WORLD-CLASS SOCCER : For the Boys’ Teams at Valhalla, Hilltop and Torrey Pines, Coaches Who Learned Game Abroad Provide Winning Edge

Attired in a warmup suit he probably doesn’t need, George Logan, the Scottish lord of San Diego soccer, is enjoying both the sunshine and the skills of his Valhalla soccer players, who are artfully working the ball up and down the field during afternoon practice. The sun feels nice. So different from home.

A few miles away, Hilltop’s Tom Evans, an American coach trained in Germany, is running with his players, running around them and running past them. All the while he gives a running commentary. He teaches on the move. Stays a step ahead by keeping in good shape. Stays a step ahead of other coaches by flying to Germany at the drop of a hat trick to take soccer lessons.

Up north, at Torrey Pines, Hungarian born Steven Juhasz has just gotten a laugh. A joke has been told in his broken, charming English. “You played like tiger with no teeth,” he tells a player who he wants to become more intense. “Next time I want teeth.”

Soccer is called football where Logan, Juhasz and Evans were taught. It’s taken seriously. All three have borrowed coaching methods from abroad and constructed a foundation for dominant high school soccer programs in San Diego. Combined record? Forty victories, three losses and three ties.

Logan, who has coached Valhalla since 1974 and won games almost as often as he says “Oye, laddie,” moved to San Diego from Scotland in 1960 in search of, if nothing else, a touch of warm weather. He had grown somewhat tired of waking in the middle of the night and looking out the window at the rain.

Logan could have worked in Scotland. There were coaching jobs available. If only the weather was better.

“The bloody weather back there . . . “ he says, shaking his head. “There’s an old saying you get rain between the showers. I wouldn’t be coaching today back in Scotland. This is great here. I’ll probably coach until I’m 90.”

In Scotland, rain wasn’t the only problem. The field was always muddy. There was one ball, one referee and the coach, who Logan says must have been crazier than the rest, standing hunched over on the sideline shielding himself from the rain and doing his best to keep warm. Basically, it was a bloody mess.

Weather conditions not withstanding, Scotland is a great place to learn fundamentals. Scotland and England are considered the father countries of the sport. Children learn how to dribble a soccer ball just after learning to walk.

The Scots, Logan says, devised their original soccer strategy out of necessity. They were looking for a way to best their more-physical English rivals, who were much taller and heavier. So the pass was invented. And perfected.

“I think the Scots brought an attractiveness to the game,” Logan said. “Results obviously help a lot, but if you can combine a winning team with an attractive team, then you’ve got something.”

And that’s what Logan does here in a climate in which he can enjoy the results. His reputation is unmatched locally. At San Diego State, he compiled a record of 148-48-17 from 1968 to 1981. At Valhalla, he has won three consecutive CIF titles. This season, led by returning All-CIF players Scott Hargrove, Derek Berry and Toby Taitano, the Norsemen are 19-0 after beating Granite Hills, 5-0, Friday.

Logan, 56, retired from SDSU in 1981 because the long hours and travel became too much of a burden. But he retained his love for the game and continued at Valhalla, building a program so highly regarded that students attend the school just to play Logan’s brand of Scottish soccer.

If victories are the reason for Logan’s reputation, it is his character, sense of humor and innovative practices that endear him to his players. Bus trips after road games usually include a song or two, sung and written by the silver-haired maestro himself and flavored with a resounding chorus from the players.

Jokes? Logan tells them frequently.

“Even if they’re not funny, we laugh,” said fullback Richard Hedgpeth.

Indeed, Logan has a unique style. Once, one of his players found himself tangled in the net behind the goal after running a tad too far on a practice drill, and Logan said: “Caught in the net like a bloody tuna.”

Amid the chuckles, players pick up the subtleties of the game. Practices are lively. Logan always has fresh drills. Rain no longer disrupts his sleep, but he often tells players about waking up in the middle of the night and thinking of a position switch or a new strategy. Soccer is his life.

“You can certainly tell the difference between him and another coach because he’s a professional,” Hedgpeth said. “Before I knew Mr. Logan, it was always the same drills every practice, the same routine. But Mr. Logan always mixes it up well, and I think that’s why he ends up with a well-rounded team.”

It doesn’t take players long to figure out Logan is special.

“You can look at him and say, ‘Yeah, he knows what he’s talking about,’ ” said Jason Miller, a senior fullback. “He’s the only coach I’ve had that doesn’t criticize without being creative. When he tells you something to do, it’s not because it’s raining that day.”

It couldn’t be. He left the rain in Scotland.

Steven Juhasz’s niche isn’t twisting words and phrases of the English language into eloquent prose. Hamlet soliloquizing, he’s not. But communication is not always verbal. As an instructor of soccer, Juhasz, in his second year at Torrey Pines, is a master of demonstration. Call him the Shakespeare of soccer.

Juhasz took his Falcons to the San Diego Section 3-A championship game last season, losing, 3-1, to Valhalla. This year, when coaches talk of the county’s best teams, Torrey Pines (12-2-2) is always mentioned.

Juhasz’s background? Check his resume. Or maybe take a look at some Hungarian soccer books where he is pictured demonstrating various soccer skills.

Atop the resume, Juhasz lists his participation on the Hungarian Olympic team, which won a gold medal in 1968 at Mexico City. Juhasz scored the third goal in the championship against Bulgaria, helping his team to a 4-1 victory.

Juhasz’s soccer skills often amaze his players. His speaking skills often confuse them. Ross Dixon, a senior forward, recalls the first team meeting last year.

“We just looked at him like ‘What are you saying?’ ”

But he’s more fluent this year, right?

“I don’t know if he’s gotten better,” Dixon said. “We understand him more. Now we know what he’s going to say pretty much before he says it.”

A few samples:

“No any problem.” Translation: If we play like we should, this team won’t give us any trouble.

“No dancing.” Translation: Don’t take stutter steps in front of the goal.

“Must to fun.” Translation: Have fun?

“I don’t think that’s what it means,” forward Aaron Webb said. “It means play good, play nice, play not too aggressively.”

Anyway, the words aren’t important. Juhasz does most of his teaching with a kick, a dribble or a pass, impressive in itself because of his incredible skills. During a practice early last season, he was trying to explain how to successfully complete a left-foot volley. But the team wasn’t catching on. Finally, he abandoned words and drilled a perfect shot into the back of the net.

“He just said, ‘No, like theeees,’ ” Dixon said. “And everybody was just in awe. Those are really hard to do.”

Coaching hasn’t detracted from Juhasz’s desire to play.

“Sometimes,” Dixon said, “he’ll demonstrate every third one because because he wants to take the shot.”

Past experience has taught Juhasz that demonstrations hold an athlete’s attention better than talk. Five minutes, he said, is about all you can talk before players begin to notice the birds and planes in the sky above. No any problem. He keeps talk to a minimum and keeps his players moving. Practices are short. Improvement is steady.

“I show them everything I want,” he said. “It takes 30 seconds. My practices, nobody sits down. Sit down in a movie or in the cafeteria, not on the field.”

The base for Juhasz’s knowledge comes from training he received long ago. The difference between youth coaches in Hungary and America, Juhasz says, is experience. Certified coaches with a vast background in soccer instruct at the youth level in Hungary. Great importance is put on teaching skills at an early age so players have developed proper habits by the time they reach high school.

Juhasz says many American youth coaches are fathers who like soccer but have never played at a competitive level.

“I’m very, very lucky,” he said, “because I had an excellent teacher and almost, we say, a second father. On the field, he was not a babysitter. He was a coach. In practice, (we weren’t) friends. And I learned many good things from him.”

Now, Juhasz is the coach.

“Some of the coaches I’ve had have never played soccer,” Webb said. “I can see a big difference because he knows what’s happening in the game. You respect the guy so you don’t want to screw up.”

Who loves you, Tom Evans?

“American Airlines loves me.”

Why?

“I probably travel between 80,000 and 85,000 miles a year.”

The reason? Dedication to the sport of soccer. Simple.

Evans, who has two CIF championship trophies to show for 10 seasons at Hilltop, became a serious coach in 1978. He had just visited Germany for the first time and witnessed what he considered some of the best teaching methods in the world. So now, with a passport cluttered with stamps, he shuttles back and forth to Germany picking up bits and pieces of soccer knowledge, storing them away and sharing them with the players he coaches in San Diego.

Evans, 40, grew up in Akron, Ohio. He studied German in college and still speaks it fairly fluently, though he admits he remembers more of the gutter lingo than the technical language necessary to communicate soccer drills. He plans to spend six months in Germany, possibly this spring, to take classes and pursue his goal of becoming the first natural born American to earn a full professional German soccer license.

“That’s one of my dreams,” he said. “There’s no guarantee that I’m going to be able to ever achieve it either, but I want to give it a shot. That license is very prestigious. It’s welcomed all over the world.”

It also requires a good deal of time, money and patience. The training program goes six days a week for six months and costs $15,000.

“It’s something that even for a German is very difficult to achieve,” Evans said. “It’s a tough curriculum.”

Then again, Evans is fairly tough himself. Rather than standing around watching while his players practice, Evans is right out there with them. He runs more than they do, switching positions every few minutes to help demonstrate a different move. After his high school practice, he takes a 10-minute soft drink break and then coaches an under-9 team.

Evans is in such good shape that it sometimes makes his freshmen a little nervous. To condition for each season, Hilltop players run four to six miles a day through the streets of Chula Vista. Evans joins them. Sweeper/midfielder Derek Petty, now a junior, remembers worrying his way through a few runs as a freshman.

“It always scares you,” he said. “If you don’t beat him, you think you’re going to get cut.”

And beating him isn’t easy.

“I remember when I was a freshman I came late, and I started late with him and he just worked me hard,” midfielder Chugger Adair said. “I was struggling to keep up with him. He’s in better shape than most of the team.”

This season, Evans made a decision he knew might cause him trying moments. He opted for a youth movement, cutting several seniors who played last year to make room for freshmen with potential. The youngsters’ biggest problem has been getting started each game.

“The whole season,” Evans said of his 9-1-1 team, “the first 10 or 15 minutes has been an adventure. The last couple of games I’ve been kidding them if they start the game 10 minutes early and then start playing, then the freshmen will be fine. As long as we can stay close the first 10 minutes.”