A Chance of a Lifetime : Truly great basketball players emerge only once or twice in a coach’s career. This year and next, it is Simi Valley Coach Bob Hawking’s turn. Will juniors Don MacLean and Shawn DeLaittre help him score a college job--or merely leave him with memories?

Winning basketball championships and sending players off to major colleges has become almost second nature at some high schools.

For the past 27 seasons, every senior on the basketball team at DeMatha High in Hyattsville, Md., including the reserves, has been offered a college athletic scholarship. Coach Morgan Wootten has won 818 games in 31 seasons at DeMatha and five times the Stags have been voted national high school champions.

At Crenshaw High in Los Angeles, students dubbed the gym “Six Flags” after the Cougars won their sixth City championship in 1980. Since then, they’ve won three more City titles, giving them nine in 16 seasons, and three state championships in the past four years.

Season after season, DeMatha and Crenshaw--and a handful of others--are among the nation’s elite, but truly great high school basketball programs are anomalies.

Considering the limited talent pools available for high school sports--coaches can draw only from among the kids who live in or reasonably close to their areas--most coaches consider themselves fortunate to have one great team or one great player in their careers.

It’s not uncommon for high school coaches to spend their entire careers in anonymity, only to be thrust into the limelight upon the arrival of a savior in short pants.

Fred Pennington ran a successful program for 25 years at Maynard Evans High in Winter Park, Fla., winning 11 league championships in his first 21 seasons. But it wasn’t until his 24th season, when he had a senior center named Darryl Dawkins, that he won a state title.

Nelson Burton coached for 30 years in the L.A. Unified School District, but only won a City title when a senior playmaker named Gail Goodrich ran his offense at Poly High in 1961.

“I was a great coach for a year or two,” Burton said.

All of which brings to mind Bob Hawking, whose once-in-a-lifetime experience at Simi Valley High entered its second season this week.

Hawking has a potentially dominant player in 6-10 junior Don MacLean and a potentially great team that includes another highly regarded junior, 6-5 forward Shawn DeLaittre, and the coach’s son, Butch, a 6-1 point guard.

Hawking regards this group as an extension of his family. The players have been dribbling, pardon the pun, “since they could drool,” he said, and Hawking has been coaching them since they were in the second grade.

Hawking once called this team “kind of a lifetime project for me.”

And no wonder.

In his first 11 seasons at Simi Valley, Hawking’s teams won two Marmonte League championships, but never made it past the first round of the playoffs.

Last March, in his 12th season, Hawking’s sophomore-laden team played for the Southern Section 4-A championship.

More challenges await. Later this month, Hawking will take the Pioneers to Hawaii for the Iolani McDonald’s tournament, which includes the Nos. 1 and 2 teams in USA Today’s final high school poll from last season: Camden (N.J.) and Flint Hill of Oakton, Va.

Next season, Hawking plans a trip to Washington, D.C., and a possible matchup with DeMatha.

“We got an indication early that this group was going to be pretty special,” Hawking said, “and I think in order to reach one’s potential, you have to stretch yourself a little and play the best people that you possibly can. That’s the idea behind these trips.

“We’ve had an influx of talent that this type of community is probably only going to see once in a generation.”

So the coach wants to show them off. And if, somewhere along the line, the coach gets noticed, too, well, that would be OK, too.

“I’m not looking for this group to catapult me into another position,” Hawking said.

“But if it happens, it happens.”

There is more to high school coaching, of course, than state championships, future superstars and phone calls from Bobby Knight and Dean Smith.

Consider that Pennington said last month that coaching Dawkins, who went straight from high school to the National Basketball Assn., was great fun, but it was by no means the apex of his career.

“The other day, the first captain I ever had at Evans was sworn in as a circuit judge,” said Pennington, 59, who is now general manager of a tire company in Orlando, Fla. “When my wife and I showed up at the reception, tears came in his eyes because we’d taken the time to go and see him.

“That had to be the highlight of my career.”

Still, the right influx of talent can change a coach’s life.

“A lot of my time is still taken up with things concerning Ralph Sampson,” said Roger Bergey, who won back-to-back state championships with Sampson at Harrisonburg (Va.) High in 1978 and 1979.

Bergey, 46, who still coaches and teaches driver education at Harrisonburg, directs Sampson’s summer camps.

Has the tag of being Sampson’s high school coach followed him around?

“You’re talking to me this evening, aren’t you?” Bergey replied.

Coaching Sampson, who grew from 6-7 to about 7-3 in his four years at Harrisonburg, was “a great educational experience,” Bergey said.

“It was fantastic,” he said. “TV coming in. Al McGuire. Oh, man. TV specials. Oh, boy. I tell you, it was quite an experience.”

And now?

“I’m just an old high school coach, plugging along, trying to put a team together,” he said.

Bergey, who said this year’s team is one of the worst he’s had in 15 years at Harrisonburg, said he never tried to use Sampson as a springboard into college coaching.

“I saw recruiting first-hand,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d really care for that very much. High school coaching is what I call true coaching. You’ve got to take what comes. Fortunately, I had a good one come along.”

He wasn’t the only one.

Jack Donohue had been coaching at New York City’s Power Memorial High for four years when a freshman named Lew Alcindor enrolled at the school in 1961.

Four years later, Power Memorial was a three-time city champion and Alcindor was off to UCLA and, eventually, the National Basketball Assn., where he would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

And Donohue?

He left for Holy Cross, where he spent seven years before being named coach of the Canadian national team, a position he has held for 14 years, including the 1976 and 1984 Olympics.

Donohue said that he planned all along to leave when Alcindor did, “but, certainly, the exposure didn’t hurt. There were a lot of people recruiting Lewie.”

Alcindor’s presence not only made the coach more visible, “it made me a lot smarter, too,” Donohue said.

Donohue was aware that he might be accused of riding on Alcindor’s coattails.

“I don’t know if I was that sensitive about it, though, only because I knew I wasn’t,” he said.

Still, Donohue, 55, said his association with Alcindor encompassed “four great years” and opened a lot of doors.

“I’m not sure they’re any of the doors I took advantage of,” he said, “but certainly it presented some opportunities.”

These situations don’t always turn out so happily.

In the last three years of Maury Halleck’s 23-year coaching career at San Marcos High in Santa Barbara, his Royals mesmerized the Southern Section.

With no starter taller than 6-3, San Marcos rose to the top of the 4-A rankings thanks to the intelligence, aggressiveness and cohesiveness of its players.

The Royals won three straight Channel League championships, 43 straight regular-season games and the prestigious Tournament of Champions; they lost only six times in three seasons. Their reign ended on a sour note when they were upset by Long Beach Poly in the 4-A final in 1981, but the Royals were widely praised just the same.

College coaches from all over the West called Halleck at the time, just to tell him how much they enjoyed watching his team.

“I was a great fan of that team,” said former USC Coach Stan Morrison, who is now athletic director at UC Santa Barbara.

Halleck’s starters had played together for four years before they got to high school, and by the time they graduated, they probably knew each other better than their parents did.

“They played with such a flow, a rhythm, that it was really entertaining,” Morrison said. “They played with the highest confidence in their ability and in each other, and they didn’t try to do things they weren’t capable of doing.

“It was also a team that was classical in the sense that everyone had a role and although a couple of them were talented enough to have more than one role, they played their roles to the hilt. It was just an amazing thing to watch.”

To compensate for their lack of size, the Royals employed a pressure defense between the free-throw lines, all but conceding the inside to their taller opponents.

It worked almost to perfection.

San Marcos was 24-1 in the 1979-80 season and 26-1 the next season.

“I don’t think I’ll ever see a team like that again,” Halleck said. “The chemistry was just perfect with those kids.”

The coach, of course, had something to do with that. Morrison described Halleck as an “outstanding” teacher.

But when Halleck attempted to move up to the collegiate level, he was surprised by the lack of offers.

He took a sabbatical from San Marcos, traveling for five months throughout the Northwest to observe the basketball programs at Washington, Oregon State and Idaho, among others.

When he returned to Santa Barbara, he was convinced that he was ready to make the jump to college coaching.

“I really felt that I could coach anywhere in the country,” he said. “I really believed in myself, but college coaching seems to be a game of musical chairs--a coach gets fired, another takes his job and the first one goes to another place. And I just couldn’t get in.”

Halleck, 56, said he was offered assistant coaching jobs, but he would have had to take a cut in pay. And, besides, he believed he was capable of being a head coach.

For two years, he coached the softball team at San Marcos.

He’s now the athletic director, but he’d like to get back into basketball.

Even if it means returning to high school coaching?

“I’d sure take a good look at it,” he said. “I loved it. It was a lot of fun . . .

“If I had a good shot at something, and somebody needed some help and I had a good opportunity, yeah, I’d sure do it.”

Meanwhile, back in Simi Valley, Hawking looks for new worlds to conquer.

Before last December, he had never taken a team out of state, but by the middle of next season, he will have made three out-of-state trips with the Pioneers in a little more than two years.

Last year, they played in a tournament in Las Vegas.

But is this really so much different than what Hawking did for this group when they were playing in the Valley Youth Conference in grade school? Then, he drove them all over the San Fernando Valley in search of competition. They rarely found much, winning 56 consecutive games at one point.

When they reached junior high, Hawking gave them up--he didn’t want to be accused of recruiting--but they continued to win. As ninth-graders, Butch Hawking and DeLaittre led Sequoia Junior High to an unbeaten season that included two wins over MacLean’s Hillside Junior High team.

Last year, finally reaching the varsity, Hawking’s “special group” was 27-3, including a 58-55 loss to Muir in the 4-A final.

It was a disappointing end to the season, but Hawking was already looking ahead.

His search for bigger and better competition hasn’t come without a price.

In order to finance these out-of-state trips, the players are involved almost year-round in fund raising, including car washes and candy sales.

Hawking said the fund-raisers get the players involved in the community and teach them responsibility.

“In our program,” he said, “the players are asked to do a little bit more in order to put a little frosting on the cake.”

But Hawking said he has been criticized because of the amount of time his players must devote to the basketball program.

“I want us to become the best team possible and face the best competition possible,” he says by way of response.

A group like this may never land in Simi Valley again.

“I guess, logically, you’d have to say that,” Hawking said, “but I’d hate to go on another 20 years in high school coaching and not have another outstanding group of talent. But that may well be the case.”