Ventura Heals Under McCune’s Touch : High school football: Coach restores sense of pride in players after Kochel sex scandal rocked Cougar program last year.

It is 2 p.m. Monday, Sept. 28, 1992. Room 23 at Ventura High. The weekly meeting of the school’s football team is about to begin.

Coach Harvey Kochel, who customarily presides over the meeting with a felt pen and an overhead projector, suddenly defers to assistant Phil McCune.

“He said, ‘You start going over everything. I have a meeting with the principal,’ ” McCune recalled.

McCune was puzzled.

“When will you be back?’ ” he said.

“You don’t understand,” Kochel said. “I’m not coming back.”

The exchanging of the pen ultimately signified a changing of the guard. True to his word, Kochel did not return.

McCune’s voice softens as he reflects.

“I was devastated.”

*

It is 2 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, 1993. Room 23 at Ventura High. McCune has the felt pen, an elbow on the overhead projector and the players’ attention. The Cougars’ head coach is discussing “what’s important now,” a phrase he utters, oh, about 15 times each meeting.

What’s important now? Blocking assignments, defensive adjustments, putting the hurt on Buena star running back George Keiaho. The agenda for tonight’s Channel League showdown with the cross-town rival Bulldogs is a long one, spelled out on a 10-page handout prepared by McCune.

Ultimately, what’s most important now is feeling good about playing football for Ventura High.

“Most of you guys would rather watch film of Buena than study for a midterm,” McCune says, moving from behind the projector for emphasis. “And that’s OK. We all know that that’s not the correct priority, but playing Buena on Friday night is what’s important now. And you know we always, always, always do what’s important right now .”

What’s Important Now--WIN, if you haven’t caught on to McCune’s acronym--not only rolls off the coach’s tongue, it has been the Cougars’ clarion catch phrase since the day McCune was thrust into the job the way a firefighter is sent in to battle a brush fire.

Kochel’s departure, three weeks into last season, was the cow kicking over the lantern. Before the week had passed, the 48-year-old coach was in police custody and the team, the school and the community were aflame in controversy.

Fourteen months later, Kochel is serving a two-year prison term for engaging in a seven-month sexual relationship with a 15-year-old female Ventura High student. And a season filled with disbelief and sensational publicity--all of it negative--is in the past.

“Everything is great this year,” said Ramsey Jay Jr., a junior wide receiver and member of last year’s varsity. “The morale was good right from Hell Week.”

About the only thing that hasn’t changed is the Cougars’ performance under McCune.

Once again, Ventura (7-2, 5-1 in league play) is in the thick of things, needing a victory at home in tonight’s season finale to pull even with first-place Buena (7-2, 6-0).

Last season, after stumbling to a 2-2 start in league play, Ventura rallied to win its final three games, including a 62-27 rout of Buena. The Cougars (8-3) finished tied for second and advanced to the Southern Section Division III playoffs, in which they lost to Peninsula, 20-14, in the first round.

And so it goes under the likable, well-mannered McCune. Although this seaside community might be slow in noticing, McCune, 52, with his pragmatic, take-care-of-business style, has restored respect to Ventura High football.

Suddenly, what was painfully humiliating is no longer. “If anything, I’m more proud now than ever,” said senior quarterback Erik Olson, a free safety last season. “With all the difficulties, we had a great season last year.”

Still, few players probably felt much like strutting down Main Street sporting a Ventura High sweat shirt. “It was not easy,” McCune said. “But we were in the middle of the season (when it happened), so there really was no choice (but to go on).”

The media spared no details in reporting the Kochel affair. And coverage lasted weeks. An investigation revealed Kochel allegedly had been sexually harassing female students for years and in fact had been reprimanded by school officials for acting inappropriately with female students on more than one occasion.

Parents of the girl in question brought the matter to the attention of school officials after a search of their daughter’s room produced about 50 notes written to her by Kochel, many of them sexually explicit. In August, they filed a lawsuit against Kochel, the Ventura Unified School District, two former school officials and Ventura County.

The couple charge school administrators with neglecting to curb Kochel’s behavior. The suit seeks unspecified general and punitive damages.

In January, Kochel pleaded guilty to six felony counts of unlawful sex. He is serving his sentence in Avenal State Prison near Fresno.

“The Harvey Kochel incident tore apart the school,” Ventura Principal Jerry Barshay said. “When you have kids who respect and work for a coach and then something like this happens, they don’t know who to believe after a while. For the first several weeks, they were traumatized.”

Barshay immediately appointed McCune interim coach. The staff’s senior assistant and a science teacher at the school since 1974, McCune was the logical choice. He served as head coach at the school from 1974-1979, never posting a winning season but earning respect from players and colleagues that has lasted to this day.

“Phil is one of those guys who’s in coaching for all the right reasons,” said Rick Scott, coach at Buena and a longtime friend of McCune. “He really cares about the kids.”

McCune became an assistant to Kochel in 1981 after serving a one-year stint as an assistant at Ventura College. Under Kochel and McCune, the team’s defensive coordinator, Ventura went 77-35-5, winning or sharing six league titles.

McCune never envisioned returning to the head-coaching ranks, although he enjoys wearing a whistle around his neck as much as the next guy. It’s the administrative part of the job he can do without: fund-raising, paperwork, dealing with the media. Pushing a pen of a different sort.

“Some of the things you have to do as a head coach are things that take you away from coaching,” McCune says. “Every day there is something that is non-football-related that takes you away from the kids.”

McCune offers a sheet of paper as an example.

“See this?” he says. “A teacher wants me to find out if these four guys have been cutting class. It’s no big deal, it’s just a pain.”

Under different circumstances, McCune would have turned down the job. But he more than graciously accepted.

“I said, ‘Phil, you’re going to have to do this,’ ” Barshay said. “He said, ‘I’ll do the best job I can.’ The immediate emphasis was to carry on the team and bring the kids through a grieving period.”

Ventura had won its first three games and was ranked No. 1 in The Times’ area poll the day Kochel was arrested. But suddenly, rankings and league titles were unimportant.

“Hopefully, you try to be a positive role model and the kids see how you’re handling it and how the rest of the coaches are handling it,” McCune said. “Personally, I didn’t have the time to reflect on all this stuff happening inside me. I was so caught up in doing what was important at the time, I don’t think I ever had the chance to say, ‘What’s the big picture here?’ The big picture was: These kids need some direction.”

For his part, McCune had to put aside his own feelings of disbelief. Although rumors had swirled about Kochel for years, McCune, like much of the school’s staff, readily dismissed them.

The absence of Kochel, his friend of nearly 20 years, saddened McCune. Yet true to his credo, McCune focused on players and their problems.

“He sat me down and talked to me friend to friend rather than coach to player,” Jay said. “He helped us grow closer like a family. He said it was just a fact of life what happened. Sometimes we have to deal with these things.”

“The best thing I can say about Phil McCune,” Scott said, “is that he handled the worst adversity I’ve ever seen a school have to live through about as courageously and with as much class as possible.”

McCune kept the pen to the projector and the stream of handouts flowing. On Mondays, players load up on paperwork as they enter Room 23, then leaf through the instructions while the coach arranges Xs and O’s overhead.

“The thing I like about Coach McCune is that he’s not the kind of guy who wants all the fame, he just wants us to win,” Olson said. “ ‘What’s Important Now’ has become our big motivator. We even joke about it sometimes. Like when we’re out after a game, we’ll say, ‘What’s Important Now?’ And someone will say, ‘Food!’

“But we use it in football. We don’t think about the playoffs. This week we think about Buena. If we take care of what we need to do today, we’ll be better off tomorrow.”

Tomorrow rarely makes its way into a discussion with McCune. He accepted the job as head coach on a permanent basis after last season, but he is unsure how long he will keep it. “I don’t know if I’ll be back Monday,” he says with a laugh. “I try not to look past Friday night’s game.”

*

What’s important now for Phil McCune is getting back to the projector. The Monday meeting is moving along and the coach is sitting on a couch in an adjacent classroom, discussing all that has transpired over the past year.

McCune would rather be with his players than talk to a reporter, but he is gracious nonetheless.

Focusing constantly on the task at hand, McCune perhaps finds it difficult at times to recognize the rewards of being a head coach. But before leaving, he concedes it’s not all one big headache.

“I was thinking about this the other night on the way over to Oxnard,” McCune says. “One of the things I don’t like is riding the bus. But I was sitting there thinking that it is really a privilege and really quite an honor to be allowed to be in a position where you are representing a group of kids who are such outstanding young men.

“You focus on that.”