And Now It’s Team Handball for Oxy Quarterback : ‘Father Flaherty’ Found His Calling in Football

Father Flaherty may have a nice ring to it, but Tim Flaherty just didn’t have the calling. After some heavy soul-searching, he chose passing over preaching.

The 25-year-old Occidental College junior, who is working toward his bachelor’s degree in psychology, is finished with college football now, after using up his NCAA eligibility while attending St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, Moorpark Junior College and Occidental.

But there is another athletic pursuit to replace football--team handball--and Flaherty would love to make the U. S. national team.

Flaherty was a quarterback who didn’t play the position until he got to Moorpark. After parochial school he went to Chaminade for the ninth grade and then entered Queen of Angels, a Roman Catholic seminary. With his Catholic upbringing, he got to meet a number of priests who visited his home, and their life appealed to him. He entered St. John’s to study the priesthood but gave up the idea after two years because of other interests that he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice.

Goal: ‘Work With People’

“I’d still be in there now, but I needed to get out and work with people,” said Flaherty, who worked at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club in Simi Valley for 2 1/2 years before coming to Occidental. He eventually wants to do social work. “I enjoy sports a lot and I enjoy being with people.

“But it wasn’t just football. I didn’t feel my talents were be used to the best ability. I didn’t want to go through the priesthood without checking out these other things.”

Football, indeed, was one of them. He hadn’t touched a football in a game situation until he got to Chaminade as a high school sophomore. He began last season as Occidental’s second-string quarterback behind Pat Guthrie because, as Coach Dale Widolff recalled, “he didn’t have a whole lot of experience and he was pretty raw.”

Halfway through the season’s third game, the Occidental coach decided his offense was sagging and inserted the 6-3, 195-pound Flaherty, who threw four touchdown passes over a four-week period. The Tigers continued undefeated with Flaherty in the lineup, but Guthrie took over for good in the second half of the sixth game and threw three touchdown passes to regain his starting status for the rest of the season.

Inexperience Hurt

“He had good tools, but the inexperience hurt him more than anything else,” Widolff said. “He has great intangibles. He’s a tremendous leader and the kids really like him, which is important at that position.”

The Tigers finished the regular season 10-0 but lost their NCAA Division III Western Regional playoff game, 43-42, to Central College of Iowa on a failed two-point conversion attempt in the final minute of a game Flaherty spent entirely on the bench.

Assistant Coach?

Although Flaherty cannot play football for him next fall, Widolff is planning to have him contribute as an assistant coach during his senior year. Flaherty, however, isn’t sure of his plans.

“A number of people here said I should do it and I’m still considering it,” he said recently during an informal team handball demonstration in the gym at Occidental, where he is trying to organize a club handball team. “It’s up in the air. I may stay here because I’d like to finish my education--or I may go to Colorado Springs.”

Flaherty referred to the site of the Olympic training center where he went last December to try out for Coach Javier Garcia Cuesta’s U. S. national handball team. Only nine players, including Joe Storey, Mike Leonard, Rod Oshita, Greg Morava and Steve Goss, were left from the team that finished ninth among 12 teams in last summer’s Olympics with a 1-4-1 record. Flaherty, who worked at the Olympic team handball events as a youth venue coordinator, traveled to Colorado to try out for one of the remaining five positions on the current roster and made it as an alternate.

He was one of four substitutes to accompany the 12-player team on its recent two-week trip to Norway for the Men’s B World Team Handball Championships, which East Germany won. After four plane rides and a bus ride totaling 24 hours, he didn’t dress for any of the team’s seven games. Instead, he worked with the camera crew that videotaped each game of the U. S. team’s trip.

Hooked on Handball

“From what the coaches tell me, we’re still a little way behind the East Germans, but we’ve reached a point where we’re not getting blown out anymore,” said Flaherty, who will join the team in Germany two months from now for the student world championships. In August, the national team will start making preparations for the 1988 Olympics and Flaherty is hoping to get an invitation to try out again.

Flaherty, whose family moved from Inglewood to Simi Valley when he was 3, started playing team handball in 1983 while attending Moorpark. The coach there was Scott Rosmaier, a former team handball player at UCLA who started the Ventura County Condors the same year. Flaherty learned of the tryouts through a friend, who had read one of the flyers that Rosmaier had put up around the college. Once he saw how the game was played, he was hooked.

“It’s just the challenge of the whole thing, of throwing a ball and beating an opponent and trying to throw a ball past a goalie,” he said. “I also like the back and fourth action of it. It’s really like hand-to-hand combat. It takes a lot of running ability and agility, all these things that I don’t necessarily have but have been working on acquiring.”

Although he has never seen his ex-quarterback play team handball, Widolff expressed confidence that Flaherty will succeed at it.

He Has ‘Intangibles’

“There’s something about him that allows him to pick up things quicker than most,” the Occidental coach remarked. “He’s picked up two sports fairly late in his life, compared to most people, and has excelled in both of them.

“It’s not like he’s particularly fast or has an unbelievable arm, but I think there’s something about being an athlete that’s a lot more than athletic ability. It’s the intangibles and the motor skills that he has.”

The 25-year-old college junior, who played in the first team handball game he ever saw, admitted he was awkward at the international sport the first year he played it. As a left-handed shot, however, the right back-court player had a built-in advantage because of his wider scoring angle.

“Scott was just leading me through, telling me the rules,” said Flaherty, who along with Rosmaier is the only player left from the Condors’ original 1983 squad. “I’m not sure I’m even pretty good at it now, compared to (the players on) the national team or the world championships that I went to.

“I think I’m holding my own on defense. I guess I have the potential of a shot. It’s just going to take a lot more playing time. I still haven’t learned all the technical stuff, all the moves and such, but I’ll get that down.”

Praise for Rosmaier

Most of the Condors have been playing as a unit for only a year. Rosmaier started with 10 players and is now up to 15, including six back-court players, five wing players, two circle players and two goalkeepers.

“Scott’s basically what’s keeping the team going up in Ventura County,” Flaherty said. “He just keeps believing all these years and keeps trying to bring people in. It’s hard to get athletes involved and to stay interested long enough. You try to keep recruiting people. Some people take onto it just like that--like I did--and just enjoy it right away.”

Ventura County participates in the seven-team California Handball Assn., which includes the Los Angeles Stars, Los Angeles Crusaders, Westside Express, USC and the defending champion California Heat, which has a split squad. The schedule, which runs from October through April, plays in a tournament format.

The site of the monthly tournament is determined by whichever team can afford to host it. The Condors have hosted three of them at the Camarillo Boys’ and Girls’ Club in the past 12 months, the most recent March 30 when they hosted the Ventura County Open and finished third behind the victorious L. A. Stars with a 2-2 record.

Flaherty has been the Condors’ showcase player--and the most closely guarded one--throughout their 7-14 season because of his association with the national team.

“It’s a pretty big deal for us,” said assistant coach Kurt Stone, who the physical education director at Camarillo Boys’ and Girls’ Club. “We know his ability. He’s a superb athlete. Just having a national team player on your team brings more respect and more ability to our team when we play in tournaments.”