Struggle Looms at CLU : Football Players Expect Shoup to Fight Dismissal

Would the most noble of Kingsmen do anything else but go out on his shield?

Not on your life. Or your job. Which is why Cal Lutheran University football players expect Bob Shoup to put up quite a struggle before he accepts the school’s decision to permanently relieve him of his coaching duties at the conclusion of the upcoming season.

Will the Kingsmen’s coach of 27 years fight back?

“Oh, yes,” senior captain Pat Wolcott predicted. “I think he will and I hope he does.”

Shoup, the only football coach Cal Lutheran has ever known, had planned to take a one-year sabbatical from his coaching and teaching duties during the 1990-91 school year but fully intended to return to both his faculty and coaching responsibilities the following year.

School officials have other ideas, however. Shoup was told Tuesday night that his classroom hours will be waiting for him but that the football team will not. Adminstrators have refused to discuss the matter until an official statement is released today.

And now the school is bracing for its football patriarch’s response.

Shoup declined comment Wednesday when asked if he would appeal the decision, saying he’d be “better off to wait a little” before responding.

His players wasted little time voicing their opinions. In their collective opinion, Shoup’s dismissal is only one more blow among many to the school’s crumbling athletics program.

They point to the firing of basketball Coach Larry Lopez and the decision to eliminate athletic scholarships last year as other examples of the school’s “animosity toward athletics.”

“Instead of going forward we seem to be going backward,” Wolcott said. “This couldn’t come at a worse time.”

Shoup, 57, who brought the school to prominence by winning the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics football championship in 1971, was an outspoken critic of the school’s decision to eliminate athletic grants and withdraw from the highly competitive Division II Western Football Conference to join the Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

“He had a meeting with us and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to fight this thing and do whatever it takes,’ ” Kingsmen quarterback Tim Zeddies recalled. “And by golly, he stood right by what he said and I guess that made some waves with the administration.”

Indeed, Shoup was a nonconformist. Last fall, he publicly charged that college administrators had covered up a 1985 study that found a move to the SCIAC would be detrimental to the school’s best interests.

“Coach Shoup is a fighter,” Wolcott said. “I’m sure he has a lot of people who don’t like him at this school because he’ll fight for what he believes in.”

John Milam, a sophomore offensive lineman, had his own theory about Shoup’s dismissal.

“He’s the one who has given all the verbal agreements as far as the scholarship money goes,” Milam said of Shoup. “I kind of feel like they want to drive us out. The faster they can get rid of the people on scholarship, the faster they can go to the SCIAC.”

Said Zeddies: “It’s like a pyramid. You break down the foundation, the bottom layer, and each part tumbles down from there.”

Shoup has an overall record of 182-81-6, but in recent seasons the Kingsmen have struggled--another reason for their coach’s ouster, the players say.

“If you win, you don’t get fired, that’s the bottom line,” said Greg Maw, CLU’s placekicker.

Cal Lutheran is 16-27 the past four seasons and has won only two of 23 Western Football Conference games. That record, the players say, is the result of a lack of financial support from the school, not a shortage of coaching ability.

“Coach Shoup built the reputation of this school,” Wolcott said. “It’s too bad they’re treating him like that. If he wants to step down, he should be allowed to step down properly.”

Shoup said he discussed an early retirement proposal with school officials as early as January, but terms of an agreement were never reached.

He reiterated Wednesday that the school’s decision took him by surprise. “There was no communication,” Shoup said. “There had been discussion of what I might do in the future, but nothing specific.”

And now the next move is his.

Might he now leave the football team immediately?

No, he will not.

“I’m looking forward to coaching the team in 1989,” Shoup said. “I made that commitment last January and I don’t see any reason not to fulfill that commitment.”

Said Maw: “We’d like to go out with a winning blast at the end--for Coach Shoup, and for ourselves.”