Eighty-Sixed : 1987 Saw Their Teams Quickly Eliminated From Contention, but the Coaches of Banning and Harbor College Are Out to Make Next Year a Winner

Hard times have come to Wilmington.

At Banning High School, where they are usually hoisting another city football championship banner about this time, the Pilots and first-year Coach John Hazelton struggled through an up-and-down, 5-5 year and were knocked out of the playoffs in the first round--their quickest farewell since 1976.

At Harbor College, first-year coach Chris Ferragamo, fresh off his long-running success at Banning, swallowed a large dose of reality in the form of a 2-7-1 season.

Their seasons were so similar, and so strange from the start, that it wouldn’t be surprising if Hazelton and Ferragamo spent their time consoling each other.

Instead, Ferragamo is upbeat as he recruits and plans for next fall, and Hazelton is ready to get back on the field and reestablish the Banning program in his own image.

It was a year of hard-learned lessons for both. Now, both say, it’s time to start putting together the 1988 season and shutting up the nay-sayers.

Ferragamo, sitting in his office under a sign reading, “Enthusiasm Is the Force That Creates Momentum,” said with customary gusto: “I’m doing lots of recruiting--I’m recruiting like crazy. We started early. We’ve been taking our 47 freshmen and our redshirts (players who sat out a year) and been putting them in the weight room. We started Nov. 15--the day after our last game. The key for us next year is to be bigger and stronger.”

Hazelton, getting ready for Christmas break, was giving out footballs to athletes who wanted to play catch over the vacation.

“We’ve fairly well regrouped already and (are) headed toward next year,” he said. “There was a group of juniors out on the field the Monday after we lost (in the playoffs). They had a little reaction like, ‘This is never gonna happen again. Let’s get after it.’ This is a group that will be mine and mine alone. The juniors were always the ones that believed.”

It was the end of an era last winter when Ferragamo left Banning--where he starred as a lineman and returned to coach for 17 years, winning eight city titles. His hiring at nearby Harbor College was announced as the dawn of a new day at the college, even though the team was coming off a conference title.

Ferragamo did make cosmetic improvements, right from the start. He started a boosters club that raised nearly $40,000 to build an impressive weight room. He got new uniforms. The players were provided with good football shoes.

More than 80 players suited up at the beginning. They scrimmaged against Taft, and were bloodied but unbowed. Maybe the warning signs weren’t clear enough, or were masked in an aura of rose-tinted optimism.

But reality hit rapidly: a 28-0 opening loss to Moorpark; a struggling 10-3 victory over San Bernardino Valley; a big victory over out-manned Victor Valley; then losses--some tough, some not close--the rest of the way, with one tie mixed in.

Worse than the losses themselves, several of which came in the closing minutes, was the way the team played. Ferragamo’s option quarterback, Eddie Kapu, broke his wrist in a summer all-star game and never got to play. To Ferragamo’s dismay, he couldn’t find a quarterback who could play his game.

The team also had trouble on the ground, because the line was constantly overpowered. To Ferragamo, whose Banning teams had manhandled opponents, this was like trying to learn a foreign language without a dictionary.

“Our high school teams were stronger than this team,” Ferragamo said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We got pushed around so bad, it was a joke. Valley pushed us around like crazy.

“It was a shock. All of a sudden, I realize we can’t block. I’m an offensive line coach, and we can’t block. I looked at films of Moorpark--those guys were strong. They pushed our fannies all over the field. I figured it was technique, so we went back to practice and worked on blocking technique. It wasn’t technique. I was in total shock and dismay at our lack of strength. You have to be strong in this league. You’re not gonna be able to over-finesse ‘em. Everybody’s the same size. You win in the off-season (teaching technique and weight-training).”

There were other surprises. Players came and went, with nearly half of those who suited up for the first week of practice gone by November.

“Guys show up for a few weeks, look pretty good, then disappear,” he said with a look of disbelief. “You call him up. ‘Coach, I got a job.’ That’s my first-team tackle. It was musical players. I didn’t like that. That’s not the kind of kid I want to go after. I want the kid who wants to go on, that football means something to.”

There was also a lack of team spirit that Ferragamo had never known at Banning. That, he said, is changing. “We had a group, not a team,” he said. “We had a group of guys coming in from all over. There was no real feeling for each other. This year we’re talking like a team: ‘What are we gonna do?’ ”

Athletic Director Jim O’Brien, who has won several state baseball titles at Harbor, said that Ferragamo was probably caught by surprise by several aspects of community-college football. “Probably one of the biggest things the staff learned was the players they thought were real good weren’t that good at this level,” O’Brien said.

“The biggest thing is there’s a big difference between the community-college athlete and a high school kid, or even a four-year (college) kid. I think that it was a surprise. Adjustment is probably the key word.”

O’Brien said he expects Ferragamo to bounce back, especially with a more experienced team returning. He said Ferragamo “certainly didn’t throw in the towel. He never quit working hard. There were probably three or four games we easily could have won with a break. Anything that possibly could have gone wrong, did. He didn’t cry about it.”

O’Brien added: “He’s having a good recruiting year. Also, we only had six or seven sophomores. It will be a real key to get most of those kids back, and start out with an experienced team.”

And Ferragamo continues to have a magnetic effect on the community, the athletic director said. “He shows a genuine concern for the kids. He’s certainly not lacking for enthusiasm. I’ve never seen a guy so enthusiastic, or work so hard. He’s always working. That’ll pay off. I believe that--hard work pays off.”

Ferragamo is ebullient when he looks to the future. The players are working hard in the weight room under weight coach Jim True. Ferragamo, who traditionally specialized as an offensive line coach, will now coordinate the defense, handing the offense over to Joe Dominguez.

This time around, he said, the coaches will know what to expect. So will the players.

“The most positive thing (to come out of last season) is we can’t do any worse. We’ll do better,” Ferragamo said. “As coaches, we know (now) what it takes to win at this level. We really didn’t. We expected to come over and make an impact. We didn’t make any impact.

“You have to have numbers and you have to have size and strength. The first year we forgot about some of the traditional things you have to do to have discipline. There was nothing traditional here. We were doing what we had to do to scrape together a team.”

Ferragamo said one common thread he noticed among opponents was that nearly every good team had its own strength, be it the passing game, rushing defense, whatever. The good teams had a notable personality, and recruit to maintain that. That’s something he’ll try to establish at Harbor. Much of it will depend on the recruits Harbor gets for the skill positions--quarterback, running back, receivers.

“At Oklahoma, you’re gonna go there if you’re an option quarterback,” he noted. “That’s their tradition. We don’t have a tradition. We’ve had a hodgepodge. Next year, we’ll start settling in on some avenue of action.”

Meanwhile, Ferragamo is accomplishing some good things this year. He’ll get four-year-college scholarships for his handful of sophomores good enough to move on. And he may be setting some precedents for a program that has been held together by prayers and shoestrings for a long time.

Ferragamo still teaches at Banning, so he sees Hazelton regularly. Before the season, he was pumping up his successor, offering visions of the glory they would bring to Wilmington. Then Harbor’s season started, and Hazelton found himself having to console his mentor.

Hazelton had been an assistant at Valley College and said privately one day: “I’ve coached at junior college and I’d never do it again. You couldn’t get me to do it again.” In Banning he felt that he had the most desirable high school coaching job anywhere. Then the Pilots’ season started.

Hazelton found that he, too, didn’t have a capable quarterback. The team lost its first two games even while playing tough defense. Then it won two games, but gave up a lot of points. Cleveland scored three touchdowns in the first quarter, shredding Banning’s secondary.

At the start of Pacific League play, the Pilots were 3-3. Seniors were grumbling that things weren’t being done the Banning way. Fans were grumbling that the Pilots’ offense was simplistic, that it appeared to have forgotten the forward pass.

Hazelton saw it differently. Except for the Carson loss, Hazelton says Banning might have won the games it lost if Ferragamo was still at the helm because he would have known who to plug into the problem areas. But, the coach stressed, there would have been problem areas no matter who was in charge.

Hazleton, a curly-haired 36-year-old, leaned forward in his small office to make his point. He earnestly defended his first year and his young staff, saying that those who know football realize that he did what he could with what he had. Everyone else, he said, are “armchair quarterbacks (who) jumped on and off the bandwagon.”

Twenty of the 22 players he started were new to the lineup. “Everybody was very devoid of fundamentals,” Hazelton said. Even worse, there was no quarterback in sight.

To his armchair-quarterback detractors, he leaned forward, eyes flashing, and offered this rejoinder: “I hear criticism and I really protect my staff from it. We were not a football team that got . . . snuffed every week. We were a few points from being 9-1.”

Hazelton went with his instincts and decided to start 15-year-old sophomore John Maae at quarterback. Hazelton calls Maae a once-in-a-decade talent, but quickly adds that the youngster didn’t know any of the plays when the season started and never took a snap at quarterback in summer leagues. Hazelton had to severely scale back his offense while Maae learned on the job.

“You really need a trigger man at any level of football,” Hazelton said. “We’re growing one here.

“In retrospect, here I am winging it with a 15-year-old at quarterback. So it’s not like I inherit the legacy. Teams lined up against us with a nine-man front to open. (Maae) is a fabulous talent (but) I had to steady him. We coached on the move. Again, that’s no excuse ‘cause I’m proud of the kid. We went slowly.”

If Banning took some unexpected lumps this year, Hazelton said it will be repaid next season. Maae will return; leading tailback Chris Griffieth will be back, and much of an impressive offensive line returns, anchored by 6-foot-7, 265-pound All-City tackle Bob Whitfield. “The tailback position here right now is a guaranteed 1,000 yards,” Hazelton said, adding that if Griffieth can improve his speed, it might be closer to 2,000.

And Maae will go to spring practice and summer passing leagues knowing Hazelton’s system.

“I’m excited. They know me, they know what fundamentals and techniques we asked. Naturally I’m willing to take the heat for staying so simple on offense. Everybody thinks we’re so conservative. We coached a run-and-shoot deal at Valley College. I understand that stuff, I can teach it. At the end of the year we were doing some very sophisticated things.

“I’m very capable of (running) a very multiple offense. We’ll pick up where we left off. You’ll see it next year. But you can only be as multiple as your quarterback is capable of.

“The bottom line is I can go out there in a month and I can line up John Maae and call a play, and he can run it, and we didn’t have that until after the first game. And anybody who doesn’t think that matters, their opinion matters very little to me.”

Ferragamo saw several of Banning’s games and sympathized with Hazelton. “It was the same thing we went through here,” he said. “He didn’t know how to utilize the talent. As he gets acclimated to the talent, he’ll be a winner. He really tries hard. He’s got to establish his traditional ideas. You don’t win the first year, just like I didn’t.”

Hazelton was aware of the shadow of Ferragamo. “Even if we won the city this year it would’ve been one of the greatest struggles I’ve ever been through,” he said. “I’m a strong personality. I actually was a little tempered as a result of following such a strong (legacy). I listened to how it was done and did a little bit of it.”

Hazelton, who was a volunteer assistant at USC last year, stayed in contact with Trojan Coach Larry Smith this fall. “He told me, ‘It’s gonna be more difficult than you think. Just hold on to your attitude, keep pushing ahead and stick to your guns.’ Because when you stop believing in yourself, you’re dead.”