Football Is Family Rite at Valley Christian : Tradition: The De Bie name seems ubiquitous-- from the offensive coordinator, who graduated from the small school in 1971, to the quarterback, wide receiver and athletic director.

It’s not the stipend that brings offensive coordinator Rick De Bie back to his alma mater, Valley Christian High School, to coach football every season. It’s family.

Football Coach Mike Wunderley is Rick De Bie’s brother-in-law. A cousin, Harold De Bie, is athletic director and boys’ basketball coach. Another cousin, Cari, is the girls’ tennis coach.

Rick’s sons, junior Jeremy De Bie and sophomore Jonathan De Bie, are quarterbacks on the varsity and junior varsity football teams, respectively. Cari’s brother, Brett, is a wide receiver on the varsity and a star basketball player.

On game nights, if Rick De Bie glances up into the packed bleachers at Crusader Field he can see his father, Rich, operating the game camera.

While family involvement at private Valley Christian is not new, you almost need a score card to tell the De Bies apart.

Rick De Bie receives only $1,500 a year as offensive coordinator, but he considers the nicely manicured, unpretentious 27-acre campus on Artesia Boulevard in Cerritos a second home.

“There’s a closeness here. Everyone knows each other,” he said. “We did things together when I was (a student) here. There was a lot of social interaction, and the church and the school were the common denominators.”

The school was founded by several Christian Reformed Churches, predominantly Dutch, in the surrounding area of former dairy farms that stretched from southeast Los Angeles County into northwest Orange County. Even today, the school attracts students from as far away as central Orange County.

Most youths at this 470-student school go on to college, but few earn athletic scholarships. Still, on the small-school circuit, the Crusaders are hard to beat. In the past 14 years in football alone, Valley Christian has won six Olympic League titles, a CIF Southern Section title and has advanced into postseason play 13 consecutive times.

Valley Christian plays host to rival Ontario Christian at 7:30 p.m. Friday. Ranked sixth in the Southern Section’s Division X, the Crusaders are 6-1 this season.

Wunderley gives a lot of the credit for the team’s successes over the years to Rick De Bie, who has been with Wunderley since he began coaching football in 1975. When the booster club gave Wunderley a game football for his 100th win in 1990, for example, Wunderley also gave one to Rick De Bie.

“The success we have had at Valley Christian since I’ve been here has been a result of the consistency we have had,” Wunderley said. “Rick just knows how I feel about certain things.”

The two have similar opinions on offensive schemes, Wunderley explained, and they spend a lot of time discussing them, often on Sunday afternoons at Wunderley’s Cerritos home. Football also is the hot topic on annual summer vacations at Bass Lake near Fresno for the Wunderleys and De Bies.

Rich De Bie, Rick’s father, was one of 13 children who came to California with their parents from an Iowa farm in 1936. The family settled in Paramount and five of the children attended Valley Christian, which had opened the previous year.

“But my father was a dairyman and he believed in work, not school,” Rich De Bie said. “So we all went here until we turned 16 and then went to work.”

Rich De Bie eventually returned to school at the defunct Excelsior High in Norwalk, but his heart, as it still does, belonged at Valley Christian. Both his sons went there and Rick graduated in 1971.

“When I graduated, this place was predominantly Dutch,” Rick De Bie said. “The area wasn’t as crowded with homes, and dairies surrounded the school.”

Today, Crusader Road, which runs along the eastern fence of the school, backs up to an auto mall and business park, while 183rd Street on the southern end of the campus is no longer the meandering dirt road it was in Rich De Bie’s day.

Only about half of the students now are of Dutch descent. Many of the Dutch residents left the area because of rising land prices and encroaching urbanization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some moved inland and enrolled their children at Ontario Christian.

The flight of those families was sometimes painful. Rick De Bie recalls how one of his best friends moved during their senior year in 1970 and played quarterback for Ontario Christian against Valley Christian.

Tuition has crept up to nearly $4,000 a year from $300 in Rick De Bie’s day, but otherwise Valley Christian has not changed much.

“I like it here,” said Jeremy De Bie, the varsity quarterback. “It’s smaller than a public school. You get to know everyone.”

When Wunderley, who attended Excelsior, became junior varsity coach at Valley Christian in 1975, he asked De Bie, by then his brother-in-law, to be an assistant.

“Rick was driving a backhoe for his dad at the time,” Wunderley said. “He had the luxury of getting off in time to come to practice, although he’d show up with grease and dirt all over him.” He now manages his father’s plumbing contractor business.

When Wunderley was named varsity coach in 1979, De Bie also moved up.

“We just get along and have a good time,” Rick De Bie said. “When the coaches scout together it’s like going out with your buddies.”

The younger De Bies got their indoctrinations at early ages, as a large picture of the Crusaders’ 1986 CIF Southern Section Inland Conference championship team in the coaches’ office reveals. Both Jeremy and Jonathan were ball boys for that team, as was Wunderley’s son, Michael, now 12. The photo shows their smiling faces surrounded by sweaty, celebrating football players.

Brett, who fancies basketball more than football, was not a ball boy back then, but “he was probably running around in the stands somewhere,” Rick De Bie said.

In two previous seasons, Wunderley and Rick De Bie converted players to quarterback from other positions. But now Wunderley feels Valley Christian is set. Jeremy and Jonathan De Bie have grown up as quarterbacks, perfecting the Crusader system under the tutelage of their father.

“We’ve been able to do a few more things (this year) with the position than we normally do because we have the quarterback’s dad as a coach,” Wunderley said. “We’re reading things more. It’s more for the kid to think about, but then, we have reasons to try it that way.”

Playing for dad has not been without its problems, however, according to Jeremy, who has passed for 664 yards and five touchdowns.

“Sometimes I think he’s harder on me than the other players,” he said.