THE PRESSURE POINT : The Second-Guessing Starts When the Players Wind Up on the Sidelines

Parents, quite naturally, want the best for their children. Football coaches who hope to keep being football coaches want what’s best for their teams. It is an unfortunate reality for both parties that the desires of each don’t always coincide.

The result is a parent-coach relationship that is sometimes far from buddy-buddy.

Parental pride can be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t exactly lend itself to impartiality. Asking a father to give an unbiased evaluation of his son’s athletic talent is like asking a playwright to review his own play.

So, being subjected to second-guessing--some of it downright nasty--is an unwritten part of every prep football coach’s job description. Mike Milner, Fountain Valley High School coach, has learned to be philosophical about it.

“The way I look at it is this,” he said. “There are three things everybody thinks they can do. Number one is make a movie. Number two is write a book. Number three is coach a football team.”

What makes it different at the prep level is that parents can voice their opinions from the stands every Friday night--usually well within earshot of the coach in question--or at the booster club meeting the following Tuesday. Some parents are able to harness their pride enough to limit themselves to dropping a subtle hint or posing a polite inquiry. Others, as Orange County coaches can attest, make rude and sometimes insolent demands.

The majority of the complaints, coaches say, stem from playing time, or lack of it. There are only 22 starting positions on a team, and for nearly every player who isn’t among the starters, there’s a parent or two who thinks he should be.

Milner said he has been fortunate to work with some supportive parents during his six years at Fountain Valley. But bad apples can leave a bitter aftertaste that’s difficult to get rid of.

“I’ve been threatened physically several times by parents whose sons were not playing,” Milner said. “I’ve had parents tell me that if their kids didn’t get scholarships to Arizona State or UCLA or wherever, they would sue me.

“You get some over-achieving parents who live and die with their sons and they get carried away. We tell our kids they can come to us and ask us why they’re not playing and we’ll be very honest with them and explain what areas they need to improve in to become better players. But sometimes when parents come to us and ask why their son isn’t playing and we’re very honest with them, it’s difficult for them to take.”

Jim Rawls, Garden Grove coach: “I think when you become a head football coach you become a politician. Like it or not, the parents are important to our careers. Sometimes, you have to say what they want to hear. Most parents who are so involved with their kid’s athletic careers can’t deal with truth.”

Ed Blanton, Estancia coach, remembering the reaction of the father of a quarterback who had been benched in favor of a player who went on to become an all-league selection: “I don’t think he’d spit on me if I was on fire.”

Bob Lester, El Modena coach: “Every coach who’s been in the business for a while has had a bad experience with parents.”

The following is a look at a few that stood out in the minds of area coaches. Some were recalled with laughter. Others weren’t so funny.

Just This Once, For Aunt Millie and Uncle George--A personal favorite of Milner’s involves a second-string receiver whose position was occupied by one of the team’s most talented players. Milner said his receiver coach got a phone call a few days before an important game. The caller was the father of the back-up receiver.

Milner: “The conversation went basically like this. The father said, ‘I have relatives coming in from back East to see my son play. They’re coming a long way. I wonder if you could start my son in the game.’

“He was asking my assistant to start a kid over someone who had earned that position from the beginning of the season.”

Milner characterized the reserve player as talented, but not hard working. The decision of the coaching staff was to keep him on the bench and start the more deserving player.

“The father did not understand our reasoning,” Milner said. “My coach said something to the effect that he was not Father Flanagan and this wasn’t Boys Town.”

The Not-So-Subtle Approach--Lester recalled an instance in which a father resorted to plain and simple intimidation in an effort to get his son in the starting lineup.

“I was threatened one time to play a kid, or else ,” he said. “It was this great big Samoan guy. His son was the worst player in the world. He didn’t say what the circumstance would be if I didn’t play the kid, but before the game, his wife came to me and said, ‘You’d better do what he says. He’s crazy.’

“I didn’t play the kid. After the game, I kept my big line coach right by my side, just in case, but nothing happened.”

Screen Test or Screen Pass--This one comes from Mike Marrujo, Valencia coach, and it happened while he was coaching at Pius X in Downey. It involves an offensive tackle who had to choose between going Hollywood and going to practice.

“His dad thought he had the potential to be a movie star,” Marrujo said. “His dad wanted him to miss the first two days of two-a-days to audition for a movie. I said he could but he’d be on the JV team when he came back.

“His dad said, ‘You know Marrujo, you don’t look like much of a coach.’

“Well, he had this old shirt on and was sort of disheveled, and I said, ‘You know, you don’t look much like Howard Hughes, either.’ ”

The tackle put Hollywood on hold and was on time for practice.

Cleaning Out the Hall Closet--Don Douglass , who has suffered through three straight losing seasons at Dana Hills, once had a father present him with a playbook the father had used during his high school playing days. “It must have been 30 years old,” Douglass said. “The offense was the old full house, T-formation that Hampton Pool devised for the Rams. He told me, ‘It worked for me, why don’t you try it.’ I told him, ‘I’m open for anything,’ and looked it over. But it just wasn’t feasible.”

Up Close and Personal--Blanton remembers his surprise at discovering that a parent had come out of the stands and down to the sideline to express his disapproval during a game. “I turned around and there was a parent next to me. He said, ‘You’re yelling at the kids and I don’t like it.’ We were eyeball to eyeball and he threatened to kick my rear.”

Fortunately, someone intervened before the scene got any uglier. “An assistant principal came over and took him away,” Blanton said.

Gimme Western Union--One coach, who asked that his name not be used, remembers a game for the league championship that ended with the score tied, 12-12. The game was decided by the California tiebreaker, in which each team gets the ball on its opponent’s 10 yard line and is given four downs to score. The process continues until the tie is broken.

In this case, the coach watched as his opponents score first. On his team’s series of downs, the coach called for a pass. It was intercepted, bringing an abrupt and painful end to the season.

The coach said he felt badly enough, but it got worse when he arrived at school on Monday. A telegram was delivered to him. It read: “Those who live by the pass shall die by the pass.” The wire was unsigned.

But the coach said he is 90% certain who wired him the message: his tailback’s father, the booster club president.

Freshmen Need Ink, Too--From Chuck Gallo, Mater Dei coach, comes the story of the parent of a player on the freshman team who couldn’t understand why Todd Marinovich, the starting varsity quarterback at Mater Dei as a freshman last season, was getting his name in the newspapers and his son was a relative unknown.

“His son had been a star player in Jr. All-American and on the elementary school level, but I had to explain to the guy to just be patient,” Gallo said. “There are 220 kids in Mater Dei’s football program, and a Jr. All-American star is going to go unnoticed for a while here.”

The Truth Hurts--Rawls coached at Chino before coming to Garden Grove in 1983. It was at Chino that he had his most heated confrontation with a parent. “During a booster club meeting, a father asked why his kid wasn’t playing,” he said. “I told him we could talk about it after the meeting. But he said he wanted to know right now why his kid wasn’t playing. I said I didn’t think this was the time or the place to discuss it.

“Finally he said he wanted everyone in the meeting to know why his kid wasn’t playing. So I said, ‘Because you’re kid’s chicken-bleep.’ ”

Rawls said the father then sank in his seat and began to cry.

This Team Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us--Lester said he once had a booster club president who drank too much liquor. Not long into the season, it became apparent to Lester that the man was unfit for office.

“His son was a terrible player, but we were in a situation where we had to play him some,” Lester said. “The guy called me up late one night and he was drunk. He told me I should have had his kid do the kicking in a game. I don’t need some drunk calling me in the middle of the night. The next week, I had him fired as the booster club president.

“It was either him or me.”