Keeping the Faith : Football Remains Worthwhile for Players, Coaches at Winless Hoover, North Hollywood

As football practice begins at Hoover High in Glendale, quarterback Nate Dishington is zipping spirals through the mid-afternoon smog while students make a fly pattern toward the campus exits.

The Tornadoes are 0-4 and have been outscored, 143-3. Consequently, the day’s practice emphasizes fundamentals.

“We’re taking small steps,” Dishington said. “Right now, we’re just working on putting a good drive together because that’s what we’ve been unable to do.”

Few of his homeward-bound classmates seem to care. Among them, junior Arbi Ohanian, himself a one-time high school quarterback in his native Houston, pauses long enough to consider--then dismiss--the notion of calling signals for his new school.

“Here?” he said, seemingly surprised that someone would ask. “There’s no line. Wait--I have a lot of friends on the football team. Maybe I shouldn’t say that.”

A few hours later and a few miles to the west where another back-to-basics football practice comes to a close at North Hollywood High, 30 or so sweaty players participate in final wind sprints.

Few students remain on campus--even fewer seem to notice that the Huskies also are trying to rebound from an 0-4 start.

“All I know is that they’re no good,” said one girl, a junior who asked to remain anonymous when it came to criticizing her shoulder-padded classmates. “I just heard they lost one game, 140-0.”

She heard wrong, of course. It just shows that not everyone is interested in football. At least, not this season at Hoover and North Hollywood.

Not only have both teams failed to win a game, neither has come close. Neither has even scored a touchdown.

Hoover has been blown out by Alemany (47-0), Burbank (37-0) and Temple City (31-0) and scored its only points in a 28-3 loss to South Pasadena.

Among the lowlights: Burbank tailback Alex Dixon, a former Hoover student, rushed for 111 yards, including touchdown runs of 34 and 43 yards. Against Alemany, Hoover managed only three first downs and 68 yards in offense.

North Hollywood has been outscored--a bit of clarification--141-0, losing to El Camino Real (31-0), San Pedro (41-0), Palisades (30-0) and Grant (39-0). In 16 quarters, the Huskies have mustered only five yards total offense.

North Hollywood fumbled on the season’s first play from scrimmage and things have only gotten only worse. Against San Pedro, the Huskies were held to minus-24 yards in offense.

“We’ve had a Murphy year,” first-year Coach James Lippitt said, offering a simplified explanation for the team’s futility. “Everything that can go wrong, has gone wrong.”

The way things have gone, maybe going incognito on campus isn’t such a bad idea. “I hear it every day,” North Hollywood linebacker Allan Wing said. “You guys will never win. Why do you practice? Why don’t you just give up? Are you going to score this game?’

“Sometimes, I feel like going up to them and knocking them out, but I gotta turn my back because I gotta think of my future. It’s hard. It hurts. But you gotta take it.”

At Hoover, even cheerleaders have become targets.

“People say, ‘How many defense cheers do you have?’ and ‘You guys are going to lose by 60 points,’ ” senior Janet Choi said. “We started doing another cheer for when the other team scores a touchdown, just so we don’t keep saying the same one over and over.”

Said Dishington: “The lowest point of the season has been how everyone has lost faith in us.”

Facing classmates on Monday mornings might be tough, but no one is ready to trade in his helmet for a paper bag.

Go ahead and laugh, but the season is still young. And optimism runs high among coaches and hand-clapping players on both practice fields.

“Win or lose--mainly lose now--we think about next week and try to improve,” Hoover defensive back Rony Castillo said. “I think that’s what everyone does.”

North Hollywood is 0-1 in Valley Pac-8 Conference play entering tonight’s game against visiting Monroe.

“I still think we can turn it around,” said Lippitt, 29, a North Hollywood assistant last year. “We’re not dead.”

Hoover, which plays at La Canada tonight, enters Pacific League play next week against Muir. “I don’t really feel humiliated because I know our kids have played very hard and we’ve played some very good teams,” Coach Dennis Hughes said. “As long as the kids are doing their best, what more can you ask?”

For openers, how about, “Why do you keep getting blown out week after week?” At least, that seems to be the question du jour on both campuses. Answers are in short supply.

“The faculty has been great, but my students really lay it on me,” Lippitt said. “What can you do? If you let it bother you, you’re being a bad role model.”

Basically, both coaches attribute their difficulties to tough schedules, inexperienced players, thin rosters and lack of speed among skill-position players--or some combination of the above. Most players concur.

“Experience is a lot of it,” said North Hollywood quarterback Chris O’Connor, one of only six seniors on the team. “The closest we came to scoring a touchdown was the 20-yard line against San Pedro, but our receivers dropped two (potential) touchdown passes in the end zone. This week, I don’t play quarterback. I’ll be playing receiver.”

At this point, however, explanations for losing aren’t really as important as how to cope with lopsided losses. While profiles are low, so are confidence levels, which makes a turnaround all the more difficult.

“A lot of these kids are going through the difficulty of early adulthood and their egos are very fragile,” said John Callaghan, a USC professor of physical education who specializes in sports psychology. “It could do these kids an awful lot of psychological harm to lose like this. The coach has a remarkable job to do in this situation to continually boost them up.”

Hughes said that his staff has tried to refrain from “browbeating” the players.

“We know we’re in a situation this year where every game is going to be tough,” Hughes said. “Their peers are getting down on them already. I think there’s enough out there to tear them down without the coaches getting in on that.”

Hughes, 35, a 1974 Gendale High graduate, speaks from experience. As an offensive lineman for Texas El Paso in 1977 and ‘78, he played out a dismal senior year that included several blowouts, including a 68-19 loss to Brigham Young and a 66-3 loss to Arizona State.

“The coaches just really beat on us and beat on us and practices just kept getting longer and longer,” Hughes said. “We wound up getting worse instead of better and the scores became more lopsided. I think the only thing I got out of it is that I made it through the season. I tell the kids that.”

Dishington, a 6-foot-2, 205-pound junior who has completed 25 of 60 passes for 205 yards, said he passed on an opportunity last year to move with his mother to New Mexico and play quarterback for what likely would be a more successful team.

“I could have easily gone down there and played, but that’s not the way I do things,” he said. “And quitting has never crossed my mind.”

It has for others. During the off-season, all-league wide receiver Chris Kalaleh transferred to Oxnard High after Hoover posted a 2-8 record (0-5 in league play) last season. Then Dixon transferred to Burbank.

Hughes, who described the majority of the players as upbeat, said that few players have abandoned ship since the season began.

“My hat is off to (the team) just for being out there every day,” Hughes said. “It was 100-and-something degrees last week and they’re out there with shoulder pads and helmets sweating their butts off while a lot of kids are down at 7-Eleven playing video games or cutting school and going to the beach. I think they’re successful just for that reason.”

Attrition has played a part in North Hollywood’s fortunes. The Huskies, who were 5-4 (4-3 in conference play) last year and remained in playoff contention until the season’s final week, began the season with a 30-player roster that has dwindled to about 25 players.

Lippitt said that those who left did so for reasons other than the team’s record, but the consensus among players is different. “A lot of people thought there was no future in this team so they just decided to quit,” lineman Lucio Gramaldo said. “I just think they gave up. Who needs them?”

Lippitt, who has labeled this a rebuilding year from the beginning, said that the loss of tailback Leon Gable, who rushed for nearly 1,800 yards and 24 touchdowns as a senior last year, left the team without “a gun to shoot.”

“At times, I thought it would be tough going in,” Lippitt said. “But I never would have believed it if you would have told me before the season that we wouldn’t have scored after four games.”

Frustration has led to experimentation. Practices this week have included no-huddle offenses and tackle-eligible plays. They might not make a difference, but it’s too early to be crowing “Wait ‘til next year.”

Or is it?

“Next year? I’m not through with this year,” Lippitt said. “I’m still having a good time. I came home from the game on Friday night and my wife told me she was pregnant. And it was our one-year anniversary. Even though we lost, 39-0, I still had a great weekend.”