stumbling along a BEATEN PATH : During the Past 40 Years, Moorpark Has Lost More Football Games Than Any High School in the Valley Area, but the Town Hasn’t Lost Interest

Once a quiet little farming community populated largely by Mexican-Americans, Moorpark has become yuppified in the past few years. Anglos looking for clean air and rural life styles have begun moving into tract homes that have risen on land where avocado trees used to grow. Since 1980, the population has more than doubled to 16,000, the city has incorporated and the construction of a new high school has been approved.

As a city in transition, Moorpark often seems to be a paradox between old and new. A year-old shopping center anchored by a Hughes Market and a Taco Bell is only a short walk from the Centro Campesino, a storefront for a farm workers’ local where a sign in the window urges consumers to boycott eggs. And on High Street, where shops are being renovated with turn-of-the-century facades, it is not uncommon to see a Mercedes or a Rolls Royce leaving a trendy restaurant or a mom-and-pop grocery.

Although the sudden changes in the character of the city have been met with grumbling by some of the families who have been around for generations, there is one Moorpark tradition that nobody would mind breaking.

Since World War II, Moorpark has consistently had the worst football teams in the Valley area.

“In the ‘30s, we had a bunch of old farm boys who could really run and a few Mexicans who were fast and lean and could catch the ball, so we weren’t all that bad,” said James Whitaker, who has been following Moorpark High football fortunes, or lack thereof, for most of his 62 years. “But after the war, I don’t know what happened. The roof just caved in.”

And the Musketeers were buried in the rubble for four decades. During the past 40 years, they have suffered more winless seasons (nine) than winning seasons (eight). They have never won a Tri-Valley League championship. Nor have they beaten archrival Carpinteria in the 44 games since 1934, an exercise in futility that rankles and frustrates the fans.

“It’s depressing,” said Ted Harris, a fireman who played football at Moorpark in the early ‘60s. “Every year, beating ‘Carp’ is all the kids talk about. Every year, they get the wind knocked out of their sails. We just can’t get the job done.”

If that isn’t embarrassing enough, Moorpark is still trying to forget what the locals call “the streak.” From October, 1977, to October, 1982, the Musketeers lost 46 games in a row. (Few acknowledge the streak’s one “win”--which came on a postseason forfeit by Bell-Jeff.) Some players went through their high school careers without celebrating a victory. Some played on a team that scored only 19 points in the entire season. Some even had to endure the indignity of being thrashed by scores of 79-0, 57-0 and, twice in one dismal season, 69-0.

“My senior year was a total disaster,” said former Moorpark football player Gene Paredes, class of ’79. “I don’t ever want to think about it.”

During the streak, it probably wasn’t a coincidence that students at Moorpark allegedly acquired another bad habit besides an ability to lose games. According to Paredes, drugs began to circulate through the school in the mid-1970s, creating a new underclass of student: the burnout. The burnout didn’t go out for sports and snickered at anyone who did. Even teammates turned on to drugs and turned off to football.

“Hard times hit Moorpark,” Paredes said. “When I played on teams in the seventh and eighth grades, we won championships all the time. Then the same guys came in first and second on the JV team. But when we got to the varsity, a lot of those guys lost interest in playing and started swinging the wrong way with drugs. They got in trouble with the law. All of a sudden the nucleus of that JV team was gone. They wanted to party instead of play sports.”

Within the school, Paredes said, “spirit went down and down and down. We had some big boys around school, but they didn’t want to play football and get their ass kicked all week for nothing.”

By 1978, there were only 12 players on the varsity. “I played fullback, linebacker, returned kicks, played on the kickoff and punt teams,” Paredes said. “We had to do everything, but when you’re 16 or 17, you can run all day anyway. The hard part was looking across the field and seeing 65 guys on the other sideline.”

Underdogs on the field, the football players often found themselves underdogs in their own school.

“There were always a lot of guys who mouthed off to us,” said Jimmy Paredes, Gene’s youngest brother and one of five brothers who played Musketeer football. “But we figured it was only jealousy because we could do what they couldn’t do, and they didn’t have the guts to get out there.”

It certainly took courage to come back every Friday night after being physically and emotionally abused the week before. Moorpark’s 1979 team never came closer to winning than a pair of 25-0 losses. Try explaining that to your girlfriend’s kid brother. Gene Paredes’ 1978 team even had to show up at school the following Monday morning after a 79-0 mugging by Bishop Diego.

“It was a terrible game, a real nightmare,” he said. “I’ll never forget looking at their coach and seeing him cranking his arm for them to run up the score. All I wanted to do was string out a play on their sideline so I could knock him on his butt, but it never happened.”

During the streak, the Musketeers were not only the whipping boys for the other teams, but for opposing fans as well. “They were always trying to rub it in,” Jimmy Paredes said, still disgusted. “No-class places like Fillmore and Santa Paula, they always had to say something after games. We’d lose and they’d still harass us, belittle us. It was depressing.”

Evidently, the Musketeers weren’t always willing to be humiliated off the field. Former cheerleader Jill Wilcoxon, who never exhorted a single winner in 1981, remembers “riots” after games when, she said, “Fans would go after us as we walked off the field.”

Jimmy Paredes gives opposing fans little credit for intelligence, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Moorpark spelled backward is “kraproom,” which, some fans concluded, is an appropriate place for a losing team. “We’d always hear, ‘Go back to kraproom,’ ” Paredes said. “What idiots.”

If winning is everything in America, then it would seem the Musketeers had nothing. No hope. No pride. No self-respect. Playing for them should have destroyed character, not built it. And by all that is holy in sports, their fans should have turned on them, burned them in effigy or, at the very least, spanked them with boos.

But that isn’t what happened. Despite the undercurrent of tension and apathy at the school, the Musketeers never quit on the field, their fans remained loyal and steadfast, the stadium stayed filled, cheerleaders never lost their spunk, and the community hung together. The players even insist they had a good time.

“I liked it, the majority of the players liked it, we had fun playing and practicing, and I’m glad I did it,” said Jimmy Paredes, who experienced winning only twice during four years of high school. In his sophomore year and his brother Gene’s senior year, no one ever toasted a Musketeer victory during postgame pizzas at the Round Table in Simi Valley, but the players managed to have a few laughs anyway.

“It’s sort of a brotherhood when you get together with a bunch of guys,” Gene Paredes said. “During games we really tried and gave it our best shot. We didn’t have a lot of talent but it was fun, even if we didn’t win. We went out together after losses and still enjoyed ourselves.”

In those days, Moorpark was still a small country town. People pulled for each other. Players grew up on the same street. Neighborhoods were tight. Despite the racial mix, there were never any conflicts. “You have to realize something,” said Jimmy Paredes. “Everybody in Moorpark basically knew each other. Going to a game on Friday night was the thing to do, and almost everybody went.”

Sure, people griped during the streak, said Whitaker, “and they’d say, ‘Oh, lost another one.’ But we didn’t take it badly. Never got downcast. It was kind of a country reaction.”

Even while the team was losing 46 in a row, crowds of up to 3,000 were common at home games. Jimmy Paredes played on 1981’s 0-10 Musketeers, the school’s last winless team. Of course, at that time the fans didn’t know whether the streak would ever end. So their patience should have been wearing as thin as their expectations. But even after witnessing beatings of 57-0 and 55-0, they didn’t get vicious or vocal.

“They booed a few times, but it wasn’t directed at one player,” Paredes said.

Not everybody is proud of the city’s placid reaction to the streak. One citizen feels that the fans accepted losing as a way of rationalizing their own defeats. “They made martyrs out of the team,” he said, not wanting his name used. “People would say, ‘Well, they never gave up.’ Then again, they never really got started in the first place.

“There’s no honor in losing. There is no honor in being poor.”

Almost as difficult as being a Moorpark football player in those days was being a Moorpark cheerleader. Although the crowds “always stuck with us,” said Wilcoxon, the players often became angry at the cheerleaders for being eternal optimists in the fourth quarter with the Musketeers hopelessly behind.

“It was our job to yell things like ‘That’s OK, that’s all right,’ even when we were losing 56-0 and there was no chance to win,” said Wilcoxon, who tried to keep up spirits during the winless ’81 season. “It was really sad. We used to drive really far to away games hoping we’d win, and we’d lose, 60-0. Then we’d have to drive all the way back.

“I transferred from Royal in Simi Valley, where we always won and had a lot of guys on the football team. And then I’m in this little school where we had more cheerleaders half the time than football players. But it was fun being a cheerleader. We could always look forward to the basketball season.”

It may be hard to believe, but young Moorpark athletes actually looked forward to the football season. Despite all those losses by the varsity, “We always had hope,” said Willie Gutierrez, a freshman on the junior varsity when Moorpark ended the streak in 1982 by beating El Segundo, 13-6. “The guys always talked about winning when we got to the varsity. ‘Wait till we get there,’ stuff like that.”

Most citizens have their own reasons for Moorpark’s losing tradition. Said Whitaker: “At one time we were the big thing at this end of Ventura County, but then other communities kept growing and Moorpark kind of got left behind.”

With a student body of 350 and 13 varsity players, Harris’ Musketeer teams in the early ‘60s won only three games in three years. He has stayed a fan, even though he has to make a 400-mile round trip to watch the Musketeers, and he has chronicled the social changes in the students. To him, Moorpark kids were more wholesome in his day than they were in the late ‘70s.

“We was rednecks,” he said, “but we never had shootings or knifings and we never heard of dope. We had a good feeling about ourselves and our town and our school. We never had peer pressure. There was a camaraderie between the students, but it went out in the ‘70s and then didn’t return until three or four years ago.”

Former football Coach Joe Howell doesn’t think the students are as much to blame for the football team’s failures as the school board. “The leadership was pretty poor,” said Howell, a Moorpark resident who recently retired after teaching history at Thousand Oaks High for the past 30 years. “There hasn’t been any stability here. People think change is the answer but it’s not.”

In the past decade, Howell says, Moorpark High has gone through four superintendents, four principals and five football coaches, including himself. He and Floyd Berger were co-coaches in 1982 when the Musketeers beat El Segundo. But neither was retained two years later when a new principal, Mary Quirk, brought in her own coach, Bob Noel. Quirk has since been replaced and has filed a lawsuit against the school. In his first two seasons, Noel guided the Musketeers to their first appearances in the Southern Section playoffs.

“In the school’s history, you can see coaches coming and going,” Howell said. “That’s extremely disruptive of the program. It takes time to build something. There has to be a foundation at the junior high level, and it has to be built on secure leadership.”

When Howell first moved to Moorpark 10 years ago, the school board had reacted to the revenue-reducing impact of Proposition 13 by voting to eliminate athletics. Whitaker looked at it as “an opportunity to gracefully back out of having losing teams,” but Howell and a few others formed a booster club that raised $10,000 and saved interscholastic sports.

“We held pancake breakfasts and fund-raisers and manned the concession stands during games,” Howell said. “People came out of the woodwork to help. We got a great deal of the money from housing developers.”

Developers, of course, have a vested interest in maintaining the quality of Moorpark schools. The young couples buying $120,000 homes in Moorpark no doubt want their boys to learn sportsmanship and teamwork on the football field. With two elementary school bulging with children of new residents, the future of Musketeer football has never looked better. Enrollment in the high school is up to 700, and new students have played key roles in Moorpark’s recent success.

This season, Noel has 60 boys out for the varsity and JV teams, but Moorpark still has struggled. Going into tonight’s game against winless Fillmore the Musketeers are 0-3.

Although Noel picks Carpinteria to win the league title, he is looking forward to his team’s Oct. 10 game against the Warriors. He realizes that the odds have to be shifting in favor of the Musketeers, but then again, luck has never been on their side.

“God lives in Carpinteria,” Noel said. “We could win nine games and lose to them and we still haven’t done anything for this town.”