He’s a Youthful Coach With a Seasoned Approach : Only a Couple of Years Ago, Granite Hills’ Mitch Burton Was a Coach’s Player; at 24, He’s a Coach

As a football player, Mitch Burton was a coach’s dream.

“Dedicated, hard-working, inspirational, intelligent,” said Joe Rockhold, Burton’s coach at El Capitan High. “If you think of all the things a young man and a football player should be, he was all of them.”

Is there any reason to believe then that Burton won’t be a player’s dream as a football coach?

Perhaps, and the cynics surely are pointing to it already.

It’s his age.

Mitch Burton, the new head football coach at Granite Hills High School, is 24.

Hired in June, one year after graduating from San Diego State, Burton is the youngest coach in the history of the Grossmont Conference and one of the youngest ever in San Diego County. He played against 24-year-olds at SDSU.

“I’m sure there are a few people waiting for me to make a mistake,” Burton said. “And I’m sure I will oblige them. I know there are those that think I’m too young or not experienced enough to do this job.”

Which brings up the question, how much does age really matter?

In terms of coaching, very little, said Herb Meyer of El Camino.

Meyer was 24, five months younger than Burton, when he got his first head coaching job at Oceanside during the Eisenhower Administration.

Meyer, now the winningest coach in county history with a 231-97-14 record, has won a record seven section championships.

“Things have changed a great deal over the years,” Meyer said. “It used to be, for the most part, you paid your dues as an assistant for so many years before anyone let you become a head coach. I think everybody now is looking for the person who is most qualified.”

Enter Burton. Brad Burton that is, Mitch’s twin brother who is five minutes older.

“(Mitch) may be young, but he’s certainly credible,” Brad said. “He’s always been such a responsible and respectable person. He’s way beyond his years in those areas.

“And he has a tremendous amount of football experience and knowledge. He’s been through a lot of battles. His age kind of belies that, but he really has.”

Brad should know. He and Mitch have been nearly inseparable throughout their lives.

However, while Brad worked in advertising his first year out of SDSU, Mitch went back to school for his teaching credential in English and worked as an assistant coach at El Capitan. Brad, who has since started work on obtaining his credential, is now Mitch’s defensive coordinator.

It seems fitting that they are working together again this year. At El Capitan, Brad wore No. 19, Mitch 91.

They were the two tight ends in Rockhold’s two-tight-end offense.

Later, at SDSU, while Brad played predominantly on the defensive line, Mitch was being switched from tight end to fullback to tight end to defensive end to outside linebacker and finally back to tight end for his senior year.

Along the way, the Burtons played under three different head coaches--Doug Scovil, Denny Stolz and Al Luginbill--and a score of assistants.

Mitch said it was tough changing positions and coaches so often, but he feels fortunate to have gone through that now that he is a coach.

“I gained a wealth of experience in a short amount of time, having played so many different spots for so many different coaches,” he said. “And they were all good coaches. I learned a lot, and I studied them all. I was always interested in learning about techniques and strategy.

“I’m more of a thinker type. I’m not a big yeller. I try to encourage the kids to motivate themselves.”

As offensive coordinator, Burton has installed a variation of SDSU’s quick-pop, one-back offense. As head coach, he gives his hand-picked assistants liberal reign over their areas.

“That was the great part about this job,” he said. “The administration was great in letting me pick my own assistants. And I couldn’t ask for a better staff.”

In addition to Brad, Burton hired former teammates Todd Coomes (SDSU) and Gene Leves (El Capitan) to work with the linebackers and receivers, respectively. James Rada, who attends SDSU, and Russ Cook, who worked with Mitch at El Capitan last year, are the offensive line coaches. Tony Johnson, a former Canadian Football League player, has the backs and works in the booth during games. Richard Butcher, a graduate of Granite Hills and Harvard who is a scientist in a DNA lab at the Salk Institute, is the defensive backs coach.

With the exception of Cook, all are under 30.

“As far as administrative affairs, (Mitch) is a rookie. You can tell that,” Butcher said. “But as far as football strategy, he doesn’t act anything like a first-year coach.”

Said Burton: “I like to think of myself and our coaches as tools for the players. We are a resource for them to become better football players, just like the library is a resource for them to become better students. They are not our pawns.”

The Burtons know all about tapping resources and using libraries.

After redshirting their first year at SDSU, both Mitch and Brad were selected to the Western Athletic Conference All-Academic team each of the next four years. In 1988, Brad was named a National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame Scholar-Athlete leader of the year, an award Mitch won the following year.

When Mitch entered SDSU, he had thoughts of going on to law school but changed his mind.

“I just wanted to be in a positive environment,” he said, “so I decided to become a teacher.”

Jim Mann left Granite Hills to become the coach at Mt. Miguel last spring, opening the door for Burton.

“When this came along,” Burton said, “I just had to apply because it was a dream job. I knew it was a longshot, but I also knew I was qualified.”

Meyer felt similarly qualified when he got the Oceanside job in 1959. But there were many others who didn’t share in his confidence, he said.

“I remember we had several changes that year,” Meyer said. “And there was a big hullabaloo in the local newspaper. They said the school district was deemphasizing athletics at Oceanside High School, bringing in all these neophyte coaches.

“We were fortunate to win the league championship in five of the first six years I was there, so that calmed things down a little.”

It’s doubtful Burton will be able to pull off an early streak like that, but he said there isn’t pressure to do so, either.

Missing spring practice and having had only three weeks to prepare for the first game, Burton has started 0-2.

Granite Hills lost its opener to Patrick Henry, 21-17, when Henry scored on a 75-yard busted pass play with 1:40 left in the game. Granite Hills trailed Santana, 3-0, at halftime and, 10-0, at the end of three quarters the following week before allowing three long touchdowns in the final minutes of a 30-0 loss.

“The wins will come,” Rockhold said. “Mitch just has to be his own man, and he’ll be fine. He has confidence in himself, and he’ll project that. He knows what he’s doing, and that will become quite clear very soon.”