Orange County Prep Wednesday : Playing All the Fields : Some Coaches Still Insist That Players Broaden Their Athletic Horizons

Bob Lester won three Southern Section championships and, as it turns out, bucked one growing trend while football coach at El Modena High School.

He never kept his players cloistered in the weight room for hours on end during the off-season. In fact, he encouraged them to participate in other sports--basketball, tennis, swimming . . . anything as long as it didn’t have anything to do with football.

“After football, I’d just as soon turn every kid over to other sports,” said Lester, who coached at El Modena from 1967 to 1985. “They became better people for it. They didn’t tire of football.”

Herb Hill, Loara football coach and one of Lester’s contemporaries, has a similar attitude.

“They ought to play in as many sports as they can, particularly when they are freshmen and sophomores and maybe even as juniors before they should decide on one,” said Hill, who has won 176 games in his career, third-most among active Southern Section coaches.

In this age of increasing specialization, it seems to be a novel idea, but El Modena never suffered for its laissez-faire approach during the off-season. Under Lester, who retired from coaching after the 1985 season, El Modena had one of Orange County’s winningest football programs.

The Vanguards won Southern Conference football titles in 1978, ’83 and ’84 and were runners-up in ’80 and ’81.

Mitch Olson is separated from Lester and Hill by decades. Lester coached varsity football for 18 seasons. Hill for 28 seasons at Loara and Rancho Alamitos. Olson, 28, has coached just two varsity games at Kennedy, but his philosophy is identical. He too adheres to the notion that less can often mean more and makes compelling arguments against specialization to his players.

“Personally, I tell them to play anything and everything they can,” Olson said. “Realistically, these one-sport guys are trying hard for a scholarship and about 99% don’t get anything. And in the end they cheat themselves out of having fun playing the other sports.”

Olson speaks from an abundance of experience. He was a three-sport letterman at Los Alamitos from 1977-79, playing varsity football, basketball and baseball all three years.

Even after his high school career, Olson continued to juggle sports. He signed a professional baseball contract after graduating, played in the minor leagues for a few seasons then switched to football.

He played football and ran on the track and field team at Orange Coast College his first two years, then finished his eligibility at Whittier College.

“Basketball was probably my worst sport,” Olson said. “(But) I liked the coach and a lot of my friends played on the team. In football and baseball, I was trying to advance, but the fun aspect of basketball got me into it.”

Unfortunately--at least the way Lester and Hill see it--athletes such as Olson are becoming increasingly rare.

“When I first started coaching there were all kinds of three-sport lettermen,” Lester said. “They were proud of their letterman’s jacket with the three letters on there, and rightfully so.

“Now you suck so much time and so much work out of them, they don’t want to play anything else. They see a guy with five babes in the car headed to the beach and they start thinking, ‘I should do things guys my age do.’ ”

Hill said at Loara specialization is out of the question for one very practical reason.

“(The Loara coaches) know we have only so many good athletes and we have to share them,” Hill said. “Some years the baseball lineup is the same as the football lineup and the football lineup is the same as the wrestling team. If you make them specialize, you won’t have enough kids to go around.”

This also is true at Kennedy, where several athletes are emulating Olson.

“In a sport like football, it’s not going to hurt to play other sports,” Olson said. “It might even help them, especially to keep them in shape.”

At season’s end, Lester would tell his players he didn’t want to see them until after Christmas vacation break, at the earliest.

And even then, only 20 of the 70 players would turn out, and they wouldn’t be around for long. Most would soon join the spring sports (baseball, tennis or track and field), if they weren’t already playing basketball.

Lester said only two or three players would spend the entire year in the football program.

“Most kids at our place went to a health club to lift weights (in the off-season),” Lester said. “Oh, we checked up on them. We could tell if they had become more defined and the work was showing up on their build.

“Our record wasn’t all that bad, so it worked. For us, at least.”