Walk This Way : Marina Athletic Teams Are Successful Despite Reliance on Non-Staff Coaches

“They’re a pain in the you-know-what. We’ve had so many problems over the years. At the end of the season, they’re gone. At the beginning of the season, they sometimes don’t show up. Eighty percent of the problems with high school sports could be traced back to walk-on coaches.”

Santa Ana Valley boys’ Athletic Director Leon Smith in 1996

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Larry Doyle can sympathize with the sentiment, but when you’re the athletic director at Marina High, where all but a handful of varsity coaching positions are filled by walk-ons, you figure out a way to get the best, then do everything you can to hang on to them.

If it means acting as a liaison between student-athlete and contractor-by-day-turned-basketball coach in the afternoon, you do it.

If it means doing all the paperwork for a certain walk-on who’s a great trainer, strategist and motivator, but not much of an administrator, you do it.

And if it means making sure bus transportation is scheduled for away games--so you don’t have to worry about parents complaining their daughters rode in the back of the coach’s pickup truck to the last game--you darn well better do it.

“There’s no question that it’s much better to have a coach who is also on staff,” said Doyle, who has been the Marina boys’ AD since 1987 and the girls’ since 1990. “The biggest thing is year-round control of the kids. They have to be somewhere the rest of the year when their sport isn’t in season.

“In addition to my regular math classes, I’m responsible for the grades of more than 400 students who belong to walk-on coaches.”

Doyle has a distinct--or maybe district would be a better word--disadvantage to many of the county’s other athletic directors. The Huntington Beach School District allows only three faculty coaches at each school to teach only four classes. In some districts, any staff member who coaches has to teach only four classes.

And since the monetary incentive--teachers get the same stipend a walk-on gets, which ranges from about $1,500 to about $2,900 per sport at Marina--is minimal, the faculty isn’t exactly lining up outside Doyle’s door to take on more work with no additional time to accomplish it.

“With all the multitudes of openings we’ve had over the years since I’ve been here, I’ve had maybe a half dozen teachers apply for a coaching job,” he said. “In the last six years, I know for sure it’s been only two.”

Football Coach Mark Rehling, who was a walk-on last year, Paul Renfrow (baseball), Dick Degen (track), Cheri Swatek (girls’ swimming), Frank Rutolo (girls’ golf) and Joe Crider (boys’ golf) are the only faculty members who are head varsity coaches at Marina.

Doyle admits the walk-on hiring process is often a “crapshoot,” but he has managed quite a few rousing successes to go with the usual number of flash-in-the-pans and outright flops.

Darrick Lucero, now the school’s resident substitute, coaches both boys’ and girls’ volleyball. The girls’ team is the defending state champion. Pete Bonny, a junior high school teacher in Anaheim who is in his 10th season at Marina, led the Vikings’ girls’ basketball team to the Southern Section championship last year.

Softball and field hockey Coach Shelly Luth, a former bartender who now works on the school’s security staff, took the softball team to state titles in 1994 and ’95. Water polo Coach Dave Carlson’s girls’ team won the first Southern Section title in that sport last year.

Roger Holmes’ boys’ basketball team made the playoffs for the first time in five years last season. And former girls’ soccer coach Bobby Bruch, now director of coaching at West Coast Futbol Club in Mission Viejo, was at Marina four years (1992-95), winning three consecutive Southern Section titles.

The Marina girls’ soccer team, however, has fallen on hard times of late, failing to make the playoffs the last three seasons, a fact that many in a community with some of the strongest girls’ club soccer teams in the country find a bit shocking.

Given the here-today-gone-who-knows-when nature of walk-on coaches, it shouldn’t be all that surprising.

“Sometimes you get a top-quality young person who wants to move up and be a full-time teacher, so they’re always interviewing and usually get snatched up,” Doyle said. “Sometimes you have to beat the bushes to find one person to apply. We’re looking for a wrestling coach right now. Know any?”

The secret to Doyle’s success has been his ability to hold onto the good ones when he gets them.

“Larry does so much of the extra stuff for you, getting officials for games, a lot of the paperwork, setting up banquets,” said Carlson, a substitute teacher and club water polo coach whose boys’ team clinched its first league title in four years last week. “He just makes it so much easier.

“When you’re a walk-on at Marina, you get to spend almost all of your time coaching.”

For Love or Money

Luth, who tended bar for 10 years so she could be home during the day with her sons, Jared, now 12, and Shane, 8, has been at Marina since 1984, when she agreed to help a former college teammate as her assistant. She became the head coach in 1991.

A former high school field hockey player, she rescued that program at Marina in 1987 when the school was going to drop it for lack of a coach.

She’s quick to dispel any notion she was ever motivated by the money.

“I figured it out at the end of the year in ’95 after we won the CIF title,” she says, laughing. “I made $1.27 an hour that year.”

Like many walk-ons, Luth has a competitive personality and love for communicating the lessons of sports.

“It’s about life skills, it’s how to deal with the left turns in life,” she said. “And there are lots of left turns in life, in the workplace, in the family. No one likes to lose, but it’s about that too. It’s important to understand how to lose.

“I tell the girls, there are some huge things ahead of you and you have to learn to deal with competition in all its forms. When you go out for a job interview, you can’t just go knock your opponent down an elevator shaft.”

But even Luth, who obviously has all the right stuff for walk-on coaching, admits she has become a better coach since she began working 19 hours a week in supervision at Marina three years ago.

“There is definitely something to being on campus,” she said. “You get to see them, they can locate you if they need to. And you’re a little more into the cohesiveness of the school experience. It’s been very positive for me.”

Holmes, who graduated from Fountain Valley High, has been a walk-on basketball coach at various levels in the county for nearly 20 years, dating back to his days as a player at Long Beach State. He coached at Ocean View for nine years, was the head boys’ coach at Santa Margarita for four and assisted Bill Reynolds at Southern California College before coming to Marina 3 1/2 years ago.

He took the job in the face of overwhelming advice not to. Apparently, Holmes and Doyle were the only ones who thought it was a good idea.

“There had been three different regimes in three years,” Holmes said. “The program was definitely in flux. But I liked the idea of starting from ground zero. I didn’t want to step into a set situation. I wanted to build a program that was full of good people who were also good players.”

Three returning starters quit the team during Holmes’ first season and the Vikings won only four games. They won eight the next year and made the playoffs last season.

“This year, we’ll have the best team we’ve had,” he said, “and, program-wide, our GPA is over 3.0.”

Holmes always planned to get his credential and teach full-time--he still does, in fact--but to no one’s surprise, he hasn’t been able to find the time. The construction business he and a college buddy have built over the years allows him to make enough money to support his family and still spend most of his time coaching basketball.

His wife, Debbie, has an ingrained understanding. Her father, Gary Dixon, was a longtime golf coach at Los Alamitos High and her brother, Todd Dixon, is the boys’ basketball coach at El Toro. The Holmes’ 7-year-old son, Brendan, is the Vikings’ ball boy and Debbie and 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Kayla, are fixtures at every game.

“It’s a family thing for us and if it wasn’t, I don’t see how anyone could do it,” he said. “We have two kids together and I have 60 others in the program here.”

Going for Glory

Bruch was a player with the American Professional Soccer League’s L.A. Heat and a coach/trainer with the North Huntington Beach soccer club when he saw an announcement in the paper that Marina was seeking a girls’ soccer coach.

“I wanted to give something back to the sport and it was also a test for me personally, to succeed as a coach at the high-school level,” he said.

He had 12 freshmen on his first varsity team, a group that matured and went 61 games without losing over a three-season stretch that culminated in ’95 with a third consecutive Southern Section title. They outscored opponents, 90-9, that year and never allowed more than one goal in a game.

Bruch left after that season because he believed his club team--now the West Coast Shamrocks--had a chance at a national title. Southern Section rules forbid high school coaches from coaching their players on club teams and two of the Shamrocks’ best players--Megan Orach (now at USC) and Anne Giallonardo (now at Arizona)--were on Marina’s team.

The Shamrocks lost the title game in 1996, but they won that coveted national championship this year as an under-19 team.

Lucero had earned a degree from UCLA and was about to enroll in law school when a friend called to say the boys’ volleyball job was open at Marina. Lucero, who played at Ocean View High, was already completely infected by the coaching bug. He had been coaching since he took over the frosh-soph team at his alma mater when he was only a freshman at Orange Coast College.

“There are a number of things I could have done that would have made me much better off financially, but this isn’t work for me,” he said. “I found I couldn’t get away from coaching. This is what I enjoy most.”

Since his arrival in 1995, it pretty much has been good times all around. Lucero led the girls’ team to the state title last year and the Vikings, ranked second in Southern Section Division I-A, clinched their first outright Sunset League title in 15 years last week.

“I knew we had potential to do well, but making it happen is always another thing,” he said. “I had a vision when I started here that we would be the best, not just to win league titles, but to compete for CIF titles.” But the good times might not last long. Lucero, who is only months away from earning his teaching credential, may not be Marina’s main man in a year or two.

“I’d love to be here, obviously,” he said, “but you have to do what’s best for you in the long run. I feel obligated to these kids here, but I’m 29 now. I have a daughter and I have to think about her future too.”

So if a coaching position with a full-time teaching job opens up somewhere else . . . well, it’s the fate of most walk-ons. Eventually, they walk off.