When All Else Fails, Try Pulling a Fast One : Some Teams Use Unique Tactics to Get an Edge on Opponents
As a form of psychological gamesmanship, it wasn’t altogether original or even planned. But it certainly got some people all hot and bothered.
In January, the Villa Park boys’ basketball team visited El Modena for a Century League game. When the Spartans arrived, they walked into a gym that felt more like a boiler room.
“It was like a sweat box,” Villa Park Coach Chris Burton said.
The temperature rose a few more degrees from the steam generated by angry Villa Park parents and fans. Burton, who said the matter wasn’t “that big of a deal,” said the parents were concerned about their kids playing in those conditions and by what they perceived was a psychological ploy by El Modena Coach Tim Tivenan to benefit his team.
That, Tivenan says, wasn’t the case.
“We had no control over it,” he said. “They had just fixed the heater (in the gym) and it was left on all day by accident. By game time, it was just cooking in there. . . . Our (school) administrators were quite concerned about it.”
But Tivenan admitted to using the incident to rally his team.
“The first time it was not our fault,” Tivenan said. “But we did try to keep it warm after that. Our kids kind of got behind it a little bit. We now call the gym ‘The Kitchen.’ Toward the end of the season, our cheerleaders kind of picked up on it and started wearing aprons.”
Regardless of how it started, playing in The Kitchen proved appetizing for the Vanguards. They beat Villa Park that night, 63-45, and won their remaining four home games to earn a share of the league championship with Santa Ana Valley.
In the process they joined the ranks, perhaps unfairly, of athletic teams that allegedly--or even admittedly--have schemed to use unique tactics to gain the upper hand on opponents.
Consider what happened a few years ago at Pacifica.
Faced with the prospect of playing a league foe but wanting to save his top pitcher for another opponent later in the week, the school’s baseball coach--who is no longer there or coaching--came up with what he thought was a clever plan.
“He turned up at the (baseball) field about 5 o’clock in the morning and turned on the sprinklers,” said Santiago Principal Don Wise, then principal at Pacifica. “There had been some rain that night, so he probably thought nobody would notice. I went to check the fields, and the JV field wasn’t too bad, but the varsity diamond was under water. That seemed strange to me. Then one custodian who was there early and saw the whole thing told me what happened. I fired the coach.”
Wise said he and three students worked on the diamond throughout the day to get it into playing condition.
“When the other team showed up, we were making the final touches,” Wise said. “We played the game.”
Baseball coaches don’t generally resort to such drastic measures, but some will try to swing the odds in their favor with all sorts of maneuvers. Rob Megill, the coach at Los Alamitos, said he has seen almost every trick in the book.
“One of the things teams will do is alter the mounds,” Megill said. “The (Southern Section rule book) gives you general directions. It says that the mounds are supposed to have something like an inch drop for every foot of dirt in front of the rubber. But we played on a field with a mound that went straight out for about four feet in front of the rubber with no drop at all. It looked like a grave. I was looking for a headstone.”
Megill said one common tactic in baseball is to tailor the field to exploit the home team’s strong suit.
“We have pretty good team speed, so we try to keep the infield grass not as wet so the dirt underneath is not as soft and the ball will go through it faster,” Megill said. “We keep the dirt area between home plate and the grass pretty hard, too. It can work to our advantage or disadvantage, though.”
With harder soil in front of the plate, speedy batters can slap down on the ball and beat out high-bouncing grounders.
One gimmick that worked wonders for La Quinta baseball Coach Dave Demarest was thought up in the early ‘80s when he tried to figure a way to stop Garden Grove’s Lenny Dykstra, now with the Philadelphia Phillies, from stealing against the Aztecs.
“He (Dykstra) used to steal usually on the first or second pitch after he got on,” Demarest said. “So in this one game, we decoyed him. He took off for second and we hit a couple of bats against each other in the dugout, which sounded like the batter had hit the ball. Then our catcher threw the ball high to our shortstop like it was a pop up. Dykstra was practically to second base, and we tagged him out as he tried to run back to first base. It didn’t help us any. Grove still beat us, 6-0.”
In softball there isn’t much room or opportunity for coaches or players to pull a fast one. The diamonds don’t have grass in the infield, there are no pitching mounds and many teams play in public parks, where the grounds are cared for by crews not associated with the schools. So one of the few avenues left is the mind game.
“A couple of years ago we played this team that was warming up both of its pitchers at the same time before the game,” Mater Dei softball Coach Cathy Quesnell said. “That kind of took the concentration away from our team. It was a psychological advantage.”
Canyon softball Coach Lance Eddy said one of his pitchers was victimized recently. In a nonleague game on a rainy day, Eddy said the other school--the home team--provided only Dudley brand balls for the game, instead of the deBeer brand his pitcher was used to and comfortable with. The result was eight walks and a loss, which Eddy said was partially related to the ball.
“The Dudley ball is slicker and it has higher seams,” Eddy said. “She had never pitched with the ball, and they basically said, ‘Here, throw this.’ ”
Trying to throw a football with a little more than natural ability once got a quarterback facing Coach Dave Thompson’s Marina team into trouble. And not because his passes were off target.
“We were playing in a downpour, so they had taped tacks to his fingers so he could grip the ball better,” Thompson said. “We caught on to it and the officials caught it pretty quick, too.”
Thompson also recalled a time when Marina was scheduled for a playoff meeting with a team that was notoriously unethical. One of its tricks, Thompson said, was to turn up the heat in the visiting team’s locker room.
“We brought an ax with us, and we told them if we had to open some windows forcibly, we would,” Thompson said.
Mark Miller, the Rancho Alamitos football coach, didn’t have to issue threats in a game during his first season with the team in 1987. But they might have come in handy.
“We were the visiting team, so the chain gang was on our side of the field,” Miller said. “After a while, I realized one of the guys on the chain gang was listening to me and relaying our (offensive) plays to his kid, who called the defensive plays on the other team. The guy turned around one time and gave me this stupid grin, like ‘So you finally caught on.’ I know that is pretty rare now, but I think it still goes on.”
El Toro water polo Coach Don Stoll says one trick is still widely used in his sport.
“The goal cages have floaters in front, but the goalies push them toward the back, which tilts the cage down in the front area,” Stoll said. “That cuts down the height of the goal area an inch or two. That’s a considerable amount.”
Messing around with the goals can also be used strategically in basketball, Kennedy boys’ Coach John Mayberry said.
“A popular thing to do is to install tighter nets on the baskets if you’re playing against a fast-breaking team,” Mayberry said. “It keeps the ball in the basket just long enough for your team to get back on defense. It also works well if you have a team that presses, because it allows you to set up your defense.”
And, if everything else fails, there’s always the keep-’em-guessing approach. Villa Park’s Burton, who coached at Fullerton four seasons, knows all about that.
“My first year at Fullerton (1987), Ed Graham was the coach at Troy,” Burton said. “I think he thought I was young and stupid. So the first time we played them, he had kids run out during introductions who were not the kids they were announcing. I think maybe it was just his sense of humor.”
Or his way of making Burton sweat without turning up the heater.
