Taft Catches a Rising Starr : Prep football: Breaks, hard work rapidly lift first-year coach from poverty to helm of team playing for City 3-A title.

What a rube.

Such a plowboy.

Troy Starr tells stories about his Ohio homeland until the cows come home. Which, in Ohio, is probably every night at every house. Or so he tells Taft High players.

“He starts every sentence with, ‘Back in Ohio,’ ” said junior center Joey Rothman. “When it was raining here the other day, it was, ‘Back in Ohio, when it didn’t rain, we were worried.’ ”

Just the other day, to no one’s surprise, Starr was yapping about football in his home state. Another day, another yarn.

“Ever see an end zone with a field of corn just beyond it?” Starr asked.

No, the team replied, playing along.

“Well, in Ohio, when you run through the end zone, you go right out into rows of corn,” Starr said. “Occupational hazard back there.”

So is stepping in cow pies. Most of this stuff about corn fields is pure corn, just Starr playing the part of the Midwestern hayseed.

In reality, Starr’s neck of the woods had few trees. Lots of pavement. Railroad tracks were nearby, and the Starrs lived on the wrong side of them in Cleveland.

“To know poverty--not for a little while but for your whole life--that can be real tough,” said Starr, 30, as he stared straight ahead. “Football was, I don’t know, a way out. “

Taft’s football team has known hard times. Last season, the Toreadors did not win a game. Tonight at Gardena High, Taft (9-4) will play San Pedro (11-1-1) for the City Section 3-A Division title.

It will mark the first time a Taft football team has reached a City final, meaning that Starr has put a spin on the aforementioned.

This is way-out football.

Until he was 18, Starr lived with his mother and older sister in Cleveland under conditions that would make most folks wince.

“I’ve never seen my father,” Starr said, his eyes watering and jaw set. “If I saw him on the street I wouldn’t know him. He just walked out on my mom and two kids.

“I tell my kids on the team all that when they come to me with problems. There’s not a lot of them that can look at me and say, ‘I had it tougher than you.’ Because they didn’t.”

Starr’s mother worked at odd jobs to make ends meet. It was a blue-collar area rife with drugs, crime and its attendant problems. Starr’s mom held the family together by sheer will.

“The one thing I had that a lot of other kids didn’t was a mom that really cared,” Starr said. “That, and stability. We lived in the same house for around 15 years. It was probably the worst house in the neighborhood, but it was always there.

“It’s the same story as with a lot of my (players) today. A lot of the guys I hung around with are dead, in jail, or wherever. Some of them got out (of the neighborhood), though.”

Starr made it, for instance, though he was very fortunate and is not too proud to admit it. Starr (6-foot-2, 200 pounds) was a standout linebacker for the Collinwood High Railroaders but colleges ignored him. A few weeks after Starr had completed his senior season in 1979, he walked into a sporting goods store owned by former Ohio State lineman John Hicks, who was selected by the New York Giants in the first round of the 1974 NFL draft.

Hicks, who coached at a rival high school, remembered Starr and asked him about his college plans.

“Nobody wants me,” Starr said.

Hicks, a well-connected guy who won the Outland Trophy and was the Sporting News college player of the year in 1973, proved him wrong. Hicks phoned a friend at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, located within a fly pattern of the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton. Before Starr was through, he was named a Kodak Little All-American at Mount Union, a highly regarded NCAA Division III school.

The walk-on linebacker made quite a name for himself. In 1984, after his senior year, the City of Cleveland issued a resolution in which Starr was called, “the most honored athlete in Mount Union College history.” The plaque hangs on Starr’s dining-room wall.

“My wife makes me hang that stuff up,” Starr said.

Being hung up on his wife, Tana, is what landed Starr in the Valley. After graduating from Mount Union, Starr in 1987 followed Tana to Southern California, where she was studying to become a chiropractor. Starr, who had dreamed of playing in the NFL, scaled back his occupational objectives quite a bit--he instead hoped to become a schoolteacher.

Thereafter, Starr’s rapid ascension in the coaching ranks is equal parts surprising and miraculous. The planets must have been in alignment or something, because good luck followed Starr everywhere.

After considerable effort, he landed a student teaching job at Carson. And his master teacher happened to be Gene Vollnogle, whom Starr knew nothing about.

Vollnogle, for those as in the dark as Starr was at the time, retired from Carson two seasons ago with more wins that any prep football coach in state history. Starr walked in the door at Carson and was bowled over.

Twenty players on the 1987 Carson team eventually would play football at the NCAA Division I or I-AA level, including linebacker Arnold Ale, a senior at UCLA.

“I start out with probably the best linebacker in the country, under the winningest coach in the state,” Starr said. “I’m thinking, ‘This, this is awesommmme. ‘ “

Starr shadowed Vollnogle’s every move. At first, Vollnogle said he had no idea that Starr had a football background until he offered an assistant coaching position to another student teacher.

Starr, after learning of the position, approached Vollnogle the next day with a handful of press clippings.

“He walked up and said, ‘I know you don’t know who I am. . . .’ ” Vollnogle said with a laugh. “He brought this little media packet along to show me.”

Starr was given the job coaching linebackers and quickly proved to Vollnogle that he had the temperament and acumen to make a good coach. Trouble was, upon completion of his student teaching, Starr had run out of time at Carson. The school had no physical education position available. “If I’d had the power, I would have hired him,” Vollnogle said.

The two are cut from the same cloth. It was the sage and his disciple.

“When I was student teaching, I just followed him around,” Starr said of Vollnogle. “I watched what he did, how he’d eat lunch.

“The way we hand out uniforms (at Taft) is the way he handed out uniforms (at Carson). There are so many things we do like he does, administrative things and down the line.

“They might seem like little things, but little things can make all the difference sometimes.”

Vollnogle, unaware of Starr’s inner-city background, sensed good things would happen.

“I just got the feeling from talking to him that he’d dealt with city kids before,” Vollnogle said.

Yes, Starr had walked the walk and could talk the talk. He sent letters of introduction to every junior and senior high principal in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The only school to respond--weeks later--was San Fernando. Luck again was his escort.

San Fernando Principal Bart Kricorian passed the letter to Tom Hernandez, who lost it. A couple of weeks later, Hernandez found the letter and contacted Starr.

Starr was hired as a teacher at San Fernando and was made the Tigers’ defensive coordinator, a position he held from 1988-91.

“Tommy said the only reason he called me is because it had Carson on the letterhead,” Starr said.

Things were looking up all over. Starr married Tana in the spring of 1988. Unsophisticated or not, it seemed that Starr could do no wrong.

He became reacquainted with hardship while at San Fernando, however. Starr learned he didn’t know nearly as much as he thought he did. The Tigers would be blessed with many talented athletes in his four years at the school, but there were no Arnold Ales.

“I admit, I had an ego,” Starr said. “All of a sudden, I had some guys who weren’t real big or real fast. I had some games where I got my butt kicked. I was humbled.”

Three years ago, San Fernando was torched by Granada Hills for 55 points. Starr almost hemorrhaged on the sideline.

“It was the most humbling experience of my coaching career,” he said. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t really sleep. I wanted to run from it but there was no place to go.”

Except across the Valley, as it turns out. Starr applied for the opening at Taft last winter. It was a difficult situation. Larry Stewart, a popular teacher at Taft, had just completed his first year as coach when he died of a heart attack at a Christmas party. Taft had stumbled to an 0-8-1 record.

The school had had several successful years under Coach Tom Stevenson, who resigned after the 1990 season. Starr figured that with hard work Taft could reach the same level. He landed the job.

It didn’t take long for players to realize there was a new sheriff in town. Starr transferred from San Fernando to Taft during the intersession break last winter. In his first team meeting, he laid down the law.

“There were about 60 guys in the room where we have our chalk talks,” said Rothman, a two-time all-league center. “We had a big team then.”

Not for long. Before the meeting had even begun, Starr noticed one player was shooting dice in the back of the room. “Stuff like that was common the year before,” Rothman said. “Nobody cared.”

Starr came unglued. He kicked the kid off the team and hollered his lungs out. Some believed he was serious, some didn’t. He warned the players that they’d better show up on time the following day, or they’d have to run up the stadium stairs once for every minute they were late.

The next day, of course, a few players straggled in well past Starr’s deadline.

“We ran stairs for an hour and a half,” Rothman said. “Guys were close to fainting. Now we drag guys out of the locker room to make sure we’re there (on time). That set the tone.”

Starr estimates he threw 20 players off the team for various reasons, including several returning starters. He reasoned that if Taft didn’t win any games with them, they couldn’t do any worse without them.

“We went from about 60 guys to about 35,” Rothman recalled.

Two impact players joined soon thereafter, bringing with them a big batch of question marks. Jerry Brown and DaShon Polk, sophomores from the San Fernando attendance area, turned up at Taft.

Brown and Polk, who are black, enrolled at Taft on an open permit. At some campuses, such as Taft, the district allows minority students from other attendance areas to enroll in order to ensure ethnic diversity. Nearly two-thirds of the players on the Taft football team live outside the West Valley area and much of the student body is bused to the Woodland Hills campus from the Los Angeles Basin.

Brown and Polk are impact players, the former a game-breaking tailback who has rushed for 1,671 yards, the latter a major-college prospect at safety. They were, in fact, selected the West Valley League offensive and defensive co-players of the year.

Brown said this week he enrolled at Taft “mainly for academics.” He also said he preferred to play in a system in which he could carry the ball 20 to 30 times a game. San Fernando runs a wishbone attack, meaning that Brown would have shared the ball with several other backs. Brown has carried 60 times in the past two playoff games.

Hernandez, who worked alongside Starr for four seasons, refused to comment on the players’ decision.

“I’d prefer not to talk about it,” Hernandez said. “I’m glad (Starr’s) doing well.”

Do actions speak louder than words? After San Fernando erased a three-touchdown deficit to beat Taft, 24-21, during the regular season, the coaches didn’t shake hands afterward. Said one San Fernando coach: “There’s no love lost between them.”

Starr said he was caught in a no-win situation with Hernandez. The two have severed ties.

“I think our relationship is distant,” Starr said. “I don’t have negative feelings toward him.

“He hired me, gave me a break and I worked for him with complete loyalty for four years. When I was hired at Taft, I was faced with a difficult decision right off the bat.

“There were kids who wanted to come here from the (attendance area) I had just worked in. Who am I to say they can’t come here when we have kids here from every other high school in the district?”

San Fernando declined to formally pursue the matter, so the City athletics office did not investigate. However, City Commissioner Hal Harkness said this week the schools have agreed that no more athletes from the San Fernando attendance area will be allowed to enroll at Taft. “That pipeline has been shut,” Harkness said. “It’s all been put on the record. It will be subject to scrutiny.”

Yet there is no question that Starr has inspired loyalty. Two weeks ago, Vollnogle dropped by to watch Taft play Fremont in the quarterfinals. When Vollnogle learned a Taft coach couldn’t make the game, he slipped on a set of headphones and helped out. Vollnogle is a Fremont graduate.

Taft rallied from a two-touchdown deficit to beat Fremont, 26-14. Last week, the Toreadors held off Chatsworth, 20-14. So far, so fast. But it wasn’t easy.

When Starr took over last spring, he knew the team needed a booster shot of confidence, and the sooner the better. He entered the team in every passing league he could find, including the Cal Lutheran tournament last summer.

On the first day of the Cal Lutheran event, when teams played for tournament seedings, Rothman said nobody on the team seemed particularly bent out of shape when Taft lost a couple of games. “We kind of gave up,” Rothman said. “I guess we were used to losing.”

Starr went ballistic. He ripped his players in front of several other teams. He had players running sprints and doing pushups.

The following day, Taft rolled through the opposition, including pass-happy Hart, and won the tournament title.

“Were we surprised? What do you think?” Rothman said.

Starr kept reinforcing in the players’ minds that losing would not be taken lightly. A banner hangs over the locker room exit, placed there by Starr several months ago. Players touch it as they run onto the field. It lists several goals, including the City championship.

“Winning’s all I knew, as a player and down the line,” Starr said. “I told the kids that. I don’t even know that other stuff.”

The other stuff is for the other guys, and Starr would like to keep it that way.

“I’ve been in a winning program and I really liked it,” Starr said, his voice tailing off to a whisper. “I’d like for Taft to be a winning program, and to be thought of in that same class.”

The same class as Carson, San Fernando and, before that, Mount Union. It has been a few years since the latter, though hardly a minute goes by that he doesn’t work Ohio into the conversation.

Even indirectly. Starr’s football references generate images of farmland and wide-open spaces.

“If you build it, they will come,” Starr said, stealing a line from a movie about a baseball field was carved out of acres of corn. “If you’re a winner, you work hard and the kids know you care about them, they will play hard for you.”

Cornball? Don’t tell the Toreadors.