Gerharts go the extra mile to watch sons play football

Watching the Gerhart boys play football used to be as easy as heading over to Norco High.

Toby was the star running back, Garth the starting center and Coltin the ball boy who hung on his brothers’ every play.

Orchestrating it all was Todd, their father and Norco’s coach. And there in the stands was Lori, all those Friday nights in the fall spent cheering her husband and sons.

But times change even in the place known as Horsetown U.S.A., where equestrian trails still line a side on busy streets and hitching posts remain outside stores and restaurants.

Toby moved on to Stanford and the Minnesota Vikings, Garth earned a scholarship to Arizona State and Coltin became the high school’s starting quarterback.

Every chance they get, the parents try to freeze the clock, examining team schedules and sifting through airline flights and hotels to organize what could be called, for those who don’t mind nine hours of sleep over three days, a football family’s fantasy weekend.

Last month, the Gerharts saw each of their boys play three consecutive days in different regions of the country.

All it took was an alphabet soup of six flights, ONT-PDX-EUG-PDX-SLC-MDW-DEN-ONT, so that Todd and Lori could see two legendary venues — Oregon’s Autzen Stadium and Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The tally: 4,535 air miles and one middle-of-the-night ride in a rental car.

The boys make up only half of Todd and Lori’s brood of athletes. The Gerharts also have triplet daughters who play college softball.

When the kids resided under one roof, that meant everybody piling into a 15-passenger van for family sporting events. During football season, those trips are now more complicated but still start at Norco football games.

On this particular Friday, the Cougars are playing Riverside King, not the strongest opponent, but considering how poorly Norco played the previous week in a loss, nobody is taking chances. Before the game, voices rise and expletives fly.

Todd takes a spot in the press box high above the field, hoping it will give him a better vantage point than standing on the sideline.

Early on, he doesn’t like what he sees. A bottled-up running back laterals the ball to Coltin, who is immediately swarmed by several defenders.

“What is he doing?” Todd barks into his headset. “Get him out of there!”

Todd knows what a running back should and shouldn’t do. He played the position at Norco, where he met Lori, a star on the basketball team. Todd also played at Cal State Fullerton and briefly in the defunct United States Football League.

Coltin reminds everyone in the Gerhart family of older brother Toby even though they play different positions. Coltin is the same size Toby was as a high school sophomore — 5 feet 11 and 200 pounds — and has a similar running style, his legs churning like pistons no matter how many defenders are wrapped around him.

Although a bit short for a quarterback, Coltin typically accounts for about 70% of Norco’s yardage with his passing and running. King certainly can’t stop him. After his second touchdown pass, the game is a runaway before halftime.

Norco goes on to win, 42-7, and afterward Lori squeezes her son in a warm embrace near midfield before shifting her attention to her husband.

Their first flight departs at 6 the next morning, she reminds him, and they need to be out the door by 4:30.

“Four forty-five,” Todd replies, already negotiating for every minute of sleep he can get.

If he really wanted to nap on the plane, Todd shouldn’t have worn an Arizona State sweatshirt and sun visor.

On the second flight in their journey, from Portland, Ore., to Eugene, Ore., a flight attendant wearing a University of Oregon sweatshirt inquires about his affiliation with the Sun Devils.

She returns a few minutes later, kneeling next to him in the aisle.

“I know who your kid is,” she announces, referring to Toby’s exploits against the Ducks a few years earlier. “He killed us.”

Garth, the middle son — but at 6-2 and 305 pounds, by far the largest — will try to uphold the tradition.

After parking the rental car about a mile from Autzen Stadium, Lori slips into the back seat and uses her iPad to search for an inspirational quote she can text to Garth, a weekly pregame routine.

She finds one from the late Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers: I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle — victorious.

Victory today is not assured. Oregon is ranked No. 9 in the nation and is undefeated in Pacific 12 Conference play; Arizona State is ranked No. 18.

With a light mist compounding the gloom of a chilly, overcast afternoon, Todd and Lori take their seats in the Sun Devils cheering section, four rows up from the field in a corner of the end zone.

Watching Garth play is its own science. The Gerharts home in on the senior, observing him so intently that they often don’t know where the ball went or what happened on a play.

Garth and his teammates quiet a stadium-record crowd of 60,055 with a strong start and lead, 24-21, early in the third quarter as intermittent rain intensifies. But Arizona State continually hurts itself with penalties — one wiping out a touchdown — and Oregon starts to pull away.

“The difference in this game,” Todd laments, “is discipline.”

Walking toward the sideline late in his team’s 41-27 defeat, Todd catches Garth scolding a teammate over a play gone awry.

The lineman’s frosty exterior dissolves later when he sees his family waiting for him near the team buses in a steady downpour. After some small talk and a round of hugs, Todd and Lori are soon slogging up Interstate 5 to Portland for their next flight.

Thanks to a trail of red taillights stretching as far as the eye can see, a drive that is supposed to take 90 minutes eats up nearly 21/2 hours.

Check-in time at the hotel: 2:18 a.m.

Only four hours later, Lori is foggily gazing at the security line snaking through the Portland airport.

“Doesn’t it feel like we were just here?” she sighs in Todd’s direction, realizing they had flown into and out of the same airport less than a day earlier.

But by the time they reach Chicago that afternoon, their mood matches the weather: sunny and a surprisingly mild 57 degrees.

Toby has put his parents up at a posh hotel in the city and also shelled out $594.30 for tickets nine rows up from the field near the 25-yard line, ensuring they wouldn’t blow most of their teachers’ salaries just to see him.

Before the game, Lori will text a different Lombardi quote to Toby and end her message with the same three words she always does: “Enjoy the ride.”

Even though Toby set a high school career rushing state record at Norco and for Stanford was the runner-up to Alabama’s Mark Ingram for the 2009 Heisman Trophy, Lori recognizes that an NFL career is a dream that could end in an instant.

Toby doesn’t play much — mostly on kickoffs and punts — because he is stuck behind Adrian Peterson, the highest-paid running back in NFL history. It’s almost halfway through the second quarter before Toby charges onto the field for his first play as a running back.

“Toby’s in,” Todd announces.

Quarterback Donovan McNabb’s third-down pass goes to the other side of the field, short of the first down, and that’s that. A few minutes later, when the Vikings have the ball back, Toby takes a short pass and absorbs a ferocious hit. Lori scrunches her face in anguish.

At halftime, Toby acknowledges Lori with a hand gesture that seems to say things are going “so-so.” That’s an optimistic view considering the Vikings are down, 26-3.

It gets worse. Another Chicago touchdown triggers the “Bear Down, Chicago Bears” music video on the scoreboard for what seems like the 100th time, irritating Lori.

“I’m tired of that song,” she says.

She would hear it again before Chicago finishes off a 39-10 win. Toby’s stats: one carry for three yards and two catches for seven yards.

Meeting afterward near the team buses, the discussion turns to footwork and positioning, Todd motioning with his arms and hunkering down in a stance, the father still coaching his son.

About midnight, Todd and Lori take a stroll across the Chicago River on the way to their hotel. Later, they contemplate sleeping in and spending another day in Chicago but decide against it because Todd has a big game to prepare for back home.

So they rise at 3:50 a.m. Monday to a cacophony of alarms.

There would be one more flight before sunrise, one more layover, and a busy schedule at Norco leading up to another football game Friday.

Some things never change.

ben.bolch@latimes.com