THE COLLEGES / THERESA MUNOZ : Keever Mastered Wrestling From Sidelines

Often the best coaches are the ones who weren’t great athletes. Their lack of mastery prepared them to better understand how skills evolve.

That’s why Chicago White Sox hitting guru Walt Hriniak can teach how to hit a major-league curveball, even though he couldn’t hit one in a career that was limited to 99 big-league at-bats.

It also explains how Moorpark College wrestling Coach John Keever has built the Raider program into one of the best in the junior college ranks without having ever donned a tunic.

A college football and rugby player, Keever understood competition, but when he founded the Moorpark program in 1969 he didn’t understand wrestling, a sport that emphasizes hands-on teaching.

Undaunted, Keever took it upon himself to learn everything about the sport. He read coaching manuals, attended clinics, memorized film and soaked up scraps of information from the nation’s coaching leaders.

“It wasn’t all of a sudden a light turned on and I knew the sport,” Keever said. “When you feel you know it completely, you get beat.

“A lot of people don’t understand the skills that are required. They think you just throw them down, like Channel 13 (All-Star wrestling). It is highly technical. It requires constant repetition until it is second nature.”

As Keever’s knowledge grew and his demonstrations of double leg takedowns, reversals and escapes became textbook, he developed a passion for wrestling.

“It is a very fascinating sport and very humiliating,” Keever said. “A team sport, yet an individual sport with the one-on-one battles. It has the intrigue of one person answering to himself between the lines. You have the support of the team and the coach, but you are the only one laying it on the line.”

In time, the fact that Keever never wrestled became less of a hindrance to his coaching ability and more of a regret, an opportunity lost.

At Hamilton High, the City Section school Keever attended, wrestling wasn’t offered. Ventura College didn’t field a team, either, although Keever was captain of the football team.

His football career continued at UC Santa Barbara, where he was awarded All-American status in rugby.

Upon earning his master’s degree from Chico State in 1968, Keever was hired as a football coach at Moorpark College, a third-year school eager to start a football program. The job description also included wrestling coach.

For nine years, Keever coached both sports until wrestling was moved to the fall, requiring him to choose between them.

“It was a career decision,” Keever said. “I got great fulfillment from it. It wasn’t that I disliked football.

“Only a wrestler will understand why I made the choice.”

And only a wrestler understands what it is like to have to shed three pounds in 18 hours or spend half a night in the sauna or nurse an iced tea while his friends are munching down burgers, fries and milk shakes.

“There are so many sacrifices,” Keever said. “So much dedication and giving is required. The tougher the sport the harder it is to attract people. That is why once you are a wrestler, you are always a wrestler. It is always in you.”

Raider wrestlers must lose on average between eight and 10 pounds at the beginning of the season to fill all 10 weight categories, ranging from 118 pounds to heavyweight (190 to 275).

Then the difficult part--keeping it off.

Yet no Moorpark wrestler has missed a meet this season because he couldn’t make weight.

Unusual?

“No,” Keever said. “They do what they have to do.”

That also means daily afternoon practice sessions, weight training twice a week and morning running sessions.

The practices begin with a team meeting and are followed by a warmup, review period, new-skills period, drilling session, scrimmage session, strength training exercises, including rope climbing, push-ups, sit-ups and jumping drills, and conditioning drills, including hill charges and sprints.

The regimen has produced a 207-103-4 record in Keever’s 22 years as well as 35 All-Americans and seven individual state champions, including 126-pound sophomore Delfino Ochoa, who won the 118-pound title last season.

This season, the Raiders are 8-3 overall and 4-0 in the Western State Conference going into today’s Cal Poly tournament in San Luis Obispo.

No one seems to mind that this marvelous mentor never made a pin.

“I’m not one bit embarrassed,” Keever said, “by telling people where I started.”

Bowl speculation: If the Moorpark football team wins its last two games, it likely will face several Dec. 1 bowl opportunities.

In one scenario, Moorpark would play in the Producers Dairy Bowl, a bowl game in Fresno that attempts to match the top teams from the north and south.

Bakersfield (8-0), the south’s best team, likely will play at home, however, in the Potato Bowl, and College of the Sequoias (8-0), the north’s best team, will probably play in its Sequoia Bowl.

That leaves Moorpark (7-1), the second-best team in the south, against the second-best team in the north, perhaps Diablo Valley (7-1) or local favorite Fresno (6-2).

Moorpark Coach Jim Bittner is determined to play the strongest opponent available, however, which could lead Moorpark back to an Orange County bowl game for the third consecutive season.

Possible Orange County bowl opponents include: Fullerton, Orange Coast and Riverside, all 6-2.