NOT-SO-GREAT EXPECTATIONS : Coaches Who Take Over Perennially Poor Teams Often Lead the League in Frustrations

As he walked around the Laguna Hills High School campus last year, being introduced as the school’s new football coach, Steve Bresnahan couldn’t help but notice the strange looks he was getting from many of the faculty members.

“It was this expression that said, ‘Gee, you’re the new coach? That’s really too bad. I’m sorry to hear that,’ ” Bresnahan said.

“I could tell by their expression that they thought I needed to be treated by a psychiatrist.”

Although Bresnahan was a bit taken aback by the faculty’s reaction, he was not entirely surprised. Laguna Hills has never come close to becoming a traditional football power. In the past four years, the Hawks have a 4-36 record.

In contrast to schools that have high-powered, traditionally successful football programs--such as Mater Dei and Edison--many county schools find it difficult to be tremendously optimistic, even at the beginning of a season. Because they’ve struggled in the past, for whatever reasons, their expectations are not nearly as grand as some of their more successful opponents.

For a new coach entering such a program, the situation can be very frustrating. Some coaches say their team was written off long ago by the student body, the faculty and the parents. Because of that, the coaches have a difficult time generating the much-needed enthusiasm that is a part of every flourishing program.

At Canyon, where first-year Coach Loren Shumer has been working as an assistant for the past 12 years, the football program has not been successful. Last year was the school’s worst: the Comanches were 0-10.

Shumer blames a lot of the past failures on undisciplined approaches many coaches took. Player absences were rampant and disciplinary measures were rarely taken. In addition, players were squeezed by peer pressure not to go out for football.

“My kids would face a lot of (ridicule),” Shumer said. “Other kids would say, ‘Why go out for football? You’re just gonna get your brains beat out again.’ ”

Shumer says Canyon’s problems also include a general lack of parental support. Take the school’s football booster club, for example. In fact, you could take them out for lunch in your compact.

There are only six full-time members. Booster club president Jim Frize said he and the other members have tried continually to gain more support but cannot.

“I’ve even sent out letters trying to humiliate the parents into getting them out there to watch some of their kids at the games,” Frize said. “When the players have no support at all, it’s ridiculous.

“We might have a couple hundred adults at the varsity games. They’re always the same people. But there’s just a lot of lazy ones who’d rather sit home and watch TV than come out and watch their kids play.”

Garden Grove Coach Jeff Buenafe said one of the low points of his team’s 0-10 season last year was in their game against La Quinta. Less than 50 fans were in attendance.

“It was the second-to-last game of the year, an away game and a Thursday night,” Buenafe said. “The whole atmosphere in the stadium was real eerie. There were a few people sitting on one side, and a few on the other, and a whole bunch of darkness in between.

“The band wasn’t there, and it was so quiet we got feedback in our headsets. It was really one of the strangest feelings I’ve had as a coach . . . and one of the most depressing.”

An additional frustration--and what may be the worst problem from a coach’s viewpoint--is when the players are so ingrained with losing, that they are convinced they can’t win.

At Garden Grove, a team that’s also 4-36 in the past four years, including an 0-10 stint in 1988, Buenafe said he could see his players’ attitude deteriorate with each defeat last year.

“We simply had kids who were beat before we hit the field,” Buenafe said. “They played like they didn’t think we had a chance.”

It is this downtrodden attitude that coaches say must first be changed before a program can be turned toward a more successful path.

It’s also the most difficult change to manage.

Said Shumer: “Normally, a new coach will come into a losing program and start selling to the kids they can win. I can’t do that. If I did, they’d look at me and say, ‘We heard it all last year and we went 0-10.’ ”

Buenafe said that in the past--he has been an assistant coach at Foothill and Rancho Alamitos--he’d always coached athletes who expected to win. When he came to Garden Grove, it was evident that wasn’t the case.

“The players should expect to do the best they can, and so should the coaches,” he said. “We should expect going into the game that we’re as prepared as our opponent, and we should expect to do well.

“From what I’ve heard in the last few years, those expectations haven’t been there. It was more like, ‘Oh, we’re just out here, playing football . . . ‘ “

Most coaches say the best way to boost a struggling program is to continue to stress the basics--hard work and fundamentals--but most importantly, be realistic.

Said former Santa Ana Coach Tom Meese, who took over a struggling program at Orange this year: “Only a fool says, ‘We will win.’ A bigger fool says ‘We can’t win.’ The thing to say is ‘We can win.’

“To me that really sums it up. You know you have potential, but you also know there will be things that will happen in a game, good and bad, that can make you look either like a hero or like an idiot.

“The reality is, you’re probably neither.”