Kochel Gets Two-Year Prison Sentence : Jurisprudence: Former Ventura High football coach was convicted on six counts of having sex with a 15-year-old student.

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

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 to a 77-35-5 record in his 10 years as coach, left the packed courtroom without saying a word and surrendered to sheriff’s deputies.

Kochel, 48, expressed remorse in a letter to Storch that read, in part, “I have had time to reflect on my wrong doings and am terribly discouraged about my conduct. 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 female student, however, told authorities that she believes 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 also reveals that Kochel provoked constant complaints from female students and was the target of repeated warnings from his superiors about inappropriate touching.

And it reveals that Kochel was seen several times in compromising situations between 1985 and 1988 with another student, who his attorney says is now his adult girlfriend.

School officials warned Kochel in 1985 about counseling that girl at night in the field house; and again in 1987 after a former student had spotted the two in the office and parking lot of a Ventura motel; and on several other occasions, the report said.

The report also said that Kochel was counseled to clean up his speech, which included profanity directed at students and racial slurs against blacks.

He was counseled for calling a black student a “scrawny, skinny nigger” 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.

They had sex more than 10 times, the girl told authorities.

The report also revealed that Joseph Spirito, superintendent of schools, reported Kochel to police after the girl’s stepfather had told Spirito in September about finding 49 letters from Kochel in his daughter’s bedroom, many of them sexually explicit.

The girl had kept the letters despite Kochel’s warnings to destroy them because their relationship could get him fired and jailed, the report said.

The girl still does not believe 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.”

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.

A 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.

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.”

She complained to a vice principal, she said.

A 1981 graduate who worked as a driver’s education teaching assistant for Kochel in her junior year said that 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 away 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. She added that Kochel had told her he had had a vasectomy.

A 1986 graduate testified that Kochel, who was divorced in 1988, slapped her on the seat 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 be taken out of Kochel’s class. When school officials refused and put her in his class again the next quarter, she refused to go and took an F, she testified.