A House That Goes a Long, Long Way : Unusual Fallbrook Fund-Raiser Figures to Send the Football Team to Hawaii

Here today, gone to Maui. That’s why they’re here today among the bulldozers, bricks and wood planks at the Maui House. Where there used to be 1.6 acres of grapefruit groves, a highly unusual high school athletic fund-raiser is under way.

It has become something of a point of pride for the entire community of 16,600 off Interstate 15 in northern San Diego County, just east of Camp Pendleton, about a 2 1/2-hour drive from where Tom Pack grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Tom Pack is a name almost everyone here knows.

He is the coach of Fallbrook High School’s football team, and although Maui House was not his idea, he probably is the person most responsible for its success.

That success will be total if the 3-bedroom, 2 3/4-bath country style home that his football team is building at 2223 E. Alvarado sells for the list price of $169,900.

Then the Warriors will have earned the money for their season opener Sept. 6 at Maui High.

Sure, a lot of other teams have gone to Hawaii, especially in recent years, but none ever quite like this. Buy some land, build a house, sell the house? C’mon, what’s the joke?

“I’m glad, because it’s a lot better than selling candy bars,” said senior Scott Barrick, the Warriors’ starting quarterback.

Others weren’t so convinced, like friends who couldn’t believe that a member of the varsity football team would rather spend a warm summer afternoon roofing a house than going to the beach.

“They all thought we were crazy,” Barrick said. “ ‘Why would you want to do that?’ they said. Nobody understood.”

Will they ever?

“When we’re in Hawaii.”

Major fund-raisers are nothing new for Pack, an All-Southern Section basketball player at Alemany in 1963, honorable mention football All-American at Colorado State in 1966 and former baseball coach and football and basketball assistant at now-defunct Fermin Lasuen High in San Pedro. As he says, rather proudly: “Maybe I’m not a good football coach, but I can raise money real well.”

Actually, he coaches pretty well, too. Fallbrook, the smallest school in the Palomar League, which includes perennial power Vista, was 10-0 in 1982, winning its first league championship in 22 years. Fallbrook has finished either first or second and made the playoffs for the last four seasons.

As athletic director, Pack has also overseen money drives for new stadium lights and a complete re-sodding of the football field.

But he knew that to get 50-odd players, a manager and student trainer, coaches and their wives to Hawaii would take something special. Rather, he wanted it to.

The girls’ volleyball team, which is also making the trip, is taking the old-fashioned route--candy sales, car washes, etc.--but they only have about 20 people. How many soap-and-water soaked Saturday afternoons would the football team need to raise $35,000?

The original plan was for a raffle, again hardly unique. Besides, although prizes included a car and trips to Mammoth and Hawaii, Pack said he would have felt guilty depending on the community to buy $200 tickets to send his team, with all due respect to winning a football game, on a week-long vacation. Necessity was an obvious question mark.

But with the house, the money raised is not a donation.

“We’re not just taking from the community, we’re putting back,” Pack said. “Somebody will get this home, and we’re proud to have built it.”

After James Watson, the father of the team’s backup quarterback, suggested the idea after a practice last October, things moved pretty fast.

The coach, who built his own home here 12 years ago and spent summer vacations during college in the construction business in Los Angeles, loved the idea from the beginning.

“I wake up excited today because we’re going to do brickwork,” he said. “People think I’m crazy. When we finally put the roof on, we had about 15 or 17 kids up there, putting on the tiles, and I’m running around going, ‘We put the roof on! We put the roof on!’ That meant a lot to me.”

It wasn’t just Pack, though, who got excited. A story ran in the Fallbrook Enterprise, the local weekly newspaper, and Pack got a call that night from someone wanting to lay the foundation--free. Similar offers poured in on everything from brick work to cabinets and to cleaning the house when it is finished.

Of the more than 100 non-players who have worked on Maui House, only two have not donated their time. Many of the fixtures and appliances were donated by local businesses.

The place that bills itself as the friendly village was proving it.

Bob Dorame, for instance, owns a construction company in town and figures he will have donated 40 hours of time on weekends and after work by the time the project is completed.

Why?

“Because this is Fallbrook,” he said “It’s just the way everyone is here. Me and all the other contractors, we’re not asking anything in return. I think most people are doing it because we live here and we know what it’s like. We’re all here to stay and want to do something for the community.”

Said Dennis Moore, the school’s booster club president: “I don’t know where else this could be accomplished except a community like this.

“We came here from Irvine, and something like this could never happen there. Everyone is too busy with their own lives. I lived there 10 years and didn’t even know my next door neighbors. I already know more people around here in the 15 or 16 months we’ve been living in Fallbrook.”

Said Pack: “We don’t fail. I never had the feeling that we would. The community wouldn’t let us.”

Therefore, the team is in very good shape, financially. A $100,000 building loan from the Fallbrook National Bank has been covered by the father of one of the players, so the Warriors will make the trip even if the house hasn’t been sold when it’s time to go. “I wouldn’t have done the project if we had to sweat selling the house to go,” Pack said.

And because of the donated labor and materials, the job will cost only $20 a square foot, about $30 less than normal. A profit beyond the necessary $35,000 is not only expected but already is earmarked for the booster and football clubs and for new restrooms and a new press box at the school stadium.

And there’s also a little matter of a party Friday night for the volunteers, the method of repayment, along with a standing ad in the football program for two years, an add in the newspaper and team sweaters.

“I’ll cry at the party,” Pack said. “I’ll probably cry. Even though I’m 6-4, I really have a lot of feelings and appreciate anything people do for me. When they take so much time out of their lives to give, I can’t say enough. There’s nothing I can say, except thank you.”

About half a dozen prospective buyers have already been through Maui House as it nears completion. And although many of the players put in the required 15 hours long ago, some are still working. Two, however, one of them a starting receiver, haven’t worked at all and won’t be making the trip.

“When the kids drive by this house in 15 or 20 years and they’ve got kids in high school . . . they can say, ‘This is near where I went to school, near to where I played football, and this is the house that we built to go to Hawaii.’ That isn’t going anywhere.”

While the certified contractors work on their specialties, the varsity team is around for support. The players mix the cement, help hang the doors and, on this day, have given up a Saturday afternoon to help with a brick wall.

A minor slump is noticed in front of a window. No problem.

“We’ll put a bush right there,” someone says.

So they aren’t perfect hard-hats, not even Fallbrook’s best athlete, Bill Dunckel, a wide receiver-kicker-defensive back.

“To see that kid with a hammer was like a circus,” Watson, one of the organizers, said. “He couldn’t hit a nail.

“Let’s face it: Most of these kids come from wealthy families and they’re a little spoiled and aren’t too familiar with this type of work. It’s like watching a bear cub get started; they don’t know how to do it at first. But they’re giving it their all.”

This all may only be a warm-up. Would you believe an eight-unit apartment complex?

Tom Pack, the coach who isn’t happy building just a winning program, is considering that for about two years down the road. The fund-raiser to end all fund-raisers. The rent would provide the income. Steady and on-going.

It’s unique. It might work.

Any volunteers?