Caltech Football Team Reasons Out a Winning Formula

Fewer than 50 spectators populate the wooden bleachers at Tournament Park in Pasadena, and Caltech football Coach Lin Parker says most of them would not be there if it were not for the free beer.

There are no hot dogs or cheerleaders and half time festivities routinely consist of crocheting, reading a physics book or staring placidly in seeming contemplation of the universe.

Clearly, this is not Pac 10 football.

It’s club competition and anyone can play, as reflected by the Caltech Battling Beavers’ 48-man roster, which lists among its players custodians, faculty members and Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees as well as students.

Test of Survival

Shortly after Parker was hired in 1979, he decided that the Caltech football team, which had been averaging a winning season about once every quarter-century, had to drop out of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. to survive.

The move has been so successful that the Beavers’ 20-game winning streak this year was snapped only at the end of the season, leaving the team with an 8-1 record. The Beavers’ final victory came last weekend against the Pasadena Police Department.

In an era in which some student athletes star on the field but cannot read or write well, Parker has found a way to match brains with brawn.

The school, which draws some of the nation’s brightest math, science and engineering students and has produced 21 Nobel laureates, has always had an abundance of brains. But Caltech has repelled athletes in the same way that it has attracted geniuses, via strict academic standards.

“Caltech selects its students from the top 1% and when you do that, you’re going to get fewer athletes per square foot,” said Caltech Athletic Director Warren Emory.

Taking a Beating

Pitted against schools that actively recruited players solely for their athletic ability, the less-skilled Caltech team was regularly taking a beating.

“Our sole reason for going club was the fact that we couldn’t end the normal season with enough healthy bodies to play,” said Parker.

Since the team became a club, its won-loss record has steadily improved, partly because it is no longer subject to NCAA rules regarding eligibility and scheduling.

“There are some clubs that are very, very good, and we simply avoid them,” said Emory. “You can come up with a winning season if you schedule carefully.”

Although a club’s roster is open to anyone the coach is willing to accept, Parker tries to make sure the team is made up mostly of students and other Caltech-affiliated people. This year’s team had 24 undergraduate and seven graduate students, 15 staff and two faculty members.

Even so, having club rather than NCAA status presents difficulties.

Clubs have a tough time finding other teams to play, and when they do get a game scheduled, the other team sometimes forgets to show up.

And only a few faithful fans turn out to cheer on their teams, Emory said.

Yet the players rarely complain.

“We don’t expect a crowd,” said Rick Gilbrech, an injured tailback who is pursuing a Ph.D. in aeronautics. “We’ve never really had one, so you can’t miss what you’ve never had.”

Several of the players had no football experience when they tried out for the team.

‘Give It a Try’

“Before coming here, I never saw a football game except on TV, but I played a lot of rugby, so I decided to give it a try,” said Pascal Yvon, a defensive end from Poitiers, France, who is studying material science.

“This is my first season,” said Huw Davies, a 5-foot-6, 125-pound kicker seeking an advanced degree in geophysics. “I’ve played rugby before, but never football.”

Davies said he enjoys the game but he and his friends take exception to being thought of as “nerds playing football.”

Some players do have experience, including Vince Riley, 25, a maintenance man at Caltech’s athletic center, who has played with the Beavers for five years. Riley, a running back, won unofficial Most Valuable Player honors in at least one game this season.

“We kid around a lot, but if you get too relaxed, you get hurt,” said Riley, who injured his knee last year.

Had Wrong Date in Mind

On a recent Saturday, the Beavers warmed up for a game against the semi-pro Orange County Cowboys, but the Cowboys were severely shorthanded because half the team thought the game was Sunday instead of Saturday.

Cowboy Coach Paul (Blueberry) Montes tried to scrape together a team and even suited up himself, although he had not played for four years. He scrounged up enough odds and ends to create a uniform with too-small shoes and droopy-seated pants.

“We shouldn’t lose today,” Parker said, “but with the caliber of athlete we have here at Caltech, that is certainly possible.

“Of course, if it were a mathematics contest, we’d win hands down.”

Holding Dummies

According to Parker, bona fide jocks are so rare at Caltech that he would practically jump up and down when he heard about the arrival of a new player who had earned a high school letter in football “until I figured out what it really meant.”

“It meant they had survived and held dummies all year and the coach felt sorry for them and gave them a letter. I get more former team managers and statisticians than real players.”

At Caltech, injured players are recruited to work the scoreboard or carry yardage markers.

“That’s been my glorious position for the last couple of games,” said Gilbrech, who hurt his knee. “I’m beginning to wonder if it might be time for retirement.”

If his team’s lack of skill upsets him, Parker conceals it well. He brags about his players’ academic achievements the way most coaches boast about yards rushing.

Hall of Famer

Parker points to linebacker Eric Davidson, 49, a professor of cellular biology who has written four textbooks.

“He’s a member of the National Academy of Science,” said Parker. “That’s the scientists’ ‘hall of fame.’ ”

Given the rigorous academic requirements at Caltech, football often must take a back seat to experiments and the like, Parker said.

“If a student says he needs to miss practice to finish his science project, we say ‘Go!’ We understand that the reason they are here is to become great scientists, mathematicians and engineers, not great athletes.”

When Mike Chavez, a painter at JPL, first joined the Beavers, he was a little apprehensive about his prospective teammates.

“I thought these guys would be a bunch of eggheads, and they’re really not,” he said. “There are a lot of good players.”

‘Doctor of Pigmentology’

To fit in with his super-scholar teammates, Chavez now jokingly dubs himself “doctor of pigmentology.”

Just before the game with the Cowboys, Parker took his team into the locker room for some pre-game inspiration.

He spit into a wastebasket and announced that the opposition would come up with enough players for the game, “even if we have to loan them six of ours.”

The players laughed, knowing full well that Parker was not joking and that if need be, he would ask for volunteers to play on the opposing team. It has happened before.

The march out to the field was punctuated by loud belches. One Beaver reminded another that he had forgotten his shoulder pads.

Flattened Wave

Benched due to injury, quarterback Steve Collins, a JPL employee, gave a comical play-by-play commentary and facetiously told the few spectators on hand to start a wave.

Two men who obviously had taken full advantage of the free beer obligingly raised their arms high over their heads, but the closest fans were at least six yards away, and the gesture lost something in the translation.

The Cowboys, playing with only three substitutes, valiantly continued the struggle before eventually succumbing to the Beavers 36-24.

“It wasn’t real artistic, a little ragged, but we won,” Parker said.

After the game, the team tossed the entire coaching staff into the campus swimming pool--but only after politely stopping to allow them to remove their watches.

Going Home Mad

Parker reminisced about a game last year that started out like the one against the Cowboys. The Beavers were routing the shorthanded San Fernando Valley Nomads 28-0 at half time, when the Nomads packed up their pads and wandered on.

Because they did not finish the game and “went home mad,” Parker said the Nomads did not appear on the Beavers’ schedule this year. Quitting while you’re behind is simply not a Caltech tradition.

If it were, the school’s entire athletic program might have ended as soon as it began back in 1921, when Caltech teams began logging more losses than a Weight Watchers counselor.

Because the football team is doing so well in non-NCAA competition, some might wonder why other Caltech sports teams do not follow suit and stop enduring the agony of defeat on a yearly basis.

For one thing, club sports are a lower level of competition and do not command the same respect as NCAA victories.

‘A Club Is Nothing’

“At the level of intercollegiate competition, a club is nothing,” said Roland Ortmayer, athletic director for the University of La Verne, which, in addition to its NCAA games, also plays the Beavers each year.

Ortmayer said his junior varsity football team plays the Beavers both as a courtesy to Caltech’s football program and because it gives him an opportunity to use players who would not make it off the bench in a regular intercollegiate game.

Ortmayer said that in an NCAA game, he starts with his best players, then uses the less talented ones as necessary.

“But when we play Caltech, I reverse that process to make the game competitive,” he said.

Dan Bridges, Caltech’s head baseball coach, says his team is part of a “Catch-22” situation.

At the Minimum

As a charter member of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC), which includes schools like Redlands and La Verne, Caltech must maintain a minimum number of varsity sports to remain in the conference.

“We are at that minimum now, and if baseball drops out, then the sports we have that are competitive, like cross-country and golf, would not be able to go for the championship,” he said.

Bridges says he would keep the baseball team on the NCAA level anyway because there is always the lure--however elusive--of the championship.

The baseball team posted a 6-29 season last season but Bridges said he managed to keep his players psyched up by scheduling the more easily beaten non-conference teams every sixth or seventh game.

“We try to space out the games that we think we can win to keep us motivated,” said Bridges. And as for the conference games, “I keep telling the guys that we’re gonna get ‘em one of these days,” he said.

Love of the Game

Bridges maintains that Caltech players strive not only for victories, but also for self-improvement, and they play their hearts out for the love of the game--even when defeat is almost certain.

“Having coached football,” said Bridges, who also is an assistant football coach at Caltech, “where we win all the time, and baseball, where we win very infrequently, I can tell you that the players enjoy both sports equally and our baseball players are as proud of themselves as the football players. They just measure their success by a different criteria.”

Emory said Caltech athletes are mentally tougher than just about any others.

Academics aside, “You have to admire the courage it takes to compete every season when you know you have no real chance of winning,” he said.