One Tough Lesson : Youth: Laguna High football players push fire from minds to focus on practicing for today’s game. Their coaches admit it isn’t easy to do.

They jogged out of the locker room with helmets in hand. They wore cleats on their feet and had a purpose in their hearts. It was time to think about football, not fire. It was time to do something good for their town.

That’s what their coaches had told them. Practice hard, they said. Concentrate the best you can. Block out the smoke and the ashes and the loss. You’re the Laguna Beach High School football team. You have a chance to make this city proud. Win our next game, help people smile again.

Playing high school football is difficult enough for most kids. Playing it in the midst of disaster adds another dimension. Of the 30 members of the Laguna Beach football team, 27 showed up for practice Friday afternoon. Twenty-seven teen-agers who believed playing football was the best thing to do.

“I think everybody wanted to come out today,” said Brad Bohn, a sophomore kicker. “I think everyone wants to go out and win one for this town.”

Three players were absent, but that was understandable. They were among those whose homes were destroyed by the fire. While their teammates practiced kickoffs and pass plays Friday afternoon, Gordon Orsborn, Rupert Harwood and Damon Newell were with their families, trying to put their lives back together.

Because Laguna Beach plays Century High of Santa Ana today--1 p.m. at Santa Ana Stadium--Laguna Beach Coach Mike Roche hopes to have the team completely intact by this morning. The bus leaves for the game at 11.

“Go out and find your teammates,” Roche told his players Friday. “Go out and find the ones who aren’t here today.”

Quarterback Pat Wood was with Orsborn when the latter’s Emerald Bay home burned to the ground. They watched it happen live on television, Wood said. Orsborn barely said a word.

Harwood, the team’s starting fullback, was believed to have saved his snowboard and a stereo from his home before it burned. Newell, teammates said, grabbed his comic book collection.

Stories like these circulated among the players Friday. Whose home survived, whose did not. Some had their homes looted; the fortunate ones were merely evacuated, nothing more. Some players were having nightmares about that fiery afternoon and night.

“I still wake up smelling smoke,” team member Alex Siewert said. “Every day you wake up and can’t believe what happened.”

Which is why Roche and his assistant coaches felt motivated to get back on track. The city was hurting, people depressed. Fire engines were still parked on the streets, helicopters flew overhead. It was time, if only for a few hours, to push disaster from the players’ minds.

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The usual routine. Roche figured that’s what it would take. Pep talks, stretching, jumping jacks, passing drills and huddles. The players went through the routine Friday, focusing on the game.

Coaches barked orders, players made jokes. One tackler nearly flattened a running back, and everybody laughed. When the players gathered in the locker room, the air smelled not of smoke but sweat. As they walked across the floor, they heard the familiar clacking of their cleats.

But the players weren’t the only ones focusing on getting back to normal Friday. On the hillside just above campus, a group of parents and students was doing what needed to be done as well.

The huge letter L on the hillside, for more than 30 years a symbol of Laguna Beach, had been burned by the fire, and it needed some fixing. The group spent an hour or so reconstructing it, or at least its outline, out of large, white stones. With the charred hillside as a backdrop, a few hundred feet from burned-out houses and blackened chimneys, it now serves as a symbol of efforts to rebuild Laguna Beach.