Prep Friday : Football in Irvine Is Growing Into Its Potential

When Woodbridge High School Coach Gene Noji decided to leave the high school football factory known as Long Beach Poly in 1980 in favor of a new school named after, of all things, an Irvine subdivision, he was viewed as local football’s version of Christopher Columbus.

The prevailing wisdom suggested that Noji would voyage south into the hinterlands of Orange County and simply disappear--fall off the edge of the established world of high school sports, never to be heard from again.

Granted, plenty of things had taken root and thrived in Irvine--first crops and cattle, and later housing and business. But one product for which the new city was not known was football. Irvine seemed like a better atmosphere for some transplant from a country club such as tennis.

Certainly the two existing schools, Irvine and University, both founded in the 1970s, had little immediate luck on the football field. Both had a distressing and chronic tendency to turn up near the bottom of the pile in the standings.

But Noji interpreted the area’s lack of football prowess as an inviting opportunity, not a deterrent.

“When I first left Poly a lot of people said, ‘Why would you want to go to a new school in a city like Irvine? You can’t win there,’ ” Noji recalled. “And I said, ‘If that’s the case, if we just play consistent .500 ball, people will be interested.’ I didn’t feel there was anything to lose.”

Despite the efforts of the coaching staff, the first varsity fielded at Woodbridge was a plucky but sparse group of 22 players that lost eight of nine games in 1981.

Sometimes it seemed as if the only time an Irvine-based team was assured of winning a game was when the opponent was another team from Irvine. Sometimes, even that failed, and they would tie.

But after 10 years of growing pains, football at Irvine’s three high schools is beginning to show definite signs of growing into its potential. As the children in the housing developments reach adolescence, enrollments have edged up. The quality of the teams appears to be close behind.

Ron Grossman, founder of the Irvine Sports Club, said he remembers many frustrating moments trying to find reason to cheer the city’s earlier teams. But he says that’s no longer true because the overall caliber of play is better today than ever.

There have been many signs of respectability and growing support at each of the schools in the past year.

Woodbridge surprised many by finishing in third place in the Sea View League last season. Perhaps as a consequence, Noji had his largest turnout for the team this fall with 50 players. Irvine started the 1985 season 4-0 and finished 6-4 to tie the school’s best record, although it wound up fifth in the highly competitive seven-team South Coast League race.

University, with first-year Coach Mark Cunningham and a pair of returning all-league players in Craig Belle and Scott Tompkins, also shows evidence of having turned the corner.

The city’s residents are responding with enthusiasm to their competitive teams. Nearly 3,000 turned out for the season opener two weeks ago when University beat Irvine, 34-20.

The only source of regret in an increasingly rosy situation seems to be that the city’s teams now compete in three leagues, making true cross-town bragging rights a little difficult to establish.

That’s particularly galling to members of the Irvine Sports Club, where Grossman and softball pitching coach Ron Lefebvre created a perpetual city championship in 1978. In keeping with Irvine’s heritage, they decided the appropriate emblem of achievement was a fence post trophy.

“It grew from the idea of the Irvine Ranch,” Grossman said. “Back in the Midwest, Indiana and Purdue have the old oaken bucket and we wanted to have something like that. So we contacted the Irvine Ranch people and they provided the materials. It’s intended to be emblematic of where we live.”

The trouble is, Grossman said, it is no longer a simple task to figure out to whom the three-foot-tall wooden trophy should be awarded.

The fence post originally was intended to go to the team that fared best in head-to-head intercity competition. But University is the only school that still plays each of the others in its nonleague schedule. So Grossman says the trophy will go to the Trojans if they also beat Woodbridge tonight. But if the Warriors win, it will be awarded to the team with the best overall record.

And if the current trend continues, that may be the best record a football team in the city has had yet.