DEALING WITH DISCIPLINE : What to Do Can Become a Dilemma

In a football coach’s daydream, every player would display the wisdom of Solomon, well-known king, not to mention the ability of Freddie Solomon, well-known wide receiver.

But in a coach’s nightmare--as in real life--players will do the darndest things.

They have been known to indulge in lunchtime cocktail parties, forge teachers’ signatures on grade reports, and throw oranges that hit assistant principals in the head.

Coaches in Orange County have had to deal with each of these lapses in judgment, and to respond with punishments that discourage future recurrences.

This is not the part of the job that entices anybody to select coaching as a career. But discipline is one of the necessary responsibilities in running a successful program.

“It’s the No. 1 nemesis of every football coach every year,” said John Carroll, Kennedy coach. ‘Should he or shouldn’t he be kicked off the team?’ ”

While styles of administering punishments differ, most coaches say four elements are required to impose effective discipline.

To start, the rules must be fair and the players must know the consequences for breaking them.

When a rule is broken, the punishment should fit the crime and there should be no double standards for the star and the bench-warmer.

Beyond that, most schools adopt a catch-all philosophy that covers anything the specific rules might overlook.

At Loara, Coach Herb Hill simply tells his players, “Do what is right.”

Bill Workman, Edison coach, takes the opposite approach: “Don’t do anything that might embarrass yourself, the football program, or the school.”

However, all the sound advice in the world has never prevented teen-agers from acting their age.

An example arose last week at La Quinta High School when Coach Joe Zeno received a report of a drinking party involving the majority of his players.

Zeno, who considers the use of alcohol as serious an offense as drug use, asked each of his players to admit whether he had been drinking. Twenty-one of them came to him and admitted taking at least a sip, Zeno said, because they thought it was “the thing to do.”

Zeno said he was hurt by the situation, which forced him to do some soul-searching.

“It’s a tremendous concern of mine, almost to the point where sometimes I think I’m wasting my time in life,” he said. “Just when you think you’re getting somewhere is about the time something like this happens.

“I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve been coaching 21 years, and it’s a tremendous frustration.

“As coaches, we have to face the raw reality of life--that there’s tremendous pressure on teen-agers to drink. Most of the time, I have to take my hat off to our kids (for their effort to withstand the pressures),” he said. “Social drinking--what’s going on this weekend--is the major subject of discussion around school.

“Just because we set up contracts and discuss it as a team doesn’t guarantee that youngsters are not going to break the rules.”

Zeno held a team meeting and sent out letters to the parents informing them that if there was any repetition, players would be suspended from the team. Now he is holding individual conferences with each player.

He considered benching the offenders. But with only 10 innocent players available to face the next opponent, No. 1-ranked Servite, it became a matter of safety, Zeno said.

“If I sent 12 players out there, I wasn’t sure I would have 12 players left standing at the end,” he said.

Bill Brown, Brea coach, was faced with a similar dilemma last month after three of his starters were involved in an episode of spray-painting and aluminum can distribution on the campus as part of an annual senior prank.

The trouble was, this year’s pranksters were caught red-handed after doing $93 worth of damage. School officials suspended the trio for five days, automatically forcing them to miss a game.

On top of that, Brown had them sit out the next game because under team rules, players who miss practices may not play.

The actions turned out to be a hardship on rest of the Wildcats. With five players injured, Brea had to compete without eight starters. Brown didn’t like it, but he says his players have to realize they are accountable for their actions.

“This was not the league championship,” Brown said. “These were just practice games. If they’re going to learn a lesson, it’s a good time for them to learn it.

“Kids are impulsive. They do things on the spur of the moment sometimes, just like adults do. It’s part of growing up. I hope the other kids remember this example and think twice the next time an opportunity to pull a prank comes along.”

Some schools operate under a set of hard-and-fast rules. At El Dorado, the athletic department forbids male athletes from having hair in their eyes and on their collars, and from wearing mustaches or beards.

Athletes who are caught using drugs or alcohol are dropped from sports for a calendar year. Smoking cigarettes costs a player a semester. But at El Dorado, as at other schools, it’s only the truly indiscreet who run the risk of detection--and its consequences.

“We don’t go out in the community looking for things,” Carl Sweet, Golden Hawk coach, said. “But if they bring it back here, we’ll pick up on it. And if we hear rumors, we may give the kid a warning or deal with his parents.”

Other coaches shy away from inflexible rules, preferring to consider each case as it arises.

At Loara, Hill says “there is no formula. We try to deal with each circumstance as a separate entity.”

Some years ago, one Saxon starter turned green and became violently ill on the sidelines during the first quarter of a game, Hill recalled. The player admitted to taking a drug. Hill met with his parents, and determined that the boy probably was not a habitual user. He was suspended for a game.

“The easiest thing to do is to kick them off the team the first time,” Hill said. “The hardest thing--and best thing for the youngster and the whole group--is to help them realize their role on the team and straighten them out.

“I prefer to try and help them do the right thing. If they can’t handle that, then we have to disassociate them from the team.”

Sweet agreed. “Sometimes by removing the kid (from the team) for a year, you may not be doing the best thing. For some, it’s best if they stay involved because they might be on the verge of going off the deep end. It’s a dilemma.

“I can see the benefits of flexibility, but where there is flexibility, there is also inconsistency. You have to follow precedent. If one kid gets caught drinking, it can’t be a season suspension if it was three games for another.”

Some infractions provoke little soul searching and a swift response. Bob Lester, El Modena coach, says he runs “a loose ship.” But he has one rule no player has tested, and remained on the team to tell the tale.

Lester cannot tolerate players who miss practice without a good excuse. He looks upon his team as if it were a company and his players as if they were employees. One unexplained absence, and you’re gone.

“I had to fire one just (last) Tuesday,” Lester said.

Oftentimes, situations will occur that are obviously morally or ethically wrong, yet are described nowhere in the rules.

Workman remembers one player who became embroiled in a family issue. The player’s father had forbidden a certain boy from dating the player’s sister. After the boy was seen again in the company of the player’s sister, the player took it upon himself to discourage the supposed Romeo.

The player confronted a boy on campus and punched him, breaking his nose and teeth. It turned out that he had the wrong person, however.

The school suspended the player for a week. Workman decided to suspend him from the team for a month.

“He had probation officers to see,” Workman said. “He said he was sorry, but even though he didn’t mean to do it to that kid, he did mean to do it to somebody else.”

On another occasion, Workman had to create a special punishment for the player who forged a teacher’s signature on his monthly grade progress report to the coaches.

“That was the worst offense we’ve had and probably the hardest punishment,” Workman said. He required the player to perform non-stop exercises throughout football practice every day.

“After a week and a half, we decided he had learned his lesson,” Workman said. “The kid showed me he really wanted to play football. He didn’t let us run him off.

“Actually, I thought more of the kid when it was over than when he started. And nobody else ever tried that one. The whole team got the message.”

Peer pressure is a marvelous old tool of coaches. Sweet employed it after three players skipped two-a-day practices in the summer in favor of going dove hunting.

When the hunters returned, they had to stand by as the rest of the team did grueling exercises.

“The idea was, you’re conditioning because you are going to have to be extra tough since you can’t count on these (three) guys,” Sweet said. “If they don’t come through in the games, you’re going to have to be able to carry them on your shoulders.”

One of the more difficult decisions Sweet has had to make in his career came when three of his young sophomore assistant coaches at Hart High School threw a beer party for their team. Nearly all the players attended.

Sweet fired the coaches, but chose not to kick players off the team. They were punished through extra tasks in practice.

“We didn’t feel we could hold the kids strictly accountable,” he said. “If we had, we would have been decimated. We wouldn’t have had a (sophomore) team.”

Marijon Ancich, Tustin coach, says it was much simpler to impose discipline during his years at St. Paul, a parochial school.

There, he just handed the player a broom, mop, or vacuum cleaner and let them sweat out their punishment over the floors of the locker room and chapel.

“But St. Paul was a unique environment. It’s a lot different here,” he said. The typical punishment for his Tustin players is a course of long sprints called the “manmaker.”

Last season, Kris Van Hook, Cypress coach, was faced with a most unusual excuse for breaking team rules. Ten of his players cut practice to walk precincts for a democratic congressional candidate on election day.

The players argued that it was their patriotic duty.

The candidate narrowly won the election, but the Centurions lost the last game of the season to Esperanza, 59-0, after Van Hook suspended the patriots. He didn’t buy their appeal about their duty as Americans for a minute.

“That’s just a smoke screen,” he said. “It’s not their patriotic duty to earn $50.”