PREP WEDNESDAY : GLORY DAYS: 3 Coaches Who Left Winning Ways Behind

Bill Workman wears a T-shirt and shorts and stands, arms crossed, in the Orange Coast College weight room, preparing his team for the next game.

Greg Henry wears heavy black boots and a dark blue uniform and sits in a downtown Long Beach fire station, preparing to answer the calls that come over the dispatch system.

Dave Thompson wears a tie and sits behind a desk at Marina High School, preparing to handle the Friday afternoon pep rally.

Workman, head football coach at OCC; Henry, a Long Beach firefighter and Thompson, Marina High School’s activities director, were three of the most successful Sunset League football coaches in the 1970s and early ‘80s. And, despite their success or because of it, they all left high school coaching before the league fell on hard times.

“Things don’t last forever,” Workman said.

But under Workman, success at Edison High School lasted a long time. In 13 seasons as the Chargers’ head coach, Workman was 109-39-5. He won seven Sunset League titles, two Big Five Conference championships and one conference co-championship, had a 32-game winning streak and never had a losing season.

It probably was only a matter of time before some attractive offer lured Workman away from the high school level. The OCC job, which Workman took in 1986, not only provided a challenge--the school hadn’t had a winning season since 1978--but it didn’t force Workman to leave Orange County.

So Workman moved to the world of community colleges, and Dave White, a former Charger quarterback, stepped into the dynasty his former coach left behind. Edison is 0-5 this season, but Workman says the cause-effect relationships aren’t as simple as they might seem.

“Don’t drive the nail in the coffin yet,” Workman said. “What’s happening is no reflection of Dave’s ability. Enrollment is down. They have a junior-dominated team. They are plagued by injuries. And look at that schedule. . . . It’s a killer. No one goes through that thing undefeated.”

Although Workman acknowledges that declining enrollment in Sunset League schools has played a part in the football programs’ downturn, he also points out that big wasn’t always better.

“We had our best teams when enrollment went back down to about 3,000,” he said. “It was more efficient, we were more aware of the kids. When we had so many kids, I would see 6-foot-4, 250-pound seniors on campus who had been there for four years that I had never seen before. I’d ask a kid how come he never went out for football and the kid would say, ‘Because no one ever asked me.’ ”

One of Edison’s biggest resources was its own winning tradition.

“Kids in that area couldn’t wait to get that lightning bolt on their helmet,” Workman said. “That attitude was a big advantage. It caused us to win a lot of games we shouldn’t have won.”

But, Workman acknowledged, Edison also lost some games because it had won too much. Like the game that ended the winning streak, when the Chargers lost to Servite, 14-7, in the first round of the 1981 Big Five Conference Playoffs.

“That was the best team I ever had,” Workman said, “And you could hear the snores coming out of the locker room for 10 miles. Some of those kids had been there for three years and had never lost. It was, ‘No problem, coach.’ ”

Workman himself paid the price for winning too much.

One of the most painful side-effects of Edison’s phenomenal success came during the 1981 season when an anonymous letter to the Southern Section office accused Workman of recruiting players and changing grades. After a lengthy investigation by a state judge, the allegations were proved to be without foundation. Workman has never learned who made the charges.

“Consistent winning brings out animosities,” he said.

“People don’t understand the physical and emotional pain involved. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I will never take things that seriously again.”

Workman said he doesn’t know how much of the credit for Edison’s success should go to him.

“Everyone likes to think they had something to do with it,” he said. “But sometimes, with all the details like booster club meetings and equipment orders and interviews, I thought I didn’t do anything. But as head coach you at least try to orchestrate a few things.”

Now Workman visits the Chargers only to scout.

“Sure I miss it,” he said. “You can’t spend 12 or 13 years at something and not have an attachment. We accomplished a lot at Edison. We won a lot of games, we played in front of 30,000 at Anaheim Stadium, we did all those things. But sometimes you need a new challenge. . . . You need your battery recharged.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that so many coaches left. . . . The pressure in the Sunset League is enormous,” Greg Henry said, having just returned to Long Beach Fire Station No. 1 after answering a paramedic call.

Four years ago, Henry traded the pressures of coaching football at Huntington Beach for the life of a firefighter. The job with the fire department, which Henry had applied for in 1981, came at an inopportune time. Henry had turned around a perennial loser, taking the Oilers to their first playoff appearance since 1966 and earning himself honors as the Sunset League’s coach of the year.

“When I decided to apply for the (firefighting) job, I was fed up,” he said. “But (two years later) when I got the offer, Huntington Beach was taking good care of me.”

Henry played football at Marina High School and started his coaching career at Edison as an assistant to Workman.

From the beginning of that career, Henry was a victim of the statewide budget cuts in the schools after voters in 1977 approved Proposition 13 to reduce property taxes.

“Every year, I was laid off at the end of the year and then hired again, over and over,” he said.

In 1980, after being laid off from Edison once more, he took a job at Huntington Beach, working as an assistant football coach under Bob Isherwood and coaching baseball.

But things were no more stable there, and in 1981, Henry applied to the fire department, hoping for a solid job with good benefits that allowed him to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a former Long Beach fire chief.

On the first day of spring football practice in 1981, a number of players on the Huntington Beach team didn’t show up for practice, deciding to quit the team. Isherwood resigned as head coach.

“If you’re the doormat in the league, there’s not much to look forward to,” Henry said. “The kids just didn’t feel things were going to change.”

But Henry got the job and the players returned.

“A lot of people thought I was crazy,” he said. “They said they were never going to win at Huntington Beach.”

But Henry had been infused with the Sunset League winning mentality at Edison.

“I had learned to win, I had learned what it takes,” he said. “I couldn’t do much worse than what had gone on in the past. In the first season we won three preseason games and lost the rest, but we made some progress.”

Henry started the rebuilding process by putting in a carpeted, stereo-equipped weight room, and he scheduled some less demanding nonleague games.

“We needed some wins, we needed to gain some confidence,” he said. “These kids needed to learn how to win. They needed to gain some confidence before it was time to step into the Sunset League.”

In 1982, the team was 8-4, but then the firefighting job came up. Henry proposed a compromise to then-principal Ann Chlebicki, but she rejected the idea of any part-time role, fired Henry and hired George Pascoe.

That season, 1983, the Oilers were league co-champions and made it to the playoffs, only to lose to St. Francis. And though Henry was no longer a coach, he was still consulting with the team once a week and calling the offensive plays from the press box. For his efforts he was paid $15.90 an hour.

Though Henry says he doesn’t miss coaching now, he admits that his situation could easily be different.

“It was a lack of administrative support,” he said. “If it wasn’t for all those problems, I probably never would have looked this way.”

In spring 1986, when Dave Thompson resigned as Marina High School’s football coach--after turning the program around and compiling a 58-32-4 record over nine seasons--he cited the lack of full-time positions for his assistants, maintenance problems and a general lack of administrative support.

Now Thompson, activities director, is part of the administration.

“I don’t want to dwell on those past problems,” he said. “I had just reached a point of frustration in trying to get things done, and it had affected me in a negative way.”

Now it is Thompson’s job to get things done. He coordinates game activities, supervises maintenance of facilities, provides moral support and takes away some of the burden his successor, Chris Ramsey, might otherwise face.

“I try to provide understanding and respect, without butting into coaching duties,” he said. “And it helps when you’ve seen the effect of gopher holes on the troops, compared to someone who hasn’t been in the field.”

Thompson does say that maintaining teacher/coach positions is one of his top priorities.

“You can’t develop a program without some kind of stability, having coaches in for two years and then out again,” he said. “The most important ingredient to our success (when he was coaching) was the coaching staff.”

Thompson admits that past victories have added to the current problems. For one thing, the school has inherited a tough nonleague schedule that makes league play almost seem inviting. Last year, Marina was 0-5 yet went on to win the league.

“It’s part of the price you pay in a down cycle,” he said.

“I have no regrets about my decision to leave,” he added. “It was a decision that I’d been making for a long time. But coaching is somewhere in my future still. I miss the game on the field, I miss Friday nights, I miss everything about it.”

But if he does return to coaching, Thompson says he will have a different attitude about it.

“I’ve learned not to let things that are out of your control affect you,” he said. “I was in a situation where I met one stone wall after another. I wouldn’t want to be in that situation again.”