Van Raaphorst Passes : Quarterback Now Leads Arizona State After Learning the Position at Grossmont High

One day, Pat Roberts, a football coach at Grossmont High School, slammed off his film projector and screamed: “I need a new quarterback!”

The more he thought about it, the more he carried on: “He’s got to be big! He’s got to have big hands! He’s got to be able to throw deep! He’s got to want to be a football player!”

Soon, someone named Jeff Van Raaphorst came to mind. First, this Van Raaphorst kid had good breeding. His dad had played college and pro football. Second, this kid was a catcher in baseball, which meant he had leadership tendencies. Third, even though the kid was a tight end, he’d thrown the ball around in practice and had a tight spiral.

“Plus, I liked the way he walked and talked,” Roberts said.

So he called him in and said: “You’re my quarterback next season.”

“No way,” said Van Raaphorst, age 16.

“Sorry, but you’re it,” said Roberts. “See ya.”

Now, the kid quarterbacks Arizona State. He’s coming home to play in Sunday’s Holiday Bowl.

“I owe everything to Pat Roberts,” Van Raaphorst said this week. “He made me.”

Well, he created a monster.

The kid wants to be so good, he drives himself up a wall. Touchdown passes are not allowed to wobble.

“If there’s a negative about Jeff, he tries to be too perfect,” Roberts said.

Has any quarterback ever been perfect? Van Raaphorst will kill himself trying.

He has always been that way. As a child, he’d fuss at his mom when they played monopoly.

“The whole neighborhood didn’t like the way he played,” said Joanne Van Raaphorst. “He’d finagle any way he could to win.”

His dad, Dick Van Raaphorst, said: “You know kids. He’d want to win so bad, he’d make up his own rules.”

His dad knows about winning. As a kid, he played at Ohio State for Woody Hayes. He was a kicker on the 1961 team that won the Big Ten Conference, and later, he kicked for the Chargers.

People like John Hadl and Lance Alworth used to hang around the house. When little Jeff began to play organized ball, he wore No. 21 in honor of Hadl.

But he wasn’t a quarterback until Roberts told him he had to be. Roberts took him to summer football camp, then made Van Raaphorst work with an eye machine. Numbers would be flashed up on a screen, and he’d have to see them clearly, quickly, just as a quarterback is supposed to see a receiver clearly, quickly.

Roberts said: “Count ‘one thousand-one, one thousand-two, one thousand-three,’ and Jeff could focus on 13 different points. But you don’t do that overnight. It takes work. It’s like speed reading. Anyway, if I flip numbers up slow, and a guy can’t do it, forget him being a quarterback. If you can’t see, you can’t throw.”

And, if you can’t throw, you can’t play for Roberts. His philosophy follows:

“We ran the ‘run and shoot.’ The ball’s in the air all the time, and the quarterback’s on the run all the time. We believe in throwing it. Running it? We’d do that tomorrow. We practiced running for five minutes on Thursdays. When I started as a coach, we’d knock the paint off each others helmets in practice and would get them all tough, but the heck with that. Now, I say: ‘Let’s get basketball players to play football.’

“Sometimes, teams would drop nine defensive backs against us, and Jeff would say: ‘I think the run’s there.’ And I’d say: ‘Hey, you’ve got to get used to this situation.’ . . . A lot of guys can throw the ball, but a good QB has to throw it everywhere, and be able to do it underhand, overhand, or sidearm.

“You hear some football coaches say if you throw, there are four things that can happen, and they’re all bad. Well, my philosophy is if you want kids to play, make it fun. I’ve been 36-1 with good defenses and the veer offense and the great kicking game, and I was bored to death. The way we do it, all the kids feel part of the game and practice day in, day out. We’re out there one hour, 25 minutes, and that’s it. Any more and you’re killing the grass. I mean, you can only throw the ball so much.

“These coaches get together and play golf and listen to Bear Bryant and see that Michigan hasn’t been scored on since the eighth-grade picnic, and they think that’s the way to win. But I say throw it. If they run off tackle and fumble, they say ‘That’s the breaks of the game.’ But if I throw it 40 yards downfield and get intercepted, they say that’s bad football.

“Well, I don’t care. We’re coming off the bus throwing. I won’t change. But, to do it, you’ve got to believe in Mother Nature. God’s got to give you a quarterback.”

Jeff Van Raaphorst.

His senior season, he averaged 298 yards passing per game.

Roberts, who said he is now out of coaching because “a lot of guys won’t turn their football program over to someone who will turn it into a circus,” coached former NFL quarterback Brian Sipe at Grossmont. Roberts said Van Raaphorst is the best he has had. And the kid enrolled at Arizona State, where he began playing regularly last season as a sophomore and threw for more than 2,000 yards.

He threw for 2,000 more this year, and likely will pass Mike Pagel and Danny White on the all-time passing list when he graduates next spring.

But there’s a problem.

“If we can ever get him (Van Raaphorst) to just relax, just a little bit, his whole game will improve a lot,” Roberts said.

So he sees a psychologist.

Once a week, he visits James Gough, who helps him with something called “self-hypnosis.” Van Raaphorst relaxes, and closes his eyes and Gough tells him how the defense is lined up, and the kid visualizes it in his mind and says how he’ll exploit it.

“We actually talk about the players who’ll be blitzing,” Dr. Gough said. “I create visual images. I say: ‘You’re dropping back a seven-step drop, and you’re looking off one receiver, but you check back and find he’s open, but, no, he’s not open, so what do you do?’ He’s able to play the game before he gets there. And the key is that a brain cannot tell the difference between vividly imagined things and reality.”

Is he relaxing more?

“I’m trying,” Dr. Gough said.

Now, it worked for Mark Malone, the Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback who used to play at ASU and is, ironically, from El Cajon. Malone had played poorly and finally came to Dr. Gough, who turned around his season.

Frank Kush, then the Sun Devil coach, said to Gough: “What the hell did you do to the kid?”

“Witchcraft,” Gough said, laughing.

“Well,” said Kush. “Can you do that again? We can beat Southern Cal.”

So Gough is trying the same thing with Van Raaphorst. When he gets mad and is about to scream at an offensive lineman for letting a pass rusher through, he trains himself to watch the 25-second clock for relaxation.

“You just see it, and it ticks methodically, and you get in a methodical frame of mind,” Van Raaphorst said. “I think I get into the emotions of the game too much. I need to disassociate myself more. As far as calling audibles . . . . I don’t want to be caught up in the game. I want to be practical.

“It wouldn’t be so important if I weren’t a quarterback.”

So blame it on Dr. Frankenstein. . . . er . . . Coach Roberts.

‘I think I get into the emotions of the game too much. I need to disassociate myself more. As far as calling audibles . . . . I don’t want to be caught up in the game. I want to be practical. It wouldn’t be so important if I weren’t a quarterback.’

--Jeff Van Raaphorst