Harbor’s Ailing Grid Program Needs a Shot of Good News : Injuries to Quarterbacks, Linemen and Personal Problems Thin Team

Chris Ferragamo couldn’t be faulted if he scattered the contents of his medicine cabinet this week in a belated quest for extra-strength painkillers.

The coach of the Harbor College football team had more than his share of excruciating moments this year.

His Seahawks suffered through a second straight losing season. Opponents outscored them by an average of 20.5 points a game. They even failed to improve on 1987’s 2-7-1 mark, finishing 1-10.

The losing alone--not to mention a rash of debilitating injuries--was enough to leave Ferragamo groping for any kind of good news.

If positive tidings arrive at all, they will come shortly in the form of hale and healthy quarterbacks and big, bulky linemen recruited for next year, because both orders were in short supply this fall.

The abundance of bad news, however, extends back to August and beyond last Saturday’s penalty-riddled 47-27 loss to Santa Barbara.

According to Athletic Director Jim O’Brien, Harbor issued more than 90 football uniforms in August. By November, that number had dwindled to fewer than 50 and often somewhere in the low 40s.

El Camino College Coach John Featherstone, whose Warriors finished 8-1-1, began the year with 105 players and ended the regular season with 75. “That’s attributable to injuries, problems with school and jobs,” Featherstone said. “The attrition rate is always about 25% at the junior college level.”

The attrition rate at Harbor was about 50%, and no reducing factor was more important than injury:

- First-string quarterback Eddie Lopez, whom Ferragamo and brother Vince had trained extensively last spring and summer, was lost to a damaged left knee that required surgery and ended Lopez’s season after a 20-9 loss to Compton in late October.

- Second-string quarterback Grant Beachley, a freshman who questioned whether he could handle his new starting role after the Compton loss, broke a bone in his shoulder two weeks later in a 41-0 embarrassment against Glendale.

- Offensive tackle Josh Taotoai had one bad ankle, and defensive end Reggie Fennell had two for much of the season. Fennell also was forced to switch to offense when the offensive line broke down.

- Center Leonard Miller had a bad shoulder.

- A starting defensive tackle was lost to an intestinal problem.

- Numerous people played hurt, according to offensive lineman Bo Owens.

Other personnel depletions aggravated the gaping holes at quarterback an on the line:

- A starting defensive end, who transferred from Grambling, quit because he had to work.

- Another lineman left the team midway through the season when his mother got sick and quit when she died.

- Outside linebacker Earl Austin missed five games because of a family problem, Ferragamo said.

- Strong safety Marcel Patterson quit because he had to work.

The resulting defense was always tired because it spent so much time on the field in the final five games when a makeshift offense, quarterbacked by tailback Marvin Person and kicker Luis Solorio, rarely moved the ball for sustained periods.

Stewing over his team’s lack of depth before losing his final two games, Ferragamo said: “It’s numbers we need. If I had the same crew now that I had (in a 42-25 opening loss to El Camino), we would be winning games.”

It’s an encouraging what-if thought, but it’s debatable.

Two strikes had been called on the Seahawks before the team stepped to the plate. Not only did Harbor suit up fewer than 20 sophomores, but the Seahawks--at the request of their coach--had jumped to the punishing Western State Conference, which featured state and national powers Bakersfield, Valley, Moorpark and Glendale. And if the Seahawks didn’t know how painful the schedule changes would be in August, they learned just two weeks into conference play when Bakersfield, which went undefeated this season, sent them back to Wilmington with a 47-10 loss and a bus filled with dissension.

In 1959, Ferragamo played for Harbor and lost to Bakersfield, largely, he believed, because of the officials. He thought the same thing might happen when the Seahawks visited Bakersfield in October. He told his charges they’d have to be two touchdowns better than the officials and two better than Bakersfield to win.

They lost on both counts.

Bakersfield scored several quick passing touchdowns and soon--as has been their wont all season--the Seahawks’ penalty tally skyrocketed with their frustration. Four players were ejected near the end of the game for flagrant personal fouls. A Seahawk defensive coach who grabbed a member of his unit on the sideline to demonstrate a maneuver, Ferragamo said, looked as though he was scuffling with his own player and ignited opposing fans. Later the crowd got noisier when Harbor assistant coach Jim True shoved trainer David Lew as Lew warned the coach not to touch an injured lineman.

The pounding Bakersfield inflicted and the sideline distractions caused many players to cite the game several weeks later as the season’s low point.

“Everybody got of out of hand,” remembered sophomore tailback Archie Jean.

“There were a lot of calls that were bad and it just tore us apart,” said Owens, a freshman. “We started arguing and getting in little scuffles, and every time we got in an argument or fight, it just kept going to where it spread through the whole team, coaches, players, anything.”

The suspension and ejections were unusual events in Harbor’s season. But they pointed to a more significant problem: a lack of discipline.

Jean said discipline was Harbor’s primary problem, noting that the offense often argued in the huddle.

“If somebody missed a block,” Jean said, “he would get back to the huddle and everybody would say, ‘Come on, block!’ On the next play, the player doesn’t feel like blocking because he is really down. That happened a lot.”

Numerous penalties amplified the effect of dissension. Last week the Seahawks marred their homecoming against Santa Barbara with five personal fouls, one unsportsmanlike conduct whistle, one holding call, one delay of game stoppage and one encroachment call in the first quarter.

“We really need to work on not getting unnecessary penalties,” fullback Perris Clark said after the game.

Earlier, Ferragamo had made such an attempt. If a player got called for defensive encroachment in practice or in a game, he had to run 1 1/4 miles. If a player got flagged for a personal foul in practice or a game, he had to run 2 miles. Apparently, however, the program had little effect.

Ferragamo explained the discipline problems this way: “In a lot of their backgrounds, our players haven’t been taught the disciplined aspects of the game. So the burden of taking these kids and making them into model citizens has fallen on (their coaches’) shoulders.

“They are nice kids, needy kids, and they like to be coached, but they need to learn that if they make a mistake, they pay.”

The kids are easier on their coach.

“Chris is the only coach I have ever known who, after a losing season, he is right there telling you to keep it up week after week, day after day, play after play,” said Owens. “He is so enthusiastic. I am sure the losing has broken him apart, but he still comes back showing us his pride in himself, the school, the team. A lot of coaches would have been just motivated to quit.”

Ferragamo has no desire to quit. What he wants is a full-time position on the Harbor campus for himself and his coaches so they can be closer to their players. Not one Harbor coach works on campus now. In contrast, El Camino’s Featherstone and two assistants often spend more than 40 hours a week at school.

“It is understandable that Harbor is where it is,” Featherstone said. “It is impossible to run a first-class JC program without full-time coaches, so until they can be staffed properly, it is an uphill battle.”

A lack of coaching experience also stood in the way of success this season. Ferragamo would have had semi-experienced coaches if Joe Dominguez, who called plays for Ferragamo at Banning High School, had not taken a few members of Ferragamo’s 1987 staff back to Banning this fall. “But I had to build a new coaching staff,” Ferragamo said, “and in one year you can’t teach all the coaches all the things you want to do.”

Ferragamo expects his coaches to be more productive next year. And there is no talk of relieving Ferragamo after two losing seasons--at least not from school officials.

President Jim Heinselman said he had not received any positive or negative indications from those close to the program about their opinion of Ferragamo. Athletic Director O’Brien, who coaches baseball, said he is going to make every effort to obtain full-time positions for his coaches, particularly Ferragamo. And John Mendez, who has headed the Booster Club since Ferragamo took over at Harbor, said boosters have no second thoughts about Ferragamo because he works long hours in an effort to develop a successful program.

Before the 1987 season, Ferragamo said he was trying to run a major-college program at the junior-college level. Now he says it is realistic to assume that Harbor will have a winning program in two or three years.

But, said Mendez, “I would think that it would take Chris less time to win than it would take someone else.”

His faith in Harbor’s coach is a product of the 15 years he spent with Ferragamo as head of the Banning booster club. Winning, however, requires more talent and depth than faith, and there is no easier way to discourage potential recruits than losing.

Heinselman, O’Brien and Ferragamo agree that Harbor’s performance this year will hurt recruiting. The problem is worsened by Harbor’s standing probation for last year’s recruiting violations and the attraction of a winning program at El Camino, which lures talent from local prep powerhouses Banning and Carson every year.

And as if it couldn’t get any worse, Ferragamo desperately needs coveted players like linemen and quarterbacks. He tried to get Serra quarterback Eric Hamilton last year but Hamilton opted for Colorado. The rest of the pickings were slim, and Lopez was a project because he had never played quarterback.

Next year Ferragamo expects to have four quarterbacks. Which is probably why he has an interest in Carson’s Fred Gatlin. “And if we can’t get Gatlin,” he said, “we would have to go a level below that, but we have to have them developing.”

Why would Ferragamo believe he could attract a Division I-caliber quarterback like Gatlin? Carson Coach Gene Vollnogle has no idea.

“Chris has to be realistic about who he can get and who he can’t,” Vollnogle said. “Unless something drastic happens, he doesn’t have a chance of getting either Gatlin or Perry Klein (Carson’s other QB). They will go just about anywhere they want to go.”

Vollnogle has another prediction.

“Right now kids go (to Harbor) because of what Chris did at Banning,” he said, “but if they don’t turn it around in another year, kids will say, ‘Chris who?’ ”

Ferragamo has a modicum of good news--it’s bad news if you’re an opposing coach--for those who might doubt him: He has learned from his feast-or-famine past.

He won one game at Banning in 1972, two in ’73 and four in ’74. In 1976, he won a City championship and proceeded to win seven more in the next nine years.

Last year opposing players whose teams beat the Seahawks often shook hands with Ferragamo.

“They came up to me,” Ferragamo remembered,” and said, ‘Coach, I always wanted to play for you, I am glad we beat you.’ Then they smiled and walked away. But I just take it with a grain of salt.

“I know how the other guys felt when I beat them all those years at Banning. I’m a glutton for punishment and I’ll take it because eventually I know I am gonna give it back.”