Kochel Gets 2 Years in Sex Case : Courts: The judge calls the former football coach’s affair with a 15-year-old Ventura High girl a ‘disgrace’ to teaching.

Calling former Ventura High School football coach Harvey Kochel’s affair with a 15-year-old student a “disgrace to the teaching profession,” a Ventura County judge on Tuesday sentenced him to two years in state prison.

Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch called Kochel’s seven-month relationship with the girl, who is now 16 and planning to transfer to another school, “a gross abuse of a position of trust.”

Before imposing the sentence for six felony counts of having sex with a minor, Storch added: “Teachers don’t do this kind of thing and shouldn’t do this kind of thing.”

Kochel, who led the Cougars team to a record of 77-35-5 during his 10 years as head coach, left a courtroom packed with supporters without saying a word.

He immediately surrendered to sheriff’s deputies to begin serving time for a relationship that he told authorities was “a king-size mistake,” according to court papers.

Assistant Coach Cornell Brown was among his supporters.

“I’m behind him,” Brown said. “I think the judge was very fair in his decision. Harvey’s in a lot of pain.”

Kochel, 48, expressed remorse in a letter to Storch that read, in part: “I’ve cast an unfair and gloomy shadow on a young person and her family. . . . I’ve shamed and disgraced my family, my profession and myself. For all of this, I feel horrible, and sincerely apologize to everyone affected.”

The victim told authorities that she believes that Kochel is “a wonderful person” who should not be punished for “normal human behavior,” according to the coach’s probation report.

But the probation report and testimony revealed that Kochel was a source of numerous complaints from female students and the target of repeated warnings from his superiors about inappropriate touching.

The report also reveals that Kochel was seen several times between 1985 and 1987 in compromising situations with another student, who his attorney says is now his adult girlfriend.

School officials warned Kochel about his conduct with the girl on several occasions, including incidents in 1985, when he met her alone at night in the field house, and in 1987, when a former student spotted the pair in the office and parking lot of Motel 6, the report said.

It also said Kochel was counseled to clean up his speech, which included profanity directed at students and racial remarks aimed at blacks.

He was counseled for using a racial slur against a black student in 1987 and for telling three black students in 1989, “you are black men living in a white man’s world and you have to do what the white man says,” the probation report said.

Kochel began his affair with the 15-year-old girl after she developed a crush on him that escalated, through an exchange of letters, to their first sexual encounter on Feb. 11, 1992, at Kochel’s Ventura home, the probation report said.

The girl told authorities that they had sex more than 10 times.

The report also revealed that Ventura Unified School District Supt. Joseph Spirito reported Kochel to police after the girl’s stepfather told him in September about finding 49 letters from Kochel in his daughter’s bedroom, many of them sexually explicit.

The girl had kept the letters even though Kochel warned her to destroy them because their relationship could get him fired and jailed, the report said.

The girl still does not believe that Kochel did anything wrong, Deputy Dist. Atty. Saundra T. Brewer told the court before sentencing.

“He is very smooth, very skilled and very swift in his seduction, and it’s apparent from these letters,” Brewer told the court. “He had one thing in mind, and one thing only--his sexual satisfaction. His use of her. . . . This is a man whose lust has been out of control for over a decade.”

Kochel’s sentencing followed testimony by seven women who said he touched them or made sexual overtures to them while they were Ventura High School students between 1979 and 1992.

One 1980 graduate testified that when she was 16, Kochel rubbed the inside of her thigh as they sat in the school parking lot after a driving lesson.

He also hoisted her onto his shoulder and carried her up the stadium steps with his hand on her thighs when she asked to be excused from running up the steps because of a knee injury, she testified.

A 1987 graduate testified that he put his arm around her in the weight room when she was 14 and whispered, “You know, I’ve always wanted to put my arm around you.”

“I could not believe it,” the woman testified. “I could not believe that a teacher, someone you’re supposed to be able to trust and confide in, would violate that and say something as sexually offensive as that.”

She complained to a vice principal, she said.

One 1981 graduate who worked as a drivers’ education teaching assistant for Kochel in her junior year said Kochel had her pulled out of class and summoned to the football field, where he met her alone on the bleachers.

There, Kochel offered to take her to a cabin where, he assured her, they would “have good sex,” she said.

“I was 16, I didn’t really know what sex was,” she said. “I said, ‘That’s crazy.’ I said, ‘You do have a wife, don’t you?’

“He said, ‘I wouldn’t want her to know.’ . . . He said we could have a platonic sexual relationship,” she said, adding that she refused to go with him. As for birth control, Kochel told the girl that he had had a vasectomy.

Another alumna, class of 1986, testified that Kochel, who has four children and is now divorced, slapped her buttocks when she was a 16-year-old student in his weight-training class and told her a sexual joke that made her uncomfortable.

She skipped classes and asked to drop Kochel’s class. When school officials refused and placed her in his class in the following quarter, she refused to go and took an F, she testified.

Defense attorney Louis B. Samonsky Jr. pleaded for leniency, saying that Kochel has no criminal record and that he has been undergoing psychotherapy for a cognitive disorder that led to his misbehavior with girls.

Kochel has lost his job, his home, his teaching credential and the support of many of his colleagues and students since the arrest, Samonsky said. The defense attorney asked for a one-year jail term rather than the four-year prison term sought by Brewer.

Instead, Storch chose a moderate sentence, which could allow Kochel to be paroled in about a year. Storch also ordered Kochel not to contact the victim in the case or any of the former students who testified.

“In addition to the state prison commitment, I find this man is ruined personally, professionally and financially, and shamed for what has transpired,” Storch said. “He’ll never teach again, nor should he. But I find that he has been punished outside of this court.”