West L.A. College Hopes for a New Football Coach : Community college athletics: The school wants a new man by February to replace coach who failed to win a game in two seasons.

Athletic Director Jim Raack of West Los Angeles College hopes to hire a football coach by February to replace Dick Jones, who resigned last week after the Oilers failed to win a game in his two seasons at the helm.

Raack said the college will try to find a full-time position on the college staff for the new coach in December and that Jones will remain as a full-time counselor in the extended opportunity program and services department.

“According to my time line,” Raack said, “we would identify the (staff) . . . position this month, advertise the position by the end of the month and interview through mid-January. We hope to appoint a coach by Feb. 1 and that he comes on campus next July 1.”

He said that Jones wrote in a letter of resignation that coaching football kept him from devoting enough attention to his job as a college counselor. Jones, whose 1988 and 1989 teams had 0-10 records, was hired in April, 1988, after WLAC dropped football for two years because of budget cutbacks in the Los Angeles Community College District.

Steve Bresnahan, then a Cal State Long Beach assistant coach, was originally hired as WLAC’s head coach in March of 1988 but resigned three weeks later because he had decided he could not commute to WLAC nor move his family from their home in Mission Viejo, Raack said.

Jones, a Cal State Long Beach assistant at the time, was originally hired as a WLAC counselor and an assistant to Bresnahan. When Bresnahan resigned, Jones stepped in as the Oilers’ head coach, but it was too late in the year to do much recruiting of high school seniors.

Raack said that the WLAC football program “is not in trouble. There are problems we have to solve, but they are not unsolvable. The financing and support are as good as they have ever been.”

He said that he and part-time WLAC assistant football coaches will visit high schools and talk to prospective players until a new head coach is named. He added that the new coach, if he is hired from a local college or high school, would be able to do recruiting before officially taking over July 1. If an out-of-town candidate is hired, he could designate current part-time assistants to visit high schools until he arrives, he said.

Jim Babcock, WLAC’s head coach when the program was dropped and who remained at the school as an instructor, is not a candidate for the head coaching job, Raack said.