards, an average of 36.6 a game.

The team’s ground attack, however, produced 2,932 yards (266.5 a game) and 30 touchdowns. It was difficult to argue the results--only three City teams from the Valley scored more points than Taft, which scored 241.

“We ran a power pitch with me as the lead blocker and that was real successful,” Cosentino said. “We didn’t have to rely on the pass, since the ground game was so effective.”

Cosentino will have several experienced receivers to choose from next season. Wide receivers Uda Walker (6-3, 160) and Doug Kougher (6-0, 170) and tight end Adam Zutler (6-3, 215) return.

Zutler, a converted defensive lineman, said that he believes the 180-degree turnabout stems from a 34-27 loss to Palisades in the second round of last season’s playoffs.

“We were down by a touchdown with a few seconds to go and we just couldn’t throw effectively because we hadn’t been working on it,” Zutler said. “We tried to move the ball on the ground but we ran out of time.”

The ground game, to be sure, is still in the front of the playbook. Last season, Stevenson filled out a preseason questionnaire and half-jokingly listed his coaching philosophy as “Run, run, run and then pass. Maybe.”

Lambert, a member of the old school, says the early passing success is nice but that nobody has shelved the basics, either.

“We threw the ball in passing league last year, too,” Lambert said. “And we throw every day in practice.

“This is passing league, and that’s what you’re supposed to work on. We’ll still have a good ground game, but we will be putting it in the air more this year. We have experience at quarterback.”

Running back Kelvin Byrd (5-10, 165), one of three players who rushed for more than 700 yards last season, also returns. Byrd led the team with 1,168 yards and scored 11 touchdowns. He also shared the team lead for receptions with five.

Better balance will be essential, since Taft has been placed in the 4-A Division’s two-league Conference 5.

The other members of Taft’s league are El Camino Real, Canoga Park and Cleveland. Granada Hills, Kennedy, San Fernando and Chatsworth compose the other league in the conference.

The change will be a relief to Cosentino. And not just because he will have to do less blocking.

“Last year, I got hassled some at school,” he said. “I had to take it. You know, stuff like ‘Where’s the passing game?’ or ‘What’s the deal, can’t you throw?’

“I just told them that since the running game was working so well, why take chances?”

Taft takes its first chance when it plays perennial Orange County and Big Five Conference powerhouse Servite in the season opener.

Last season, Taft played defending Big Five champion Crespi in a nonleague game and lost, 44-0.

“Well, I guess you have to prove you can play with the good teams,” Cosentino said. “We might as well start there.”