New Coach, a Victory Make Believers Out of College Team : Football: After five straight losing seasons, the Whittier Poets rejoice at turnaround in team attitude, commitment and win-loss record.

A month before he died last December, Cal State Long Beach football Coach George Allen took defensive coordinator Ken Visser aside. Visser, an assistant with the 49ers for 12 seasons under four coaches, felt it was time to move on, but he had second thoughts about his application for the coaching job at Whittier College, a Division III school where Allen coached in the 1950s.

The Poets had just finished 0-9, their fifth consecutive losing season.

But as Allen spoke, Visser was persuaded that he should pursue the job.

“Whittier, huh?” Visser recalled Allen saying. “Why don’t you go in there and see if you can get things going again, see if you can turn it around.”

If a 15-3 victory in its season opener two weeks ago against Claremont McKenna-Harvey Mudd-Scripps colleges is any indication, Visser is turning Whittier around faster than most people thought possible. Claremont, which was 2-7 last year, is far from the most formidable opponent Whittier will play this season. Still, the first victory in more than a year was reason for optimism.

Senior center Rich Kim sums up the team’s feeling about Visser: “He brought something new here.”

Even Visser, 46, seated in the college activity center not far from a plaque commemorating Allen, thought it would take more time to win a game.

“I didn’t come in here not to be successful in the next three or four years,” Visser said. “But I’m not going to say we’ll win right away.”

Whittier’s home opener is at 7 p.m. Saturday against Menlo College of Menlo Park. The Poets are 1-1 after a 15-2 loss to the University of La Verne in a Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference game last Saturday. But even that game produced some positive moments, particularly by Whittier’s stingy defense.

For almost a decade, Whittier, which has won more than 70 SCIAC titles in 19 sports, has struggled to recruit football players. The $19,000 yearly tuition--although not the highest in the conference--is one reason.

“We have tons of people who want to come here, but many can’t afford it,” Athletic Director Dave Jacobs said.

Student loans help some athletes, but many potential players have difficulty qualifying.

“We missed the middle-class kid, the kid whose dad makes too much money,” said former coach Hugh Mendez, now at Pioneer High School in Whittier.

Division III schools are prohibited by NCAA rules from awarding scholarships, sending coaches on recruiting trips or having spring football practice. The only way to contact potential players is by telephone or letter. The first day of classes is the first time a coach knows for sure who he has. Recruiting, then, becomes “a game of numbers,” according to Visser.

“The more players you can get a hold of, the greater number you may get to come to Whittier,” he said.

Mendez was the Poets’ coach from 1980 to 1989 and won SCIAC titles in 1981 and ’82. But as the number of players in the program declined, so did the number of victories. From 1987 to 1990, Whittier won only 10 of 37 games.

Mendez resigned in 1989 and assistant Don Uyeshima became the interim coach for 1990. Only eight new players and about 36 returning players greeted him. Uyeshima chose not to reapply when the job was opened in November.

Over the past 10 months Visser has raised $5,000 in donations to purchase weights and playing equipment. Whittier College President James Ash, pleased with Visser’s enthusiasm, beefed up stipends for some of Visser’s seven part-time assistants.

Visser also met with returning players.

“I want the players to have that attitude about the idea of commitment,” he said. “This is Division III, but I want them to compete to the best of their ability.”

Previously, players joked that Whittier practices were like going to “Club Med,” according to senior linebacker Cory Baker, because there was a lot of time spent standing around.

“Now we have very specific practices,” he said. “They are very structured. There’s not a lot of milling around. I wish I was a sophomore again.”

Visser arrives at Whittier from his Garden Grove home early each morning and often leaves after dark. He reviews game notes or tries to identify potential players from one of several scouting services he subscribes to. More than 500 recruiting letters have been mailed and countless telephone calls are made each day.

Whittier draws many of its players from the Northeastern United States because the Poets’ campus is similar to college campuses in that region. In addition, lacrosse, a successful sport at Whittier, is played at many East Coast prep schools. Two football players, cornerback Mike Schreiber and kicker Berto Cersi, both from Long Island, N.Y., came to Whittier initially to play lacrosse.

Visser, who was a linebacker at Westminster High, Orange Coast College and Occidental College, got his first coaching job as an assistant at Occidental. He later became an assistant at Pasadena High before getting the coaching job at Servite High in Anaheim, where he was 37-11-4.

In 1979, Cal State Long Beach Coach Dave Currey hired Visser as defensive secondary coach. Mike Sheppard, who replaced Currey in 1984, retained Visser and when Larry Reisbig replaced Sheppard in 1987, Visser became assistant head coach. Last year, under Allen, Visser was promoted to defensive coordinator.

“I was lucky,” Visser said. “Instead of me having to move around the country as an assistant coach, like so many do, the coaches came to me. I learned something new from each man I worked for at Long Beach. It was like a revolving clinic.”

Visser is hopeful of building a ball-control offense that will pressure the defense to come up with all the big plays. He calls his offensive approach “smash-face,” but warns that, with his background as a defensive coach, he will leave the details of the offense to assistant coaches.

So far, the Poets’ offense has been punch-less. More depth would help, Visser said. The team has only 52 players--the smallest roster in the conference. More than half are freshmen. There are 30 new players. A year from now Visser expects at least 40.

Jacobs says Visser will be a “miracle worker” if the team has a .500 season. Whether the college gets back to being a powerhouse, as it was for a 30-year span that began in the early 1950s, remains to be seen.

“I figured when I came here, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do,’ ” Visser said. “There’s a fun aspect here, not from a pressure standpoint. If it doesn’t work out in three or four years, well, we can say we tried.”