Serra’s Reign of Futility in Football Shows No Signs of Letting Up

SAN DIEGO —  Troy Juergens had returned to his Ogden, Utah, apartment from football practice just long enough to rest his aching knees before the telephone rang. The call came from San Diego, from someone who wanted to know about the place he played high school ball.

Serra.

This 6-foot, 215-pound linebacker who plays for Weber State responded with panic in his voice.

“Oh, my God,” Juergens said.

He hesitated, then asked, “How are they doing this year? . . . bad, huh?”

Juergens left home for a school 796 miles away, but no distance will separate him from the nightmare he experienced at Serra, a school that opened 15 years ago with a healthy enrollment and great hopes only to experience a reign of futility on the football field unmatched by most schools its size.

Juergens was one of Serra’s few standouts in football, one of two players in school history to be named to an all-county team. He was a three-year starter, but his memories are not of glory, but of ridicule and survival. Only through his dogged perseverance was Juergens able to catapult himself to the college ranks.

“No matter how hard you worked, it was like fighting a losing cause,” he said. “There was very little gratification.”

The teams on which Juergens played won five games and lost 23. But the bad times during his seasons at Serra (1984-1986) weren’t merely coming or going. They were there to stay. Serra first fielded a varsity football team in 1977. Thirteen and a half seasons later, Serra is approaching the century mark for losses. The Conquistadors will enter Friday’s game against No. 1 Morse, 39-91-2.

” . . . that bad, huh?”

It’s bound to get worse. Serra is 0-5-1 this season, and had averaged fewer than six points a game while allowing more than 33 before salvaging a last-second 14-14 tie in its Eastern League opener Friday against Patrick Henry. At the season’s midway point, three of Serra’s league opponents, Morse, Mira Mesa and Point Loma, were undefeated and ranked Nos. 1, 2 and 3 in the county.

Serra’s staff can’t be concerned with the Morses and Point Lomas of the world. But it can’t ignore Mira Mesa. Serra and Mira Mesa, two schools within 10 miles of each other, opened 15 years ago on the same day in September with similar visions for their football programs: a steady rise to success. Mira Mesa’s materialized with an exclamation point. Serra’s outlook has been obscured from the start.

“When we opened, we thought we had a very good staff,” Serra Athletic Director Tom Williams said. “We had a lot of enthusiasm. We were very excited. But when you weigh all the factors, there were a lot of negatives . . . and other positives.”

Said Juergens: “There were a couple times I was going to transfer, but I remember opposing coaches coming up to me after games and saying, ‘Keep your head up and you’ll go somewhere.’ I knew there were scouts out there recruiting guys from other schools. I made sure No. 58 kept popping into the picture on the game films.”

Not much has changed. Mike Bledsoe, a standout defensive back on this year’s team, still dreams a little. He thinks about how he made Serra’s varsity team as a 10th-grader in 1988 and became a starter. He thinks about how he believed his class would be the one to change history--to make Serra a winner.

“I still think about that every game,” he said. “I was real excited. We had some amazing people, I thought.”

Serra finished 3-7 that year, outscored by its opponents 315-150 and rudely greeted by Morse in its league opener, 71-19.

These days, Bledsoe, 6-0, 160, also thinks about the future. Colorado has offered him a letter of intent, and California and Dartmouth also have expressed interest. He could become the third player in Serra history to accept a scholarship from a Division I school. But knowing he won’t go out a winner leaves him at a loss for words.

“There was so much enthusiasm before this season,” Bledsoe said. “I thought we were going to win. But . . . I don’t think we have enough confidence in ourselves. I don’t think the team believes it can win.”

In 13 years, Serra has had only one winning season. The Conquistadors finished 6-4 in 1980, but lost to San Pasqual, 38-13, in the first of two brief playoff appearances. The next year, Serra capped a 5-5 season with a 40-7 loss to San Marcos in the playoffs.

That Serra has drifted into the doldrums in such a marquee sport is sad. But that nobody can offer a tangible way to break the spell makes this case disturbing.

“The focus in most athletic programs is on the football team. It’s just the opposite at Serra,” Coach Orlando (Skip) Coons said.

Principal Laserik Saunders, who conceded that he doesn’t know much about it, said: “I respect Skip’s diagnosis, whatever opinion he has.”

The San Diego Unified School District had a hand in the schools’ fate, when Serra and Mira Mesa opened in 1976. Mira Mesa opened with 2,150 students, Serra 1,700. Mira Mesa is north of NAS Miramar, Serra just south and east. But in terms of football fortunes, Mira Mesa’s hand had the aces.

Mira Mesa’s football team, which finished 5-3-1 its first year, has had 10 winning seasons in 13 years. The Marauders entered 1990 with a .660 winning percentage over five seasons, sixth best among Division 3-A schools. Before their 35-3 loss to No. 3 Point Loma, Mira Mesa was ranked No. 2 and its defense, which had allowed two points a game, was No. 1 in the county.

Former Serra Coach Mike Williams, who said he was forced to resign because he was asked to teach history instead of physical education, is now a Mira Mesa assistant and offered this comparison: “When I came over here I thought I was at Notre Dame.”

But all of Mira Mesa’s success apparently hasn’t filled the void left by his departure.

“I pick up the paper, (Serra’s is) the first score that I look at,” he said. “In 10 years, you get a feeling for the school. I really wish they would do better.”

Williams, who said he coached his last four years at Serra under four principals, says the school didn’t encourage staff members to help him coach football. He said he had too many off-campus assistants. But that’s only one of a dozen theories about the Conquistadors’ shortcomings.

The list reads like the table of contents of a social geography text book: physical landscapes, culture traits, population masses, population migrations, social pressure groups.

Translated, Mira Mesa is a vast area and Tierrasanta is closed in by hills, terraces and dead-end roads. Mira Mesa’s mainstream population is more football oriented and Tierrasantans prefer soccer and tennis, field hockey and volleyball. Mira Mesa keeps growing and the high school’s three-year enrollment is soaring (up to 2,502 this year from 2,400, fourth largest in the county, in 1989) and Tierrasanta’s residential development has ceased and Serra’s enrollment will probably never again jump much higher than its present 1,820.

A prevailing theory is the here-today, gone-tomorrow population of students of military parents, who make up 55% of Serra’s enrollment. Should all the families suddenly be ordered out of Murphy Canyon, the one of the country’s largest military housing complexes, Serra would lose 75% of its football team, according to Coons’ estimation.

Finally, coaches and students identify a peer-pressure problem on campus. One that says it’s not cool to play football for such a bad team.

Running back/cornerback/wide receiver/punter Bryant Tucker, who is 5-6, 146 pounds and Coons’ “best athlete,” takes physical beatings on the football field and verbal bashings in the classroom. Earlier this week, as the teacher of one of his classes announced Friday’s game while reading from a bulletin, a student blurted out, “Why should we waste our money? They’re going to lose.”

Tucker says he sees a student on campus, “6-3, 270,” ripping the team. Even Juergens’ younger brother, Jay, held out for weeks before joining the team last week.

“They don’t come out and help us,” Tucker said. “That makes us upset. We’re not that bad of a team. We play with intensity. But once we get behind, everybody puts their head down.

“Some of the players get intimidated and it’s hard to make someone that’s 140 pounds believe he can tackle this 200-pound guy. We have 150-pound middle linebackers.”

Coons says he’s preoccupied with teaching the basics of the game, instead of some of its finer points, to his players. And he has empowered Tucker, who played on three undefeated Pop Warner teams, to assist in the daily drilling.

“At (the high school) level, we should be prepared, ready to go,” Tucker said.

Said former football statistician Cherie Weurding, who now organizes pep rallies as the Serra student body commissioner of spirit: “The students expect to lose. But the games are still a big social event. When we finally scored (while losing 34-0 to USDHS last week), people in the stands went wild, high-fiving each other.”

Coons, who insists his program is “going to take off,” said he can control attitude. His biggest concerns are finding ways to stabilize the transient students from Navy families and encourage more of Tierrasanta’s young residents to play football.

Serra had 19 returning players during spring workouts. But over the summer, nine moved because their parents got orders to go elsewhere. “Every day, it’s another travesty in your program,” said Coons, now in his fourth season.

That Coons has had minimal success persuading the boys who grew up in Tierrasanta to play football only compounds the problem.

“I’m constantly on the prowl on campus,” Coons said. “They’ve all talked to Coach Coons. They just won’t come out.”

And yet last year, a Tierrasanta community support group called the Serra Foundation raised money for stadium lights. Ten members of the group, according to Tom Williams, put up their houses as collateral to fund the project, which is now complete. The lights are on at Serra’s stadium, but of the estimated 425 boys from Tierrasanta, only 12 are playing varsity football.

“I’m still learning about the Tierrasanta youngsters,” said Coons. “I might be learning more than they are right now. The second year I was here the team was 82% military. Last year, it was 80%.”

But perhaps the most damaging move Serra ever made, the one stroke that did more to keep the Conquistadors in the loss column than any other, was the school’s decision to leave the 2-A City Central League and move, along with Mira Mesa, into the Eastern League in 1984. The San Diego Section was realigning schools and Serra, at 1,983, had one of the city’s larger enrollments.

The decision came, ironically, during Serra’s only prosperous time and the only dismal period for Mira Mesa. From 1979-1982, Serra’s record was a combined 20-19 and Mira Mesa was 9-27. Williams called the jump from 2-A to 3-A “a point-blank” decision. He now calls it a mistake.

Since both joined the Eastern League, Serra has not only become the league’s doormat (with a 4-31 league record), the Conquistadors have won 14 games in the 7 1/2 seasons since. Mira Mesa has won 59.

Two years ago, Saunders called in his coaching staff and discussed dropping out of 3-A. They came out of it with a stronger commitment to topple the giants.

Said Saunders, “We decided we like that challenge.”

Perhaps someday Serra’s fortunes will turn. But, until then, its victory-starved football players must continue to “play with the hand they were dealt.”

Troy Juergens doesn’t need to be reminded.

OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

M.MESA SERRA 1977 enrollment 2,150 1,700 1990 enrollment 2,502 1,820 Football records 81-58-2 39-91-2 Football winning % .582 .238 Since joining City Eastern 59-26-1 14-59-2 Winning % since joining CEL .694 .191 Record vs. CEL 20-23-1 4-31-1 Playoff appearances 12 2 Playoff record 5-7 0-2 1990 record 5-1 0-5-1 PF/PA 113-45 41-182