FROM BUST TO B EST : McCathron’s Coordination Caught Up With His Size in Time to Earn Him a Division I Football Scholarship

Rick McCathron showed up at Thousand Oaks High four years ago as the answer to every little guy’s prayer. He came out for the football team as a 6-foot, 2-inch, 200-pound target.

He was new to the school, having just moved from Bakersfield, and missed the first few weeks of practice. And the Thousand Oaks freshman team was his first exposure to organized sports.

He towered over most of his teammates, but his playing ability lagged far behind his size. He was slow and clumsy, an adolescent whose growth exceeded his coordination.

When the squad paired off for one-on-one tackling and blocking drills, even the team’s smaller players scrambled to get McCathron as a partner. They knocked him down, separated his shoulder and kept him on the bench for the entire season. He outweighed the starting guard by 60 pounds but never played a down. He was awful and he knew it.

“I was horrible,” he says. “I wasn’t used to moving around and everyone just picked on me. It was a horrid experience. The whole season was a series of bad days. A good day was when I survived.”

McCathron good-naturedly recalls his frustrating beginnings in football because his place is now secure in Lancer football history. Four years after his woeful start, he leaves Thousand Oaks as one of the best linemen in school history and has been chosen for the South team in the 38th annual Shrine all-star game.

Kickoff for the game that features 68 of the state’s top high school seniors from last season is scheduled for 6 p.m. Saturday at the Rose Bowl.

McCathron helped lead Thousand Oaks to a Southern Section title in 1987 and was named most valuable player on last year’s Marmonte League championship team. He made all the best teams after the season: all-league, All-Southern Section, all-state and the all-state academic team. He carried a 3.5 grade-point average and has accepted a football scholarship to play at Oregon State this year.

Considering those accomplishments, perhaps McCathron told tall tales about his football shortcomings. Not so, says Thousand Oaks Coach Bob Richards.

“He’s not exaggerating,” Richards says. “Rick had a bad time his first year. We’ve had a handful of kids who matured the way Rick did, but I don’t know if anyone has achieved what he did. Generally, kids who have the experience that Rick had as a freshman, don’t come out the next year.”

But McCathron kept at it, and for reasons that stretch behind masochism. By tiny increments, he improved. By the end of the season he actually looked forward to practice. He then undertook an ambitious off-season conditioning program. When tempted with the prospect of skipping workouts, memories of his demoralizing season lured him back to the weight room.

“I got fed up with the season and thought if I was this bad now, I was never going to get better,” he says. “But the humiliation motivated me. I said to myself that I was going to show these guys. But actually, I did it to prove to myself that I could do it.”

Thousand Oaks fielded a changed player on its sophomore team a year later. McCathron’s training program transformed much of his mass to muscle and he had 20 pounds more of it. He started at offensive tackle and defensive end the entire season and earned a promotion to the varsity for the playoffs.

Thus motivated, McCathron continued his off-season training program and held an advantage over most of his linemates. Unlike many oversized interior lineman who conserve strength by moving as slowly as possible, McCathron loves to run. He runs a 4.8 40-yard dash and may be the quickest offensive lineman in Saturday’s game.

“I worked the (Shrine) game last year and I can tell you that Rick is going to be one of the fastest linemen in the game,” Richards said. “A lot of years we don’t have fullbacks (at Thousand Oaks) that run as well as he does.”

Richards insists McCathron ran nearly as well as tailback Mike Lindsay--at least on one play last season. Lindsay rushed for 1,046 yards, the fifth consecutive year the Lancers had a 1,000-yard rusher.

“I can show you films on an 80-yard touchdown run by Lindsay where he’s at the 20-yard line and McCathron’s running right behind him,” Richards says. “Rick’s going to end up as one of those 280-pound guys who can run.”

McCathron, now 6-4 and up to 260 pounds, made his reputation at Thousand Oaks on the counter gap, a play popularized by the Washington Redskins in which the guard and tackle from the same side pull and lead the ballcarrier through the hole on the other side of the center.

“I live to pull,” McCathron says. “I like moving out in the open field where I can react. That’s when I have fun.”

Fun comes easily to the affable McCathron, a big man with nary a trace of hostility in his character. In fact, the absence of a mean streak worried his Thousand Oaks coaches, who sought more aggression from their big lineman.

They hoped a little bit of Greg Banks would rub off on him. Banks, a 1988 graduate who now starts at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, also starred on the Thousand Oaks offensive line where he was the Lancers’ master of mayhem. Banks had no time for the gentle big man image. He was too busy trying to separate defensive players from their senses.

“Greg had a physical orneriness to him,” Richards says. “He’d bury you if he could. We always wished we could get some of Greg into Rick. I think we first saw that at the end of Rick’s junior year. He pancaked a guy on a counter gap play and then jumped up with his fist in the air. We played it back a couple of times. Nobody could believe how aggressive he had gotten.”

Still, it’s the gentler side of McCathron that Richards will remember. McCathron wants to become a physical therapist but is intrigued with coaching. He volunteered to help with spring practice and surprised Richards with his conscientiousness.

“We have lots of guys who show up for a practice or two in the spring and help out, but Rick was there all 14 days of practice working with the sophomore linemen,” Richards says. “His enthusiasm was tremendous and he got his points across. I think he would make an excellent coach because he can analyze things and communicate well. He’s just got a good athletic aptitude.”

You could never have convinced McCathron’s teammates of that back among the Lancer freshmen.

“We were surprised that somebody that big was so clumsy,” says Ahmed Selim, a McCathron teammate for four years and the 140-pound freshman who started ahead of him. “Seeing Rick as a senior and seeing how much he changed and how good he got, it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy.”