Supercoach Is a Man for All Seasons : Rol Bradford Coaches Every Team at South Dakota School

They call him Supercoach.

No wonder.

Rol Bradford, 37, coaches everything at Red Cloud Indian High School on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation.

He not only coaches all sports, but his teams are consistently among the best in South Dakota.

Last fall, the Red Cloud High School football team had a 14-0 record and made the regional playoffs.

At the same time that he was coaching the football team, Bradford also was coaching girls’ basketball. The girls had an 18-5 record and were runners-up in the regional tournament.

Then in his spare time, Bradford also coached cross-country.

In winter, he coaches boys’ basketball and wrestling, and girls’ volleyball. His boys’ basketball team had a 19-5 record, and, like the girls’ team, was runner-up in the regional tournament.

In the spring, Bradford coaches track and rodeo. His rodeo team got to the regional in June, and he had eight of his track athletes in the state meet.

Bradford, one-fourth Oglala Sioux Indian, a lifelong resident of the Pine Ridge Reservation, played basketball, football, baseball and was on the track team at Black Hills State College in Spearfish.

He has been athletic director and coach of everything at Red Cloud High for seven years. Before that he was athletic director and coach of everything at Our Lady of Lourdes elementary school at Porcupine, a small reservation town 35 miles northeast of here, a few miles beyond the Wounded Knee Massacre Monument.

While coaching at Porcupine, his football team never lost a game, his basketball team won 64 straight games, then finally lost a game and after that won 20 more without losing.

This coach is something else.

“His strong suit is motivation,” said Jesuit Brother Ron Simurdiak, 36. “He is one of the best motivators I have ever encountered.”

Father John Jutz would have been nuts about this coach. Jutz founded Red Cloud Indian Mission School 98 years ago. The Jesuits have operated an elementary and high school here ever since. Jutz named the school after a famous 19th Century Oglala Sioux chief.

The grade school has 300 students, the high school 220. Academic standards are tough. The kids get an excellent education.

High school athletes do a lot of traveling. The closest town of any size to Pine Ridge is Rapid City, 90 miles north.

Red Cloud plays all over the state and into North Dakota and Montana. Average distance for a game is 200 miles one way.

One day in November, when he was coaching boys’ football and girls’ basketball, Bradford traveled 300 miles in one direction with his football team, drove all night to get back to Pine Ridge, picked up the girls’ basketball team and headed for a game the next night 300 miles in the other direction.

Now you know why they call him Supercoach.

You would never know by meeting him. Bradford is calm, quiet, unassuming, dedicated.

“It does get confusing at times,” he admitted, recalling a particularly exciting girls’ basketball game.

“I was in the locker room congratulating the girls,” he said. “They were covered with perspiration. One girl finally spoke up: ‘Coach, could you please leave so we could shower and get out of these sweaty clothes?’ I forgot they were girls.”

Great athletes from Red Cloud have included Craig One Feather, all-state football star, and Cleveland Weasel Bear, two-time South Dakota cross-country champion.

Bradford may be Red Cloud’s only coach, but the school has a major booster club, in Chicago, of all places. Athletes and business leaders from there have had a 20-year association with Red Cloud, thanks to George Allen.

It started in 1965 when Allen was a defensive coach for the Chicago Bears. He got wind of the Jesuits and the kids at Red Cloud and founded the Red Cloud Athletic Club of Chicago.

Since then, club members have contributed more than $500,000 for a field house, track, football field, outfitting the students with uniforms, athletic equipment, buses and much more.

Every February, the club holds a banquet, which is attended by players from the Bears, Bulls, Cubs, Black Hawks, White Sox and Sting, all supporters of Red Cloud High. Honored at the banquets as athlete of the year have included Walter Payton, Bruce Sutter, LaMarr Hoyt and Billy Mills.

Mills is an Oglala Sioux from Pine Ridge. He did not go to Red Cloud Indian school, but he is honored in a gym mural depicting running, a centuries-old tradition among Indians. The mural shows an old-time warrior running along with Olympic runner Mills.

Hanging in the gym is the tribal flag of the Sioux, with a red field and seven tepees in a circle representing the seven bands of the tribe.

The field house is called the Paul (Dizzy) Trout Memorial in memory of the late Detroit Tiger pitcher who succeeded Allen as president of the Red Cloud Athletic Club of Chicago.

It’s in the Dizzy Trout field house on cold winter nights that Supercoach Bradford fires up his sharpshooting Crusaders.

It isn’t the money that keeps Bradford coaching one team after another. He earns only $20,000 a year.

“It’s Rol’s love of the sport--all sports--and his dedication to the youth of this community that keeps him here,” said Father Earl J. Kurth, director of the mission school for 17 years and director of development the last four years.