Cal Lutheran and Northridge: the Old and the New : Burt Strives for Enthusiasm in CSUN Debut

A phenomenon takes place at just about every preseason football camp--college or professional.

No matter what a team’s record the previous year, an aura of optimism surrounds every team before the season starts.

The coach always expects his team to have a winning season and challenge for the conference title. Never mind that his team was outscored by 300 points the previous year.

Cal State Northridge resembles other colleges in this regard. Over a 24-year span, six different coaches have combined for seven winning seasons.

All were undefeated during preseason camp.

So please excuse Northridge fans if they get a little testy when they’re told this year’s team plans to win with enthusiasm and intensity instead of with 6-3, 240-pound linebackers with funky Mohawk hairdos.

Consider a recent conversation between a reporter and a male student on campus:

Reporter: “So, what do you think of new football Coach Bob Burt? His staff and team seem pretty enthusiastic. Do you think they’re going to be good this year?”

Student: “To tell you the truth, I’m getting sick of hearing what a winner Burt is. The season hasn’t even started yet, has it?”

Obviously, this guy’s been around for a while. Must have been a grad student.

Of course, it’s not what the student body thinks; it’s what the players think. And they do indeed believe they can have a winning season, which has been Burt’s goal since he was hired as football coach in January.

Mike Kane, a senior tailback who already holds the Northridge career rushing record, says he won’t be surprised if the Matadors only lose one or two games all season.

“This is the first time in my years here that everybody’s together,” Kane said. “There’s a different attitude. We’re going to win. There’s no question about it.”

Kane says the work put in by the new coaching staff is the reason he is so confident. “We can all see how hard they’ve worked and it makes us want to work all that much harder,” he said.

And he’s not just talking about on the field and in the film room.

Burt, his staff, and even Athletic Director Bob Hiegert, took great lengths this spring and summer to upgrade the Matador football program. Coaches visited local restaurants and businesses to solicit donations of food and money. They organized a fund-raising golf tournament and planted grass on the playing fields. Meanwhile, Hiegert stapled down carpeting in the football press box, and another coach worked himself sick installing an air conditioning system in the locker room. This is called Division II football.

But there were results. “For the first time,” Kane said, “college football is shaping up to be what I always thought it would be.”

Which all means that Burt, who likes to say “There is a winning way to do everything,” is well on his way to accomplishing goal No. 1.

“My immediate plans had nothing to do with wins and losses,” Burt said. “It was to develop a feeling within the people involved in the football program--whether that be an equipment man, managers, trainers, the media, students, players or assistant coaches--that we could be successful here. That’s the one goal I have. To instill that kind of atmosphere here--not to win eight games or 10 games or be a champion in three years. If everything else is taken care of, the championships and big crowds will come.”

It’s precisely that kind of grass-roots attitude that attracted Northridge administrators to Burt when they were looking for a coach. He had been the defensive coordinator at Cal State Fullerton for six years. He knew how to suffer.

As Burt himself says, “Can you imagine Bo Schembechler spending his summer planting grass on the field? Or the athletic director at Cal laying carpeting?”

All of this is a paradox, of course. Burt wishes the program would get past the point of struggling to make ends meet, but he knows the situation could be, and has been, worse. “It’s all a part of a program growing,” he said. “The culture shock of some assistant from the University of Michigan coming to Cal State Northridge or Cal State Fullerton as a head coach is a shock that most of them probably couldn’t stand. It’s a different world. Nothing has been handed to us on a silver platter, and none of the coaches here expected it to be that way.”

And if they did, they found out different the hard way.

Quarterback coach Pat Degnan lost 15 pounds in four days this summer while working in the rather uncomfortable confines of a sweltering attic to install an air conditioning system in the team locker room. He later grew ill from dehydration.

But he says it was worth it because, “If the players know we’re busting our tails to improve things for them, they’ll bust theirs on the field.”

Rich Lopez, a holdover from the staff of former CSUN Coach Tom Keele, said the biggest difference from past to present is the intensity of the players.

“Tom wasn’t quiet, but he was reserved,” Lopez said. “Usually, football teams take on the personality of their coach. Where Tom was reserved, so was our football team and when things got going bad last season we never reached the intensity level we should have.

“Bob is a very intense person and he shows that to the players. As a result, I think we’ll be a very exciting football team to watch. These guys are excited about playing football.”

They are also a closer group than in the past. Living together for a week during two-a-day drills saw to that.

“With a new staff and new players, we felt an opportunity to eat and sleep football together 24 hours a day was very important,” Lopez said. “It made us a family.”

The idea wasn’t a new one. Lopez said that other CSUN football staffs tried to do the same thing, but couldn’t raise enough money. “We gave the players hats, we always had good equipment, but that’s as far as it went,” Lopez said. “Now the kids can really see something happening. And when they see that happening--when they see the coaches out there working for them--they have a little more loyalty.”

The players already have benefited from free meals and the air conditioning, but the result of the coaches’ work on the field won’t be known until today at 1 p.m. when the Matadors meet Sonoma State in Rohnert Park, Calif.

“Since spring, it’s been about 50-50 coaching and getting out into the community and talking about CSUN football,” Lopez said. “There were some long hours. We had five coaches working on putting in a new offense. That’s five different personalities who have all been successful coaches at other places. Under those circumstances, even a simple pitch play can take hours to discuss. It’s amazing how many different ways each play can be run. We had to figure out how we wanted to run them.”

It will be apparent soon just how often the coaches made the right choice.

After all, intensity and enthusiasm can only carry a team so far.

“When it comes right down to it, it’s always up to the players whether you win or not,”