Alvarado Won Players’ Respect and a City Title

Call it the last step, the final act in a conversion process from outsider to trusted leader.

There Manny Alvarado stood, or at least he was trying to stand. He was bent at the waist, gasping for air as desperately as any of his players on the Kennedy High baseball field. The Golden Cougars awaited the next words from their coach as they recuperated from a fatiguing set of wind sprints run across the outfield grass.

Earlier that day, Kennedy fell flat in a 4-2 loss to Cleveland when a victory would have clinched the North Valley League title. After the bus ride back to Granada Hills, Alvarado assembled the team and ordered the extra work.

As the players chugged through their first 40-yard dash, there was Alvarado, running just as hard as those half his age. When he halted the sprints and addressed the team after catching his breath, the words were superfluous. The message already had been delivered: All shared blame for the defeat, starting with the coach.

“I told the guys that I must have done something wrong,” Alvarado said recalling the incident. “We were playing for the league title and we got only six hits and two runs, so I guess we weren’t ready to play. That’s my job and I didn’t do a good one. That was just the way I approached it. It wasn’t a coaching ploy but it worked out that way.”

Kennedy rebounded two days later with a 7-5 victory over San Fernando to clinch the league title and start a five-game winning streak that culminated in the City Section 4-A Division championship.

Alvarado, at 35 the head coach of his first varsity team, led the Golden Cougars to a 4-3 win over Palisades in the final at Dodger Stadium and has been named The Times’ Valley Coach of the Year.

A year ago, Alvarado was a stranger to the Kennedy players. After an eight-year absence from high school coaching, Alvarado returned in 1988 to work as an unpaid assistant to San Fernando Coach Steve Marden. When he was awarded the Kennedy job last June after Dick Whitney resigned to become the school’s athletic director, players wondered, “Who is this guy?”

“It was definitely a ‘Who?’ We had no idea who he was,” senior pitcher Mitch Cizek said.

Alvarado, the unknown quantity, walked into a difficult situation. Kennedy’s was no sagging program looking for a savior. The Golden Cougars were a veteran team: Eight of the projected starters for 1989 were seniors-to-be. Expectations ran high. Kennedy had won two City titles in the 1980s and was Mid-Valley League champion in ’88.

“Some people told me I had my hands full,” Alvarado said. “There were a lot of seniors and I was expected to win right away. You had to introduce yourself, deal with the players and the community and win all at the same time.”

Given the circumstances, Alvarado chose a soft-sell approach, which is fortuitous because that’s his only approach. Quiet and unassuming at 5-foot-8, 140 pounds, he tiptoed into the program. No sweeping changes were ordered. No dramatic manifestoes were issued.

When practice opened in February, Alvarado got a break. Team rules dictate prompt arrival at all practice sessions and look who showed up late for one of the first workouts: team leaders Gino Tagliaferri and Pat DeBoer, both seniors. The two formed Kennedy’s double-play combination and were three-year lettermen.

Alvarado waited for no explanations. As soon as the pair hit the field, he banished them to the outfield.

“I made them run until I got tired,” Alvarado said. “You have to set limits and stick to your guns. When a rule is broken, you have to fix it. In a way, it was a blessing in disguise. I don’t know if it made an impression, but they weren’t late again.”

DeBoer accepted the discipline as payment for membership on the team.

“I had no resentment because I knew I deserved it,” he said. “I had a good feeling that it was going to happen as soon as I got in the parking lot. We thought it was going to be hard to get adjusted to him but it wasn’t.”

With the ground rules established, Kennedy embarked on the season but received bad news one week out of the gate when star center fielder Shawn Madden, who has signed a letter of intent with Stanford, suffered an injured right shoulder. His status remained unclear for a couple of weeks before he underwent surgery in April and was lost for the season.

“I think that lit a fire under us a little more, especially when we found out for sure he was through for the season,” Alvarado said. “There was no more doubt. James Campbell rose to the occasion as his replacement and the kids started playing better.”

With his team in stride and heading toward a league title, Alvarado was thrown a curve when teachers staged a walkout against the Los Angeles Unified School District and the 4-A baseball coaches boycotted the season. The baseball coaches stood alone along the sidelines while playoffs continued in all other City sports.

The season seemed doomed when City officials canceled the 4-A playoffs May 23, the day before the postseason tournament was scheduled to begin. Pressure mounted at many schools to force coaches back to work or stage the playoffs without them.

Players faced conflicting emotions, torn between their desire to play and loyalty to their coaches. A few teams voted to boycott until the coaches returned, others demanded to play despite the coaches’ absence. Kennedy, with a senior-dominated lineup, sent a player delegation into Principal James Ball’s office to demand to play. Alvarado, a rookie coach, saw his team slipping away from him. Ironically, Alvarado made his players sign a contract before the season, binding all to a full commitment to the team.

“It was a difficult decision to strike but I didn’t feel like I deserted the kids,” he said. “But I feared losing their respect and I worried about my relationship with them.”

Alvarado kept in contact with the team through Tagliaferri and Cizek and when the strike ended May 25 and the playoffs were reinstated, the team met for a hastily called practice. Afterward, Alvarado led an emotional team meeting conducted at high volume. Embittered players shouted out their anger, claiming that they felt abandoned by their coach. Instead of trying to quiet his players or talk them out of their feelings, Alvarado let them rant.

“I encouraged it,” he said. “If there was any animosity or bitterness, I told them to show it. I made no excuses for what I did and when the meeting was over, there was a mutual respect for each other. I told them they had their chance to vent, now it was back to normal.”

One week later, Kennedy formed a human pile behind the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium in celebration of its City championship.

“The team was really divided during the strike--half were for him and half against him,” Cizek said. “I felt abandoned but after the meeting I realized he had a higher responsibility. I still had to be behind him.

“It was like after the Cleveland game. He was with us and took the loss as hard as we did. He showed that he didn’t punk out on us when we lost.”

So, Alvarado’s rocky road to leadership of the Kennedy program seems complete, but a loose end remains. He’s still a walk-on coach. He is a physical education teacher at Sepulveda Junior High and is trying to find a position at Kennedy.

Eight years ago, Alvarado left the school district a bitter man. After graduating from Cal State Northridge in 1978, he joined the district as a teacher and junior varsity baseball coach at San Fernando, his alma mater. He had worked as an unpaid assistant at San Fernando for three years while completing his degree, but after two years he lost his job as part of a district-wide cutback.

He took a job at Pride House, a home for troubled teen-age boys in Van Nuys, and coached the softball, basketball and flag football teams. His teams won and he enjoyed the work, but the itch to return as a high school coach needed scratching.

“I would run into old friends on the street and they’d ask me where I was coaching,” he said. “They expected me to be coaching at a high school somewhere. Our Pride House teams never got much ink.”

He left Pride House for Sepulveda Junior High in 1986 as a first step back. A year later, when he contacted Marden about a job, he was welcomed back to San Fernando with open arms. After one year with the Tigers, Marden recommended him for the position at Kennedy.

Alvarado brought more than Marden’s recommendation with him to Kennedy. Said Alvarado with a sly grin: “I stole quite a bit from Steve.”

“I saw a lot of the things that we do over at Kennedy this year,” Marden said, good-naturedly. “I saw his infielders relaying each pitch to the outfield like we do, and moving players based on the pitch thrown like we do. He had guys scouting teams and they were using a San Fernando scout sheet.”

He may be hungry for a position at Kennedy, but the Golden Cougars’ rookie coach freely admits, “There’s still a lot of Tiger in me.”

And with a little help from Marden, he is back in the coaching fraternity.