Being a backup isn’t part of plan anymore

What happened to the days of backup high school quarterbacks waiting their turn for the chance to start instead of bailing out faster than Wile E. Coyote?

“It’s frustrating,” Sherman Oaks Notre Dame football Coach Kevin Rooney said Monday after one of his quarterbacks competing for the starting job quit when evidence mounted he wasn’t going to start. “In my mind, it’s not what high school athletics is supposed to be about.”

Rooney wants his backups to be “a teammate to the rest of the team and be prepared when the opportunity arises” to enter a game.

Unfortunately, times have changed. Parents are more than willing to have their sons transfer to keep alive the dream of earning a college scholarship, particularly at the quarterback position.

At Westlake Village Oaks Christian, three quarterbacks have left school from an original group of six competing for the starting job this summer, and one arrived from the Bay Area, Nick Montana, because he wanted to play in a wide-open passing offense instead of Concord De La Salle’s veer attack.

At West Hills Chaminade, Coach Anthony Harris thought sophomore Nick Isham would be his starter, but Isham transferred last month to Oaks Christian. Harris found his new starter when Anthony Vitto, a senior beaten out at Oaks Christian, transferred to Chaminade. And now Isham has apparently left Oaks Christian and is on the move looking for a new school.

Call it the summer of discontent at the quarterback position.

Walt Seymour shakes his head when told of the musical chairs being played. Thirty years ago, he was the backup quarterback in his senior year to All-American John Elway at Granada Hills High. He never thought he’d get a chance to start, but his parents never considered switching schools.

“Back then, I was just playing for fun,” he said.

Elway, the No. 1 quarterback in America, injured his knee, and Seymour came off the bench to start five games and helped Granada Hills reach the City Section semifinals.

“If you had two Elways at one school, I’d think about maybe getting out,” he said. “For me, being 5-9, 160 pounds, I knew I wasn’t going to make it big time and always figured there was junior college.”

That’s the question for parents. Can they accept a coach’s judgment that their son isn’t good enough to start, then be patient and hope an opportunity to play develops?

Quarterbacks, in particular, seem less willing to wait and see.

“I think it’s something probably going on throughout the country, especially in certain positions,” Oaks Christian Coach Bill Redell said. “With college tuition so high, if they think their son has the ability to be a major-college quarterback, he has to be playing. But the truth is there are very few guys who can be a Division I quarterback. It is a little out of balance.”

At Santa Ana Mater Dei, USC-bound Matt Barkley is beginning his fourth year as the starting quarterback, and his presence has scared off many quarterbacks from enrolling. Forget about the chance to learn by playing behind Barkley.

“I’m not afraid to say that competition is not the leading factor anymore [in choosing a program],” Mater Dei Coach Bruce Rollinson said. “Playing time is.”

One reason this summer has resulted in an influx of transfers in Southern California is the new statewide CIF rule that allows freshmen a one-time free transfer before the start of their sophomore year.

During this past school year, there were 601 students in the Southern Section who used the transfer rule and 157 in the City Section. Clearly, those numbers are on the rise in the second year of the rule because it’s much easier for an incoming sophomore to switch schools without losing athletic privileges.

Seymour, 47, who lives in Simi Valley and works in the medical field, said if he had kids today, “I would bring them up the way my parents did. I think they push them way too early. They don’t know how to mow a lawn anymore. All they play is sports. . . . It’s very unrealistic to think every kid is going to make it.”

Rooney urges parents to see the bigger picture, choosing a school first for academics, and for kids to play “for the love of sports, not personal glory.”

But what parent wants to be the dream breaker? That’s why kids are going to continue to transfer when told they’re going to be second-string.

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eric.sondheimer@latimes.com