Chilling Promotion : Pat Yerina, Crespi’s Coach of the Future, Takes Reins After Muff’s Sudden Death

Pat Yerina wasn’t supposed to be the Crespi High basketball coach.

Not now, anyway.

Yerina took the job as Crespi’s top assistant before this season, with the understanding that when Paul Muff retired--in three or four years--Yerina could take over if he chose.

The timetable was unexpectedly moved up last week.

Yerina’s final task as an assistant was to call the Crespi players last Thursday morning to tell them their coach was dead.

Muff, who coached the Celts for 14 of the past 18 seasons, died at age 46 because of an infection that, in a matter of days, spread through his body and caused his kidneys to shut down.

“I was just shocked over the whole ordeal,” said Yerina, 29. “I had talked to him basically every day.”

Yerina is now charged with resuscitating a team shattered not only by a lost coach, but an earthquake in the same week. He runs practices coolly, with the minute-by-minute organization he learned from Muff.

He speaks in even tones about missed layups, passing patterns and jump balls. Not the past. No time for that.

The first game of the post-Muff era is tonight against Harvard-Westlake, which brings a 16-1 record to Crespi’s gym and isn’t likely to go easy on the Celts (7-9, 3-3 in the Mission League) because of their misfortune.

Yerina said he is keeping the focus on basketball because, “That’s the way Paul would have wanted it.”

Muff, who won four league titles and more than 200 games with the Celts, was a mainstay around the basketball court since 1976, as athletic director and coach.

His glory years were the early 1980s, when he won four league championships in five seasons. Joe Carrabino, whose freshman year was Muff’s first at Crespi, starred three seasons for the Celts, then went on to play at Harvard.

“(Muff) had dedicated himself to coaching kids,” said Carrabino, now an investment banker in New York. “He had opportunities to move on to to other things, but he just felt his best impact could be coaching kids at Crespi. That was his true calling in life.”

Muff lasted four years away from the basketball court before his drive to coach prompted the athletic director in him to reappoint the basketball coach in him.

“He was really excited about getting back to coaching,” Yerina said.

This season also was a homecoming for Yerina, who played for Muff from 1980 to 1982, then moved on to Fairfield University in Connecticut.

After graduation, he was a high school assistant for back-to-back Connecticut champions at St. Joseph’s High in Trumbull. He then spent five seasons as head coach at Barlow High in Easton, Conn.

But his wife, a teacher, was laid off last summer. Soon after, Yerina was in Los Angeles to visit his parents when he heard about a job as a salesman for a cable company in Westlake. It was the ticket he needed back to California, and Crespi.

His task was to help Muff restore the Crespi basketball tradition that had slipped under three coaches in the four seasons Muff served only as athletic director.

But it might have been too much for Muff, who was also undergoing treatments for skin cancer, said Fr. Fred Tillotson, Crespi’s principal.

“He was getting tired,” Tillotson said. “He was wondering if he had taken on too much trying to build a new basketball program as well as being athletic director.

“He was one who never said no and he felt as if he had overloaded himself. Paul told me a few weeks ago he was feeling ill and he said, ‘If I have bitten off more than I can chew, Pat Yerina would do a great job.’ I know he would definitely be Paul Muff’s choice.”

Muff coached his last game on Jan. 12, a 50-41 overtime victory over Alemany. After the game, Muff told the players he was sick and he probably wouldn’t be there two days later when they played at Chaminade.

He wasn’t.

The following Monday, Muff was taken to the emergency room at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance. Yerina tried to reach players to let them know, but the earthquake that morning had rendered the phone lines practically useless.

“We knew about him getting sick, but we didn’t know it was that bad,” said senior forward Brett Nordyke, who had known Muff for years because his two brothers played at Crespi. “(Yerina) updated us . . . every day, but we thought it was just the flu.

“Once we knew he was in the hospital, we knew it was serious.”

Gianandrea Marcaccini, who transferred from Notre Dame in November, said he was shocked when Yerina called him early Thursday morning with the news of Muff’s death.

“It seemed like (a week earlier), he was full of energy and with us and now he’s gone,” Marcaccini said. “He had a sore throat. That’s all he told us.

“Even though I only knew him for two months, he’s the kind of guy I will remember my whole life. I just feel lucky I got to know him.”