HELL WEEK : It’s Run, Hit and Sweat as CIF Preps Grunt and Groan Their Way Into Shape for Grid Season

If you wanna’ play, you gotta’ pay.

--Ron Hanze,

North Torrance lineman

High school football players of all shapes and sizes--but only a huddle-ful in the shape the coaches require--are breakfasting on bacon and eggs this week at North Torrance High School. Sandwiches and fruit follow at lunch. And after a hot supper, there’s a movie.

Summer camp? Sort of. In between the nutritious meals are the most painful workouts of the year.

It’s Hell Week for incoming football players. Protein, carbohydrates and cholesterol are necessities. The faint of heart--or better, those who might faint--need not apply.

Termed Hell Week for all the running, hitting and sweating players must endure during the heat of summer, it’s an annual and crucial tradition at most of the nation’s high schools. And around the South Bay, it’s a tradition most players, and some coaches, love to hate.

The routine changes slightly from school to school but the objective is the same: Burn off the flab, build up the lungs and bruise yourself until you can’t feel it anymore. All in preparation for opening day, Sept. 9.

At North, the camaraderie that develops from players living together is expected to break the monotony of this year’s Hell Week. Coach Don Bohannon fashioned a camp format--players sleep, eat and work out together all week without going home--after a similar program he participated in as an assistant coach at Serra High in the early 1970s.

“By keeping the kids at school, we can make sure they get enough to eat and we can really control the amount of rest they get,” said Bohannon, who is in his third year at North. “The rest is the key because the kids work so hard during the week that they really need their rest.”

They need to eat well, too, and Bohannon said the food-service fare should be better this week than during normal school hours. “It’s not a lot of pizzas and junk food” or typical steam-table fare, he said.

North tailback and free safety Ron Perez, 16, said the camp format makes sense. “It’s a better idea staying together,” said Perez, a senior. “It’s more like a family.”

Agility and speed drills, weightlifting and team meetings fill out the first three days of Hell Week at North and other CIF-Southern Section schools. Southern Section rules do not allow full-contact drills until today.

City Section schools begin full- contact workouts Monday, but many City teams have been conditioning since Aug. 15.

Southern Section schools combine conditioning and contact in the same week while City schools rarely condition once double-day practices begin.

Either way, combine all of the conditioning and contact before the first game and “it seems more like Hell Month ,” says North’s Perez.

Traditionally, says Banning Coach Joe Dominguez, “kids think of it as Hell Week because they have to spend a hell of a lot of time on the field in pads when it’s hot and miserable.” Banning is a City school whose players condition before Hell Week.

Redondo is a Southern Section school whose players run and hit in the same week, and Redondo Coach Les Congelliere says: “Hell Week is like basic training. That’s why it’s tough. It’s hell and it’s supposed to be. You gotta’ make it tough, but it’s not tough just to be punitive.”

Bodily punishment, however, was inescapable Monday at Redondo.

Congelliere and his staff forced about 50 would-be varsity players to take what’s not-so-affectionately known as The Test , a 12-step running exercise that amounts to more than three miles of legwork, on the first day of practice.

Most of the running is done in intervals of 50 and 100 yards. Each step consists of 450 yards and only 90 seconds of rest are allowed between steps.

“It is a four-year tradition,” Congelliere said. “We test to see whether they are in the condition they are supposed to be in. It’s grueling and they must pass it. If they don’t, they have to repeat the 12 steps between practices until they do.”

Outside linebacker Dustin Kenerson, 15, was lucky enough to pass--but not without pain.

“I thought I was gonna’ die on the fourth step,” said Kenerson, a junior. “It was ridiculous. Right when you finished one step, Coach would go ‘Ready!’ and you had to start again.

“Everyone was about dead when we finished. We stretched afterward but my legs felt like cement.”

Kenerson had to lug his aching 5-foot-11, 170-pound frame back to Redondo by 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, but he said The Test and the rest of Hell Week are worth it. “It gets you real serious about football,” he acknowledged.

Congelliere said 90% of his varsity players pass The Test the first day. One year, he even ran it himself to make sure a sluggish player finished.

Many Redondo players trained with Congelliere this summer, often running as much as they did Monday. Summer workouts are typical at many high schools. Some players even run on their own to prepare for Hell Week.

Gardena running back Khybdeed Hairston, 17, runs at the beach when not working out with the team. “But so far,” said the 5-foot-10, 175-pound senior, “I’m the only one I know of who is running by himself.”

Hairston remembers feeling faint the first day of his first Hell Week. That’s why he runs so much now. He believes Gardena’s week is tougher than most and wants to avoid as much discomfort as possible. But many of his teammates, he says, “like to tough it out.”

Gardena Coach Dale Hirayama, whose team began conditioning Monday, condensed his team’s conditioning schedule to one week this year because two would have left many of his players with little break between the end of summer school and the start of football season.

Hirayama said that “it always seems like the temperature goes up about 10 degrees during Hell Week.” And for two-thirds of the team, that’s terrible news because only one-third comes to school in good condition, according to Hirayama.

What condition players are in before Hell Week clearly affects how much hell they go through.

Focusing on the pain, though, is not the proper approach, according to St. Bernard Coach Duke Dulgarian.

Dulgarian said: “We don’t use the term Hell Week at St. Bernard,” a Catholic school. “We don’t believe in making it hell for the kids. It’s a time to get them in decent shape so they can play two-way football for four quarters during the season.”

Dulgarian begins workouts at 6:45 a.m. this week and follows with two more sessions beginning at 11 and 2 each day.

“There is pain,” he says, “but it’s constructive.”

The hardest part of the week is getting motivated to come back for the second and third days, Dulgarian said. And that task plagues coaches as well.

After a pleasant fortnight in Maui or similar sun-drenched vacationland, many coaches say they return to school with tyranny on their minds. They don’t like it and their players loathe it, but it breeds the right attitude.

“I hate having to coach these kids at this time,” said Dulgarian, beginning his fourth year as head coach. “It seems like all you are doing is cracking the whip, but it’s something that’s got to be done.”

Dulgarian’s wife isn’t so sure, however. Irene Dulgarian believes coaches’ wives get the worst of Hell Week. “That’s why she is going away for four days,” Duke said.

Grueling Hell Week schedules fatigue most coaches. Not only are they at school earlier than the players, but most leave later than their charges and usually plan workouts throughout lunch.

“The hardest part is on the coaches,” says Carson Coach Gene Vollnogle, who has corralled six City Section championships with the Colts. “It’s not as bad on the players. They can finish practice, shower and eat. We are planning even in the evening. We survive the week, but by Thursday we’re really dragging.”

Despite losing last year’s City championship to Granada Hills, Carson finished at 11-1 and outscored opponents 437-89. And in 25 seasons the Colts hold a 7,486-3,282 scoring edge along with a 201-62-1 record.

Their Hell Week is worse than any other, right?

“No, that’s not the way it is here,” says Vollnogle. “Our kids see it as being easier because they know what it takes.”

Carson players begin conditioning two weeks before double-day workouts, a schedule Vollnogle said assures that most players are in good condition once they don pads for the first time in eight months.

When two-a-days begin, Vollnogle and his staff concentrate on teaching techniques and fundamentals. “You only push the kids who don’t show up for conditioning the two weeks before,” Vollnogle says. “The way I see it is, if a kid can’t work out and get in shape with us before double-days, and if he can’t handle what we do, I’m not gonna’ give him a uniform.”

Vollnogle said he dislikes the image of coach as slave driver. Apparently it’s unnecessary at Carson. Peer pressure apparently keeps wayward players in line--running.

“I don’t really have to say a lot,” Vollnogle says. “Sometimes with our kids, it gets near blows. When you mix seniors with younger kids, the seniors always get on their case.”

Peer pressure also lights fires in many players at Banning High, another South Bay and Southland perennial power.

“As coaches, we try to stay in the background,” says first-year Banning Coach Joe Dominguez. “We want to see who will jump right in and take over.”

It’s an approach that helped the Pilots soar to six consecutive City titles between 1976 and 1981 and collect two more in ’83 and ’85. Dominguez assisted former Coach Chris Ferragamo during those glory years and followed Ferragamo to Harbor College last year before returning to Banning.

Ferragamo said he viewed Hell Week as his one opportunity to find out who could, and could not, play Banning-style football. Dominguez will value that opportunity when the hitting starts next week, but he said teaching his players is even more important.

“You have to make sure they understand the entire offense and defense,” he said.

Usually, Dominguez added, players despise double-days more than conditioning. But during conditioning week, Dominguez had the Pilots laboring like quarter horses in a drill employing an Exer-Genie, a harness players wrap around their shoulders and attach to a rope and pulley that pull them back as they try to run against the tension of the rope.

The Exer-Genie, designed to strengthen leg and buttock muscles, has been around since the 1970s. It’s just one of many exercises available to a coach whose players need to get in shape without the use of pads and footballs.

At Banning they don’t use the Exer-Genie until after 6 p.m. when South Bay heat dissipates.

Other schools use similar timetables to beat the heat. And if you planned to become a North Torrance Saxon, you had to be on the field by 5:30 a.m. Monday after sleeping in the gym.

Which is merely one reason why it’s called Hell Week, according to Saxon Ron Hanze.

“Most of the week you are out there asking yourself, ‘Why am I here?’ ” said the 6-foot-3, 225-pound senior, “and you can’t figure it out.”