The Preps / Scott Howard-Cooper : When the Going Gets Tough, Westminster Goes Back to the Beginning

When is the fourth game of the season the first?

When you play football for Westminster High School. Or when you are the coach there and can change the rules as you go along.

Anything to turn the tide. Anything to forget the way the season really started.

Westminster, to put it simply, was overrated. It was No. 17 in the nation, according to USA Today; No. 1 in the Southern Section, according to most polls, and No. 2 in The Times’ rankings. But the Lions made a quick exit--from respectability as well as the polls. The schedule did look tough at the start of the year, but 1-2-1 and unranked going into Thursday night’s home game with Santa Ana Foothill?

A defense that was supposed to be the team’s strength has allowed 44 points in the last two games, the offense scoring 6. The one win was impressive on the scoreboard, 32-0 over Irvine in the second game but a disappointment to coaches emotionally. This isn’t the way things were supposed to happen.

“Westminster is notorious for slow starts,” co-Coach Jack Bowman said. “But this is an extremely slow start.”

So Bowman stopped the season and declared last Friday’s game with Crespi of Encino, a team heading in the other direction, the opener. And although Westminster, with a definite advantage in size and strength, lost again, 23-6, as Crespi’s sophomore running back Russell White gained 158 yards in 11 carries, it wasn’t such a bad way to start over.

If nothing else, it gave the Lions a chance to renew their dedication.

“We lacked emotion,” Bowman said. “We lacked, really, the spirit to go out and play good football, which is real unusual for our kids. I don’t know if I, myself, did a bad job of motivating them. There’s a lot of things to look at.

“The assistants have done a great job. I may have been trying to let the kids live off the clippings more than the kids did. That has changed. I take the blame for what happened in the first three games.

“Before, I was a little too lax on the kids and I expected a veteran team to behave differently. I sometimes forget that these are 17-year-old kids. Now, I’m coaching the same way as last year, treating them as kids instead of professionals.”

And of the Crespi loss?

“Unfortunately,” he said, “it was our first game and their fourth.”

When Paul Heaney came up with the idea of having junior varsity football players at Burbank’s Bell-Jeff double as cheerleaders at varsity games to increase school unity, he wasn’t sure it would be well received. So he accentuated the positive.

“It wasn’t too hard when they realized they got to go to camp with 500 girls,” he said.

Four players joined a member of the boys’ volleyball team, the yearbook photographer and eight regular cheerleaders for a week-long instructional summer camp at UC San Diego.

The Guards came away with several honors, including the unity award for the best squad in camp as voted on by all 52 schools. And according to camp instructors, Bell-Jeff is the only group in the country to use football players as cheerleaders.

“There’s a noticeable difference,” said Heaney, who teaches computer science and economics at Bell-Jeff but is the varsity baseball coach and an assistant football coach at cross-town Burroughs. “Some of the varsity football players now show up to watch girls’ volleyball matches, even the away matches, which basically on our campus is unheard of. . . . At the first pep rally of the year, the football team almost demanded that the other sports got their recognition.

“It’s rough on (the JV football players), but it’s working out OK. They don’t always realize how tired they are after a game, but they work real hard together.”

Prep Notes

Canyon of Canyon Country, with 42 consecutive victories, has the nation’s longest football winning streak, since East St. Louis, Ill., lost Friday night for the first time in 44 games. The Cowboys began the season with the third-longest streak, behind East St. Louis, the top-ranked team in the USA Today poll, and John Curtis of River Ridge, La., but that school in a New Orleans suburb, lost in the second week. Canyon (4-0), The Times’ fourth-ranked team, will play host to Mission Hills Alemany Friday. . . . Last Friday’s Pasadena-Monrovia game, halted with 9 minutes 5 seconds left in the third quarter after shots were fired into the crowd, has been ruled no-contest and will be stricken from the record, leaving Pasadena at 2-1 and Monrovia at 1-2. Police said the incident was gang related.

The early season know-your-rulebook award goes to Mike Guthrie of L.A. Baptist, who remembered--or guessed--that a missed field goal still on the field remains a live ball until the whistle blows. The situation: On Sept. 26, the Knights trailed L.A. Cathedral, 10-7, and failed on a three-point attempt on the last play of the game. A Cathedral player picked up the ball and joined his teammates across the field for the celebration, thinking the game had ended, but Guthrie knocked the ball loose, picked it up and scored, giving Baptist a 13-10 win. . . . Basketball player Ricky Butler of Huntington Beach Ocean View has scheduled recruiting visits to Loyola Marymount, Tulsa and Arizona. . . . Things were obviously a little slow last week in Little Chute, Wis., where city board members passed a resolution urging the hometown Mustangs, 5-0, to challenge the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, 0-5. Village Administrator Darrell Hofland proposed the measure, which added that the Mustangs “at least offer some suggestions” if the teams don’t meet. No word from the Packers on which game will be canceled to make room on the schedule for Little Chute.

Temecula Valley, a two-year-old school with no seniors, plays its home football games 20 miles away at Elsinore High, has no gym and no lockers and is playing its first season of varsity football. Temecula Valley is also 4-0. “We didn’t think we had a ghost of a chance,” Athletic Director Stan Ford said. “The first day of double-day practices, we had 13 players show up, and now we only have 20 or 25 on the team. We’re tickled to death.” The Bears’ first three wins were against San Diego Section teams--Ramona, Santa Fe Christian and Army/Navy Academy of Carlsbad--but they beat Ontario, a school with about 1,300 more students, last Friday, 10-7. La Sierra of Riverside is up this week at Elsinore in the Sunkist League opener. Meanwhile, the Temecula Valley girls’ volleyball team is 6-1, the boys’ cross-country team is 4-0 in dual meets and the girls’ team is 3-1.