Class Act ON AND OFF the Track : When He’s Not Coaching Track at El Camino, Terry McFate Is Teaching Pregnant Girls About Labor and Delivery at Riley High

Like many part-time coaches, Terry McFate teaches high school physical education during the day. When he’s finished around 2:30 p.m., he drives to El Camino College where he has coached the women’s track team for the past eight years.

It’s hectic and often nerve-racking, but he makes it work.

Under McFate, the Warriors have won two state titles and they haven’t finished lower than third at the state meet. He has also led the El Camino women to four Southern California championships and a 39-1 dual meet conference record. This season, the Warriors are 4-0 in the South Coast Conference.

McFate’s record sets him apart from most walk-on coaches. So does his physical education class.

His students don’t do jumping jacks, play softball or soccer. Far from it.

Just how far is evident when entering the 42-year-old teacher’s classroom at Riley High, a continuation school in Watts. The walls are decorated with posters depicting fetuses in various stages of pregnancy and instructional posters on everything from breast feeding to prenatal exercises.

Pictures of young girls holding infants are displayed on a bulletin board along with several “announcing arrival” cards with photos of newborn babies in the center. A magazine called “Lamaze” sits on McFate’s small desk along with a book titled “First Egg. First Stage of Labor.”

McFate teaches physical education with an emphasis in labor and delivery. All of his students are pregnant girls from South-Central Los Angeles who want to fulfill their academic requirements during their pregnancy.

“The state of California says they cannot kick you out of school because you’re pregnant, but a lot of these girls drop out because they’re embarrassed,” McFate said. “They feel the peer pressure.”

About 170 girls from seventh to 12th grade are enrolled at the school, which offers basic academic courses and two free meals. Each student is excused two to three weeks to deliver. After the baby is born, the mother comes back for another six weeks before being sent back to her original high school.

McFate has seen more than 2,000 pregnancies. Most of his former students return with their baby for a visit. Some come back pregnant.

Earlier this week, a former student dropped by with her 2-year-old daughter. McFate was not surprised to hear she might soon be back in his class.

“What? Naw! Really? You’re not pregnant again are you?” he said to the girl. “I told you just concentrate on one.”

Then he turned to a reporter and said: “These are kids having kids. The problem is parents are not open with their children. I tell them one child is a mistake and two will keep you in the house forever. But they keep taking chances. I call it sex roulette.”

McFate has taught labor and delivery at Riley for six years. His class covers everything related to pregnancy, from conception to the late stages of dilating. He trys to make lessons fun because that’s the only way some of his kids will learn. All of them have lower socioeconomic backgrounds and a lot of them come from broken homes. Some are only 12 years old.

“He’s a funny guy,” said Mary Lazos, a 17-year-old whose baby is a little over a month old. “I was scared when I came here, but he taught me a lot. He’s so easy to talk to. I told him everything. I mean at first I thought it was weird that a man was teaching the class, but the first day he made me feel right at home.”

McFate uses a game called family feud to help the girls learn. He walks around the room asking questions from index cards and the student with the most correct answers wins.

Some of the questions include:

How long do you stay in the hospital with natural delivery?

What determines when a Cesarean goes home from the hospital?

Should you rush to the hospital after your first contraction?

When do you start menstruation again after having the baby?

Some of the girls giggle through the day’s lesson and others take mental notes. Most of them will say that McFate has made a big difference in their young lives.

“If it wasn’t for breathing I wouldn’t have made it and he taught me how to breathe,” said Alma Cobian, a 16-year-old who gave birth to a girl last month. “He says everything straight out. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. He helped me so much. I just can’t tell you.”

McFate, a former decathlete and football player, also stresses physical fitness. His girls run and lift weights once a week. They also play volleyball.

“Mary Decker (the American record holder in the 800-meters, 1,500-meters

and the mile) ran five miles through the seventh month,” he said. “Do you know how much a baby weighs in the fifth month? One pound! That’s it. You can do anything. A lot of these girls are exercising more now than they did before they came here.”

McFate is caring, but demanding of his students and athletes. He believes hard work is the key to success and he’s proven the theory correct. He was a great two-sport athlete at South Hills High in West Covina and in 1968 he won the junior college state decathlon title at Citrus College. He was also a wide receiver for the Owls’ highly ranked football team.

He received a football scholarship to the University of Texas El Paso, but sustained a severe knee injury during preseason practice that forced him to give up athletics. He transferred to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he majored in physical education, because living in El Paso was unbearable.

While studying to get his teaching credential at Cal Poly Pomona, McFate coached football at South Hills for two years. He led his alma mater to the CIF 4-A Division title in 1972. After that he led Drew Junior High to four consecutive L.A. Unified track championships.

In 1980 McFate took over the Manual Arts boys’ and girls’ track and cross-country programs. In four years there his teams never lost a dual meet and he compiled more than 80 wins. The girls won four Southern League titles and two L.A. City titles. His cross-country teams also placed first in league every year he was there.

In 1984 McFate took over the women’s program at El Camino. The principal at Manual Arts told him he’d lose his physical education teaching job if he quit coaching track at the school, so McFate looked elsewhere for work. That’s how he ended up at Riley.

“The lady that taught the labor and delivery class knew me,” he said. “She was leaving and recommended me for the job. When she told me what I’d be teaching I said, ‘You gotta be kidding!’ I was shocked to see 75 pregnant girls.”

McFate says he learned the subject matter by sitting through classes, studying and doing lots of research. His expertise has proven to be a great asset in coaching women.

“It is a little different coaching women because you got your monthly cycle then you got people in love at this age,” McFate said. “And it depends where they come from, their home situation. I just put my time in and I get into their lives. I help them and they trust me.”

Dave Shannon, El Camino’s associate athletic director, admires McFate’s success with female athletes. Shannon coached women’s track and cross-country at the school for more than 10 years before being promoted.

“It takes great patience and great understanding to coach women,” Shannon said. “He’s a hard worker and he has a great rapport with his athletes. He’s very involved with those girls and he works very close with them because he’s genuinely concerned about them.”

Shannon says McFate is also great at spotting talent. He can tell if a kid has what it takes at an early age.

“He knew Sharette Garcia (a two-time 800-meter state champion and 1,500-meter state champion) when she was in junior high and he knew she was a tiger,” Shannon said. “And he’s a great teacher. I’ve seen him teach people how to throw the javelin and I’ve seen them go on and be successful in that event.”

Over the years, McFate has helped unpolished athletes develop into top-notch competitors. Some of them include: triple jumper Renita Robinson, javelin and discuss thrower Toya Barnes, sprinters LaWanda Cabell and Myra Mayberry and hurdler Margaret Hemmans.

Robinson was a two-time state champion at El Camino in 1985-86 and she went on to win the NCAA triple jump title at the University of Nebraska. Barnes, a state discus champion at El Camino in 1986, also competed at Nebraska where she was a three-time Big Eight shotput champion.

Cabell, a 400-meter state champ at El Camino, ran on USC’s national champion 4 x 400 relay team in 1986. Mayberry, a four-time state champ at El Camino, was also on the Trojans’ national champion relay team that year. Hemmans won three state titles for the Warriors and went on to win a conference hurdle title at San Diego State University.

“I don’t know, I guess I’m a good motivator,” McFate said. “I try to get more work out of anybody than they think they can do. The key to our success is that we work hard and we earn it. You can’t say anybody works harder than we do.”

LaToya Polk, the Warriors’ top middle distance runner, says McFate has a way of motivating athletes to work extra hard.

“He’s more like a friend,” Polk said. “I’ve had great relationships with other coaches, but Terry is one of us. We don’t talk to him like he’s a coach because . . . it’s like he’s part of us. He knows what we can do and when we come to him and say ‘I don’t think I can,’ he knows we can and he challenges us. Then we end up doing it.”

Barnes, a graduate of Narbonne High, says she never would have received a Division I track scholarship without McFate.

“I did the javelin and the shotput in high school, but he taught me to throw the discus,” she said. “He pushed me so hard. I had never been pushed like that. He was definitely my toughest coach, even tougher than my coaches at Nebraska.

“He taught me discipline and he introduced me to things I had never done before. I only wish I had more one-on-one time with him because he had a lot of girls to coach at one time.”

McFate says, for now, success makes up for his hectic schedule which includes daily drives from his Long Beach home to Watts and Torrance. He also travels long distances for weekend track meets. He jokes that Sundays are “the days I recharge my battery and say hello to my wife.”

His wife, Fran, is a five-time U.S. National roller-skating champion. They have no children.