ORANGE COUNTY PREP FRIDAY : They’re Ringing In the Wins at Rancho Alamitos : New Coach Resurrects Team Pride

Most of the players on Rancho Alamitos High School’s football team will admit that they rarely noticed the victory bell that sits in the middle of the school grounds. Few ever had any thoughts of ringing the bell, a tradition that faded long ago.

“I eat lunch in the quad every day and always thought that bell was for decoration,” said Sean Cheatham, the team’s three-year starter at running back. “It just sort of sits there.”

The tradition called for the players to ring the bell after a football victory. Most of the neighbors along Dale Street in Garden Grove never needed a newspaper to learn the outcome of a game. If the bell was ringing on Friday nights, Rancho Alamitos had won.

Today, the weather-beaten bell symbolizes Rancho Alamitos’ football teams over the past couple of seasons. The clapper inside has been missing for years, much like the team’s pride. The bell is no longer wheeled to games, but remains cemented to a post in the quad. The team has been going nowhere lately, too.

Rancho Alamitos won only one game in 1985-86 and was outscored, 442-163. So one can’t blame the current players for failing to carry on a tradition, as there has been no cause for celebration.

Until this year.

Rancho Alamitos has won three straight games in convincing fashion, and the Vaqueros begin Garden Grove League play at 7:30 tonight against host Santiago (2-1) on Jason Field in Garden Grove. Cheatham is the leading scorer in the state with 86 points, scoring 12 touchdowns and 7 two-point conversions.

Even the victory celebration has been revived. Assistant coach Doug Case saw to that, gathering his players around the long-forgotten bell after a 30-14 season-opening win over Buena Park. Nearly every player took a turn pounding the bell with a hammer, prompting some complaints from the neighbors, who had grown accustomed to peace and quiet on Friday nights.

The highlight of the evening came when Case borrowed a player’s helmet and performed several running head butts into the bell. The celebration was recreated at lunch on Monday, prompting Cheatham, who is also the school’s Associated Student Body president, to say, “Now everybody knows what that bell is for.”

Most of the credit for the revival of Rancho Alamitos’ program can be attributed to Coach Mark Miller, 32, a former assistant at Colton who attended Magnolia High.

Miller arrived at Rancho Alamitos last spring, when he would race from his sixth-period class at Colton to Garden Grove just in time for spring football drills. Miller remedied the ailing program by instilling in the players a simple philosophy and installing an even simpler offense.

“I sold the players on the fact that hard work pays off,” Miller said. “The first meeting we had was in the weight room. It sort of symbolized my emphasis on weight lifting.”

Miller also brought along a visual aid in the presence of George Hemingway, a 240-pound running back at Colton who earned prep All-American honors last season. When Miller introduced Hemingway to his players, several asked, “What do you coach?”

Said Miller: “When I told them he was a senior in high school, they couldn’t believe it. When he started doing reps of 350 pounds on the bench press, they nearly died.”

Cheatham: “Watching that guy pump those weights was enough to convince me that Coach Miller knew what it takes to win. It was living proof of what someone had accomplished under him.”

Next, Miller challenged his players with a series of exercise drills that are straight out of a Marine boot camp. The four-corner drill, with exercise stations on each end of the football field, tested a player for three minutes.

Once the drill ended, a player had 90 seconds to run about 300 yards around the football field to the next station. If he failed to reach the next station in the allotted time, he was placed in the center of the field--known as the morgue--where he exercised for 10 to 15 minutes under assistant coach Joe Morales.

“Coach Miller told us he was going to break us,” Cheatham said. “I’ll never forget those drills, but I never questioned him, either. The minute he arrived here, you got excited about the man. You could feel something positive was going to happen.

“If he told me that running through the gym wall would help us win, I’d do it without ever questioning him. He made us believe in ourselves.”

Installing a new offense marked the final phase of the rebuilding process. Miller introduced Colton’s run-oriented, stacked-I formation that features three running backs and two tight ends. The idea is to keep everything simple and execute properly.

The Vaqueros’ offense consists of 10 blocking schemes and an equal number of running plays. Miller estimates he has seven pass plays.

“I learned long ago that football is a physical game,” Miller said. “It doesn’t matter how many plays or formations you have, it’s how you execute. I suit up 24 players. I have nine offensive players who go both ways. I had to keep the offense simple.”

Miller figured his players needed to see results immediately if there was any hope for his reclamation project, so he made the season opener against Buena Park a top priority.

Buena Park was the perfect opponent. The Coyotes entered the game with the longest losing streak (19) in the Southern Section and a record of 1-18-1 over the last two seasons. Rancho Alamitos took an early lead, but Buena Park rallied in the second quarter and went ahead.

“When we fell behind, you could almost feel our fans in the stands dropping their heads and saying, ‘Here we go again,’ ” Miller said. “When the kids came back to win, I knew they weren’t going to give up. That was a big, big win for us.”

But it paled in comparison to the next week’s 60-0 victory over Savanna. When the Vaqueros took a 54-0 lead, their long-suffering fans were chanting, “We want 60 . . . we want 60.”

Miller credits a local newspaper for motivating his team to continue to win after the opener. He points to underlined sentences in the article that said: “The victory prompted ridiculous talk. Players talked of a potential undefeated season. Pretty funny stuff.”

Said Miller: “That story got me fired up and the players fired up. They wanted to prove it wasn’t a one-game fluke. It gave us the inspiration to win the next week and the following week.”

Rancho Alamitos has outscored three opponents, 120-36, but Miller isn’t sure if his team is ready to contend for the Garden Grove League title. He’s not even sure if his team is good.

“I never allowed myself to think we were going to be good,” he said. “I thought we would be improved. I don’t know if we’re good yet. So far, we’ve been pretty good.”

Regardless, Cheatham said that Miller has given the players something they lost two years ago: self-respect.

“I can’t describe the feeling on the bus following the Buena Park game,” Cheatham said. “It was something I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

“Starting on Monday, we were kings for a week. I think a lot of the teachers were astonished we had won a game.

“I can still remember my first game at Rancho as a freshman. We lost, 41-0, to Tustin. We were intimidated the moment we got off the bus.”

The losing continued. Cheatham & Co. won only three games in three years, and the victory bell became a distant memory.

Now, it’s Miller’s time in a bell-ringing season.