Before the Curtain Rises, He Gets the Show on the Road : Football: It’s the responsibility of Jerry Halpin to make sure each Los Alamitos home game runs smoothly.

OK, everyone can relax now. Jerry Halpin is here, and he has brought the most essential element for running a football game.

The bug spray.

Halpin cautiously enters the ticket booth. He’s checking the floor and surveying the walls, looking for anything that crawls.

“Our people got eaten alive last week,” Halpin says. “Well, this doesn’t look too bad. It’s just a couple of spiders . . . HOLY SMOKES!”

Halpin sprays frantically, killing legions of ants. He emerges from a thick fog, breathing heavily, and wipes his brow.

“Well, I’ll be a hero tonight,” he says.

Who was that aerosol-toting man?

It’s all in a night’s work for Halpin, assistant principal at Los Alamitos High School. It’s his responsibility to make sure each home football game runs smoothly--a job that’s not recommended for those with arachnophobia.

To most, the key people at a game are quite visible. The coaches coach, the players play, the referees ref, the cheerleaders cheer and the band plays on.

But before any of that, there is a plethora of preparation, much of it behind the scenes and almost all of it painfully tedious. There is nearly a year’s worth of work by people who go unnoticed on game night.

In the end, there’s a polished event that goes off without a hitch. Well, almost.

“Basically, each week is an adventure,” Halpin said.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Halpin is the conductor who directs the process at Los Alamitos. For him, no role is too big or too small--from stadium manager to exterminator.

Even before game day arrives, Halpin has put in plenty of overtime. The work starts in January with the annual stadium search.

Because Los Alamitos doesn’t have a football facility, the Griffins hit the road every week. Home is wherever they hang their helmets.

“We have to wait for everyone else to divvy up the stadiums in our area,” Halpin said. “When that’s done, we get whatever is left over.”

Usually that includes three places: Gahr High School, Cerritos College and Veterans Stadium in Long Beach. Thus, Los Alamitos is an Orange County school that doesn’t play a home game in Orange County. Go figure.

“The stadium is the most difficult thing for us,” Athletic Director Frank Doretti said. “We seem to spend a lot of time on the telephone just to find a place to play.”

Of course, reserving a stadium doesn’t mean the Griffins will actually get to play in it. They were supposed to play Villa Park at Veterans last Friday but were bumped because a new track was being installed.

Doretti learned about it in mid-September.

“We had a few anxious days around here,” Doretti said. “We weren’t sure we could get a stadium on short notice. We called every school in the area, and they were all booked. Finally, the people at Cerritos College let us in.”

Generally, the Griffins play at Gahr in Cerritos. The location is ideal. It’s a short bus ride from Los Alamitos, where the 605 and 91 freeways meet.

There are concessions though--such as no concessions.

No matter where the vagabond Griffins play, the lucrative snack bar proceeds belong to the school or stadium. While that makes Halpin’s job a little easier, it can take a bite out of the evening’s profits, which are already low because of the rent.

Halpin said Gahr costs $1,000 to rent, Veterans Stadium $2,500 and Cerritos College $3,300.

In contrast, El Dorado and Esperanza use the Placentia Unified School District’s stadium at Valencia. It costs them a nominal fee to cover the clean-up crew.

“We envy those schools that have access to a district stadium,” Halpin said. “We have to adjust to whatever stadium we’re in. A bigger stadium means more production and less profits.”

Ah, money.

In these financially strapped times, it’s important for a high school football program to turn a profit. According to Halpin, Gahr is the only place where that happens; generally, the profit is about $2,000 per game.

At Cerritos and Veterans, the school runs in the red.

Los Alamitos netted approximately $11,500 last season, almost enough to pay for game/meet officials for the entire athletic program.

“We have to end up making money,” Halpin said. “If we just break even, then in my mind we’ve lost.”

Playing away from the school also means transportation must be arranged.

Here, Los Alamitos’ officials catch a break because they are able to use district buses. But the transportation requests must be submitted the first week of school for the entire season.

The team, pep squad and band all must have buses to get to the stadium.

“It used to be that the cheerleaders and band members could just drive themselves to the game,” Halpin said. “Now everyone is concerned about liability. No one wants to get sued.”

Halpin and Doretti divide up most of the rest of the duties.

For each game, there must be four ticket-sellers, four ticket-takers, four administrators and six security officers, all of which Halpin handles. Doretti arranges for the chain gang, the timer, the announcer and gets the checks for the referees.

All of which adds up to paper work, paper work and, yes, more paper work.

“There’s no way this could come about without a good activities secretary and a good account clerk,” Halpin said. “They are the ones who handle the presale tickets, do the financial report, type out the contracts, type out the management forms, deposit the money, make sure the cash box balances . . . “

OK, OK.

At Los Alamitos, Sherrill Razor (activities secretary) and Lucy Conner (accounts clerk) do the dirty work.

“They may not know much about football, but no game could start without them,” Halpin said.

GAME DAY

At 5:38 p.m., Halpin arrives at Gahr. At 5:39, he reaches into the trunk of his car and pulls out two cans of Raid.

Game day has officially arrived.

There are no meetings to coordinate the evening’s events. Everyone--the cheerleaders, the band and, of course, the team--follow their own agenda.

“Somehow, it all works,” Halpin said.

At the school, the team is finishing dinner. Before every game, they go to the cafeteria, where parents have prepared a meal. Chef duties are rotated among booster club members, who also help with the cost.

“Everything we sell helps support the program financially,” said Marshall Stein, booster club president. “Besides the pregame meals, we do after-game parties on nonschool nights and help with the awards banquet.”

To pay for all that, the boosters raise money by selling programs and Griffin paraphernalia--hats, sweat shirts, seat cushions, etc. They’ll paint anything with the school’s colors, slap a Griffin logo on it and sell it.

At 5:45, the team boards the bus and heads for the stadium. For nine years, the team has had the same driver: Horace French, known as Frenchy.

“He really gets into it,” said Doretti, who also is an assistant coach. “He dresses up in the school colors. When we win, he honks the horn.”

The team gets to the field around 6 p.m. and heads to the locker room. The cheerleaders and band arrive shortly thereafter and go about the business of hanging posters and tuning up.

By then, Halpin has checked the public address system, displayed the ticket prices, hung banners and fumigated.

The first ticket-seller, Griffin softball Coach Jami Shannon, checks in at 6:08. She cautiously approaches the ticket booth.

“Last week we were overrun by ants,” she said. “Did Jerry remember the bug spray?”

A couple of deep breaths gave her the answer.

“Great, now it smells awful,” she said.

So much for Halpin’s hero status.

At 6:15, the gates are open, and the first ticket is sold. Now comes the time that Halpin dreads.

“Last week, there wasn’t an American flag,” he said. “They asked people to stand for the national anthem, and everyone was looking around for the flag. Something always goes wrong.”

The inevitable happened moments later. No one could find the down and distance markers for the chain crew. Halpin ran off to look for them.

“I went all over, looking for someone who could tell me where the chains were,” Halpin said. “It turned out they were underneath the grandstands all the time.”

The evening’s surprise over, Halpin positioned himself on the sideline to watch the game and be visible, “just to be available.”

When the game ended, Halpin packed up, then headed back to school to make sure everyone got back and cleared the campus.

Finally, at 11:30 p.m., he went home.

“This really isn’t a difficult thing to do,” he said. “The person in charge just has to set up everything in advance. It just takes a little time commitment.”

And a couple cans of bug spray.