DRUG TESTING IN HIGH SCHOOLS : Appalling or Great? Valley Coaches Have Wide-Ranging Views

Bill Workman’s plan to voluntarily test his football players for drugs at Edison High was greeted with less than overwhelming support by Valley-area coaches.

While most coaches agreed that they must keep an eye open for potential problems, some didn’t think drug testing was the answer.

“It appalls me,” San Fernando baseball Coach Steve Marden said of Workman’s plan. “We’re not dealing with animals or horse flesh here. When we have to go to that extent, then we’re missing the boat as educators.”

Marden has another solution.

“I’ve got to believe that a Charles White coming back to San Fernando High and telling the kids where drugs took him has a much greater impact,” Marden said. White, now with the Rams and a former star at San Fernando and USC, has admitted drug problems in the past.

Of course, Workman has his supporters in the Valley.

“I think it’s great,” Darryl Stroh, the football and baseball coach at Granada Hills, said. “There are too many kids using drugs and getting away with it. Anything we can do to discourage it, the better.”

Stroh said that drugs, as well as alcohol, are “the No. 1 problem in education today.”

“I think they ought to test every kid in school,” Stroh said.

It’s the legality of drug testing that worries Kennedy football Coach John Haynes.

“I think it infringes on the privacy of the athlete,” Haynes said. “Also, it makes one more problem for the coach to be concerned with, (with) something that isn’t in his jurisdiction.”

Said Hart football Coach Rick Scott: “I don’t feel I have any players that are into (drugs) at that point where my program would benefit from testing.”

Scott is more concerned with the alcohol than illegal drugs.

“If there was some way to curb the kids from going out drinking, that would be of a bigger benefit to high school athletics,” he said. “The only way to tell would be to pull them all in on Saturday and give them a Breathalyzer test. That, of course, is illegal.”

Dave Carson, the football coach at Burbank, has his players come to school the morning after a game to stretch, run, swim or lift weights.

One of the reasons Carson has the players on campus is to check for injuries.

“But I also know what goes on on Friday nights,” Carson said. “We want them good and sweaty on Saturdays to burn that stuff out of their system.”

Carson is in favor of Workman’s plan. “Any time we can help young athletes control the environmental forces around them, it’s our duty to do so.”

Nearly every coach contacted said that a player caught with drugs would automatically be kicked off the team.

Stroh has had to expel some of his players. “One kid was a starter in baseball,” he said. “And he had talent.”

San Fernando’s Marden is convinced his program is clean.

“Since I’ve been coaching here,” he said, “I don’t believe any kid has walked out onto the practice field or into a game situation where he was high on any drugs.”