A Builder Again Puts His Tools to Use : Ex-CLU Coach Helps Set Up the Framework at Santa Paula

The locker room is Fifties Functional: exposed pipes, exposed vents, peeling paint, a bulky boiler in a mesh-metal cage. The ceiling and walls are filthy white. The benches are Cardinal red. Some of the lockers are beige, some dark green. All are rusty.

Outside, a few boys fill the morning air with wobbling footballs. Others stretch, exchanging good-natured insults and stories of weekend exploits. A few flirt with the cheerleaders as they practice dance routines.

Players are still filtering in, but the coach starts practice anyway. “All right, let’s get to work!” he yells as his team begins its regimen of stretches and conditioning drills. “You guys don’t scare anybody!” he yells as his team lets out a weak war whoop. “You don’t even scare the cheerleaders!”

“They scare us,” some wise guy pipes back. The coach laughs.

The incongruity in this scene is Bob Shoup. He is reviewing the troops, holding a clipboard and a whistle, wearing a white Santa Paula High shirt and a black Santa Paula cap, offering the coach an occasional word of advice. He is doing exactly what you would expect an assistant high school football coach to do.

The thing is, you would not expect Bob Shoup to be an assistant high school football coach. You would expect to find him 25 miles southeast of Santa Paula, at Cal Lutheran University, where he led the Kingsmen to 13 National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics District 3 titles, one NAIA championship and a 185-87-6 record in 28 years as head coach.

But in 1989, Shoup was unceremoniously dumped from the Cal Lutheran football program. He remains on the faculty as a tenured physical education professor, but he has lost the team he spent most of his adult life building. And so he has come to Santa Paula to help a rookie coach revamp a downtrodden program.

The coach happens to be his son, Rick.

“There are cycles in life, and in institutions,” Bob Shoup says with a ministerial air. “I would have preferred that things would have gone in a different direction, but you can’t always control everything. Life doesn’t always work the way you’d expect it to.”

Neither does Bob Shoup. He’s a football coach, the son of a football coach, the father of a football coach. He’s also a member--and former president--of The Ascension Church council in Thousand Oaks. He collects fine wine. He’s on the board of directors of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce. He is a student of European history. He compares himself to Knute Rockne and Tom Landry and Amos Alonzo Stagg, but also to Teddy Roosevelt and Don Quixote and King Arthur. He’s a classical music buff. He’s in business. He’s in real estate. He consulted with Disney on “Hull High,” a musical comedy TV series canceled after seven episodes.

Now, for the princely sum of $1,500 a year, Bob Shoup, 60, is confounding expectations yet again. On Santa Paula game days, he’ll sit in the press box, manning the headsets, giving his son advice from on high.

“I guess some people are surprised to see me helping out a program like Santa Paula’s,” he says. “But this is the kind of challenge I’ve taken on all my life.”

Bob Shoup is a churchman, a businessman, a Renaissance man. He’s a husband, father, teacher, coach. Most of all, he is a builder.

When Shoup was a boy, his father accepted a job coaching football at East Bakersfield High. The Shoups lived on the other side of a vacant lot adjoining the fledgling school.

“I saw that school built from scratch,” he recalls. “There was nothing but desert, and then there was a school there. That made quite a strong impression on me.”

In 1956, a year after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Shoup began his first building project at Torrance High.

Torrance was a community in transition. It had a new school, a new church. Bulldozers were plowing bean fields to make room for cheap new homes.

Shoup accepted a job as an assistant football and baseball coach, but when he arrived at school he was assigned to coach Torrance’s newly formed tennis team. “These were steelworkers’ kids,” Shoup recalls with a grin. “They didn’t know how to play tennis.”

Shoup patiently taught his players the fundamentals. He also taught them to exploit their home-court edge, to take advantage of their familiarity with Torrance’s decrepit asphalt courts and swirling winds. By season’s end, his team was 11-1, sharing the league title with Beverly Hills, a perennial tennis power. With his reputation for miracle work established, Shoup took control of Torrance’s football team, a local laughing stock that had gone two years without winning a game. Two years later, it won the league title.

Having built Torrance a winning football program out of nothing, Shoup set about the task of building the school a football stadium.

“The administration gave me carte blanche to put together whatever I wanted,” he says. “That stadium had everything imaginable: nice locker rooms, training rooms, coaches’ offices, lights, press box, concession stands, you name it. And we sold it out every game.”

Torrance lost only four games during the next three seasons, and Shoup was beginning to feel as if he had nothing left to prove at the high school level. He yearned for a new challenge. So when newly founded Cal Lutheran invited him to start its football program, he gave up his tenure, took a severe pay cut and moved his family to a still-unincorporated town called Thousand Oaks.

When he arrived at Cal Lutheran, Shoup had no assistants. No equipment. No field. No locker rooms. Just a $5,000 budget and a few enthusiastic kids.

So he cut a practice field out of an orange grove. He borrowed equipment. He got hold of a war-surplus Navy bus to take his team to games. And he led the Kingsmen to a 3-4 record that 1962 season.

Today, sitting in his living room, Shoup admits some nostalgia for those hopeful days when the town was a blank slate.

“Those were exciting times,” Shoup says. “You could look out back and see cattle grazing in those hills. There weren’t any houses around here. There was a dirt road leading to Cal Lutheran. This place was in the early stages of getting its act together, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

In 1963, Cal Lutheran risked extinction after the resignation of its entire administration. In this time of crisis, Shoup continued as football coach, took over the baseball program, taught physical education, worked in public relations, church relations, fund-raising and admissions, became associate dean of men and chaired the student discipline committee.

Meanwhile, Shoup worked feverishly to convince the Dallas Cowboys to set up a training camp in Thousand Oaks. He formed a committee to organize a Conejo Recreation and Parks District to attract state funds for athletic facilities into the community. He organized a Community Leaders Club to drum up local support for Cal Lutheran athletics.

“There was a very real danger of the college folding at that time,” Shoup says. “Obviously, if the college had folded, the football program would have folded with it. I tried to do what I could to make something out of nothing.”

For 28 years, Shoup presided over one of the nation’s most prestigious small-school programs. He coordinated construction of Cal Lutheran’s stadium. In 1971, he brought an NAIA championship to the school, bringing about a massive infusion of funds at a time when the Lutherans were considering closing the university.

Shoup points to a black-and-white photograph of his first Kingsmen squad. This guy’s an attorney now. That one too. This one’s an assistant coach at Royal High. He’s an assistant at Arizona. He’s on the Cal Lutheran board of regents. He’s one of the foremost liver researchers in the world. These two are Lutheran ministers. He’s the assistant principal at Westlake High. He’s a corporate executive. So is he. . . .

“We put together a great program,” Shoup says, shaking his head sadly. “I’m sorry they took it all away.”

Bob Shoup still wears two rings: his wedding band and a Cal Lutheran ring. Even though Cal Lutheran got rid of the athletic scholarships Shoup toiled to set up. Even though the university moved the program from the NCAA Division II Western Football Conference back to the NAIA Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference against his wishes. Even though he learned that he had been fired as coach from a reporter. Even though he took the university to court to try to get his job back.

After 28 years, he cannot let go of his loyalties that easily--even if the university could.

“He’s still upset,” Rick says. “He worked all those years to build something up, and it was all taken away in the most disreputable manner imaginable.”

Since his firing, Shoup has worked as a consultant to a group building a resort in Hawaii. He has chaired the Ascension Church evangelism committee, and, of course, its building committee. He has toured Europe.

Now, Bob Shoup is embarking on another rescue mission: the Santa Paula football team. The Cardinals struggled to a 5-6 record last season, before the firing of Coach Mike Tsoutsouvas and the subsequent resignation of his entire coaching staff left the program in shambles. Rick Shoup was hired to take his place May 6, three weeks before the scheduled start of spring practice. Players already were talking about boycotting.

“I had no coaches, no staff,” says Rick, who helped his father at Cal Lutheran for six years as a volunteer and one year as a paid assistant. “I had never met the kids. I had never seen them play. The team had suffered from a real lack of support from the school, the alumni, the community.

“I needed help building a program. I was living with the best coach in California. Where do you think I was going to turn?”

Together, the former Cal Lutheran coach and the former Cal Lutheran water boy have installed a new system. Roberto and Ricardo, the predominantly Latino team calls them. “It’s like having two head coaches,” linebacker Billy Herrera says. “They don’t boss each other around or anything.”

“This is the culmination of a dream for me,” Rick says. “And it’s been a whole new breath of fresh air for Dad. He senses that he can make a tangible difference. ‘Let’s put this guy at this position. Let’s use this defense.’ It really has made him come alive.”

Bob Shoup is roaming the sidelines, shouting encouragement to the somewhat discombobulated punt team. “Wonderful! Atta way to be there! C’mon, baby!” He shows the players where to stand. He explains the fair catch rule. He teaches a trick play.

Shoup is having a great time. But, as usual, he is philosophical.

“Santa Paula’s at a low ebb right now, so it won’t be easy,” he says. “It’s a constant struggle. Human beings resist change. But I’ve always enjoyed making silk purses out of sows’ ears. I like the challenge of building.”

There’s a glint in his eye. Perhaps he’s thinking about the bean fields of Torrance, or the cattle grazing in the hills near Cal Lutheran. Or the sign in his living room, the same sign his son keeps on his desk: “Expect a Miracle.”

These days, Shoup often thinks about Amos Alonzo Stagg, the legendary coach of the University of Chicago who later assisted his son at Susquehanna (Pa.) University well into his 90s.

“I won’t be here that long, I can tell you that,” Shoup says, laughing again. “I’ll try to help this program get back onto its feet. Then, hopefully, I’ll go work on something else next year.”

Life is short, and much remains to be built.