Teaching the Battering Rams : Former Burroughs High Star Penaranda Makes an Impact as an NFL Special-Teams Coach

If you’re in Orange County and want to laugh, there are several places to go. Anaheim Stadium, to watch the Angels, for example. Or go to Disneyland and check out the admission prices. Both provide amusement.

But don’t talk to Jairo Penaranda. He is not very funny at all.

“Jairo is a very serious guy,” said Bob Dunivant, Penaranda’s coach at Burroughs High in Burbank from 1972-75. “He was very hard-working. There wasn’t too much humor with Jairo (pronounced HY-row).”

Penaranda is, however, a sound choice if you’re interested in football.

The former standout running back for Burroughs played at UCLA and then in the NFL. He is now a coach with the Rams. And although he never made many people laugh, he did make many hold their sides in pain. The 6-foot, 210-pound Penaranda did this by running into them on a football field.

“Jairo was one of the best all-around backs in Burroughs history,” Dunivant said. “He reminded me of Roger Craig, the way he ran. He’d get those knees pumping way up high and it was very difficult to tackle him. Very difficult. I remember Jairo dragging people down the football field a lot. And he never made an attempt to evade people on the field. He went after them.”

Penaranda, whose brothers Edgar and Al also played football for Burroughs, scored five touchdowns in one game at Burroughs during his senior year when he was named to the All-CIF and all-state teams. He also played football for Burroughs, lettered in track and was the captain of both school teams in his senior season.

He played two seasons at San Fernando Valley State College (now Cal State Northridge) and then earned a position on the UCLA roster in 1978 as a walk-on, but he did not play in a game that season. In 1979, Coach Terry Donahue used Penaranda extensively as a fullback and on special teams, taking advantage of his powerful build and mammoth legs and his ability and desire to block giant men with little or nothing in the way of a neck.

In 1980, however, he carried the ball 55 times for 254 yards and scored two touchdowns while continuing to serve as the blocking back and as a wrecking ball on special teams.

It was during the 1979 season, when he played sparingly, that Penaranda said he began looking at the game from a coach’s perspective.

“When you’re on the second string, you get a lot of time to watch,” said Penaranda, now 32. “I did that, and I started to look at things differently than I did as a player. You start to see the whole game instead of just what your assignment is. After a while, I wanted to learn more about the game, to learn things from a coach’s viewpoint. So I watched and I listened and I started thinking that coaching might be fun.”

It would, however, have to wait.

Penaranda was drafted by the Rams in 1980 but played sparingly in the NFL for just two seasons. After a season playing for the Oakland Invaders of the U.S. Football League, he knew his days of crashing into people were over. But he also knew that he wanted to stay in the game. And what he had seen and learned as a player and a sideline spectator during the previous several years he now wanted to put to use.

His coaching career began in the same place his playing career had started, at Burroughs.

“He helped me for a couple of years,” Dunivant said. “He had never mentioned coaching to me before that, but after he started I knew he was destined for success as a coach. He had such a great way of getting along with the kids, and he was such a responsible guy.”

Penaranda took the next step in 1987, signing on as a volunteer coach working with the special teams at USC, not an easy move for a guy who had been conditioned for three years to stomp on anything wearing cardinal and gold. After two seasons with the Trojans, he got a call from the Rams and began his pro coaching career last year, working as an assistant on the special teams.

It is a part of the game that the hard-hitting Penaranda said he enjoys very much, now that he doesn’t have to do it.

“My junior year at UCLA we were playing USC and I got my first chance on the kickoff-return team,” he said. “We didn’t have a very good team that year, and I was real nervous about it. I can still remember it so clearly. They kicked and all of a sudden all I can see are these huge guys running downfield, and it seemed like all of them were running at me. There were several of us together, forming the wedge, and they just destroyed us.

“After I got up, I remember thinking, ‘This is not for me.’ But I stuck with it.”

Now, as he gives advice to the Rams’ special-teams players, he knows how they feel about such assignments.

“Most people have an image of what special-teams guys are like,” Penaranda said. “They think all of them must be crazy. But they’re not. Special teams are a personal challenge. You have to say to yourself, ‘My man will not make a block,’ or ‘My man will not make the tackle,’ and you have to take it personally. But at the same time, you have to work as a unit.

“Special-teams play is chaos in harmony and a controlled madness. Despite what it looks like, there are a lot of rules to follow.”

Penaranda was born in the Atlantic port of Barranquilla, Colombia. His family moved to the United States when he was an infant, settling first in Miami and a few years later in Burbank. Penaranda has returned to Barranquilla several times. On occasion he and relatives have watched satellite transmissions of old NFL games together. His relatives, he said, pretend they understand, but he knows better.

“They watch with me because they know that’s what I do,” he said. “They understand very little of it, though.”

Penaranda, it seems, has enough football knowledge for the entire family. And he hopes to know much more about it before he leaves the game.

“I hope I can coach permanently,” he said. “I hope this is my start, that this becomes my career. And I want to stay with the pro game. I watch some college games, but I don’t want to go back. This is where I want to make my life.”

He should, according to one who has watched his transformation from a youngster to a 32-year-old man, have few problems.

“The thing about Jairo that I always noticed,” Dunivant said, “was that football was always No. 1 in his life, even as a kid. The other kids had other things to do and football was just one of them, but with Jairo it was different. He was the first one on the practice field and the last one to leave. When he coached with me, he was the same way.

“And even though he had been gone from here for a long time, when he coached here the kids on the team listened to Jairo. The name Penaranda means a lot at Burroughs.”