Former Ivy League Coach Now Plots Strategy in Drug Wars

The voice cut through the smoke and the smugness of the audience, which was mostly male, mostly white and mostly thirty-to-fiftysomething.

Members of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Philadelphia gathered after work in the elegant banquet room at the Downtown Club for drinks, dinner and a polite speech.

What they got was Ed Zubrow, the man who walked away from an Ivy League football championship team and marched into a city’s drug war. Zubrow’s voice echoed in the hall, bouncing off the chandeliers, the curtains, the high ceiling, even the chintz Greek columns that held potted plants. His right hand jabbed in the air, and even though he looked slightly uncomfortable in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he was a coach again, calling the plays for his troops. The only thing missing was a whistle.

Zubrow talked of newborn babies addicted to cocaine, of children on their way to school forced to walk past drug dealers, of parents taking to the streets for night-long vigils to reclaim their neighborhoods from the crack suppliers and users. He quoted the city’s most prominent real-estate developer, Willard Rouse, who said, “Our kids are going to inherit a pile of ----.”

The audience stiffened, but listened.

“There is a crisis,” Zubrow said. “Children are victims of that crisis. We can’t build enough prisons and we can’t build walls high enough around our cities.”

Zubrow’s message: Get involved. Adopt a school. Establish drug-free zones. Lobby the federal government to increase funding for drug-treatment centers. Look at your neighborhood, your school, your home, seek solutions to solve an epidemic.

“For better or worse, this city is our home, and these little children are all of our children,” Zubrow said.

He finished. The crowd applauded and left.

Quickly.

Zubrow is neither a zealot nor a hero. Last March, at age 38, he simply traded jobs, leaving the comfortable world of Ivy League athletics for the harsh reality of inner-city schools.

After compiling a 23-7 record in three seasons as the head football coach at the University of Pennsylvania, Zubrow became a special assistant to Philadelphia schools superintendent Constance Clayton. His mission: Coordinate district programs dealing with substance abuse, dropout prevention and senior high school interscholastic athletics. The Philadelphia school system -- composed of 256 schools and 190,000 students -- is the nation’s fifth-largest.

This fall, instead of poring over playbooks and film, Zubrow studies city maps and congressional testimony. He no longer calls plays or recruits athletes; he listens to neighborhood watch groups, police officers and students and tries to mobilize a prevent defense against drugs.

Zubrow’s former team, the Penn Quakers, was to end its season Thursday at home against Cornell, trying to win once more to finish at .500. He attends all of Penn’s games, and says he doesn’t miss coaching. But in his new job, success and failure can’t be measured on autumn afternoons. The challenge often is overwhelming, and the season is unending. In a salute to Zubrow this fall, the Penn band played the theme to the television show “Mission Impossible.”

“One of the things that is different about this is the terrain is changing almost daily,” Zubrow said. “You don’t have any measuring sticks. You just keep going and going.”

What motivates a man to stop in mid-career and start over again in a job some view as an impossible mission? The answer is complex.

Zubrow easily could have climbed aboard the coaching merry-go-round, turning his success at Penn into a job at a major football-playing university. But two images haunted him: the face of the recruit desperate to leave behind the crack dealers who invaded his neighborhood and the face of the homeless woman, the human 5:30 wake-up call Zubrow saw each morning at a convenience store one block from the Penn campus in West Philadelphia.

“The increased visibility of many of our city’s problems made it harder to ignore,” Zubrow said. “You stop for coffee, and there was a homeless woman on the street. It’s all the problems all of us see. Sometimes, you have to get involved in a good fight.”

George Weiss got Zubrow involved. Weiss is a Penn alumnus and football booster who in 1987 adopted the sixth-grade class at Belmont Elementary School, guaranteeing to finance a college education for all 112 students.

“At Penn, the worst thing is you recruit a guy and he goes to Harvard or Yale,” Weiss said. “With drugs, you’re talking life or death. You can’t go in there with a Don Quixote attitude and lean against the windmill. Ed is a realist.”

After the 1988 football season, Weiss brought together Zubrow and the city schools superintendent, Clayton. They talked. A job was offered. A mission was undertaken.

Zubrow said he hasn’t made a sweeping career change. Coaching, he said, is educating. Zubrow, who received his undergraduate degree in American studies from Haverford College and his master’s degree in education from Penn, said he is in another teaching role.

“I believe that unless we find a way to get a handle on the drug problem in this country, then it’s going to upset the career paths of an awful lot of people,” he said.

His job is amorphous. He has spent the last eight months educating himself about the drug problem, displaying the same careful attention to detail that marked his tenure as Penn coach. His office is filled with street maps designating the drug-free zones around every city school; statistics can be dredged up from books and pamphlets that are stacked behind his desk.

“People look at a little piece of the problem, but Zubrow, because he is fresh and new, is interested in the broad picture of education and getting kids into the working world. He is terrific,” said Ruth DuBois, executive director of the Corporate Alliance for Drug Education, which finances a drug-prevention program for the city’s elementary school students.

Zubrow’s thrust is to get all facets of the community active in drug awareness and prevention.

“I don’t think there is a part of the city not touched by drugs, and children are the most victimized by it, whether they’re the crack babies or the neglected ones, or the children who get dragged into the drug economy,” Zubrow said. “What kids tell you is they are seriously affected by drugs, whether it’s the younger kids who ask what do you do if the bullets follow you to the ground, or whether it’s the high school students, who share their parents’ frustrations and fears and sense of hopelessness. What we’re hearing from kids is that this is a major problem.”

And what Zubrow is trying to tell others is that he is not unique, that the career choice he made is neither noble nor naive, just necessary.

“The drug problem is not my problem, it’s not just the city’s problem, it’s all of our problem,” Zubrow said. “The sooner we recognize that and start making a true national commitment to fighting the problem, the greater the chances that we’ll eventually succeed. To say it’s hopeless is to guarantee it will be.”

Zubrow isn’t tilting at windmills or pushing a rock up a mountain. He is doing a job and fighting a battle.

“We don’t need saints,” he said. “We don’t need martyrs. We don’t need a few people to do everything. We need everyone to do something.”