FOOTBALL ’94 / High School Coaches Show Off Their Tricks! : TRICKS OF THE TRADE : Gadget plays and their origins are about as varied and interesting as the coaches who design them. Beg, borrow or steal ‘em, they come with no guarantees. But they can certainly make for some memorable moments.

When they said Coach Gene Uebelhardt pulled one out, they weren’t kidding.

Right from his back pocket.

The year was 1990. To make the playoffs, Royal High needed at least a tie against perennially powerful Thousand Oaks in its final Marmonte League football game. And with 13 seconds left, Royal needed something close to a miracle.

The Highlanders, trailing by seven points, had the ball at their own 35-yard-line, fourth-down, 10 yards to go. On the sideline, Uebelhardt reached back and . . . fished for his notes on a play that his team had practiced only once--earlier that evening, just before they boarded the bus. Quarterback Ryan Fien faded back and lofted a short pass to tight end Carlos Gonzales, who had settled behind a wall of blockers behind the line of scrimmage.

The Thousand Oaks secondary, duped into believing a screen play was developing, converged on Gonzales, who calmly pulled up and launched a pass to an open receiver down field.

Touchdown. Point after, good. Tie ballgame. Royal was bound for the playoffs. Uebelhardt had, indeed, snagged victory from the jaws of defeat--thanks to his father, Val, who the night before drafted the game-winning play on the back of a bar coaster.

Branch Rickey was a baseball man, but football coaches say he had it right when he said that luck is the residue of design.

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Crespi was clinging to a seven-point lead as it prepared to punt from its own end zone with three minutes left in a 1986 playoff game against Edison. Needing a big play, Edison lined up ready to rush 10 defenders. Steve Puryear, Crespi’s punter, surveyed the situation, saw that a Crespi wideout had been left uncovered, and reacted accordingly. He called an audible--a pass. On the sideline, Jim Benkert, a Crespi assistant who would later become head coach at Westlake, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Frantically, he and other members of the coaching staff screamed for a timeout.

Too late. Puryear took the snap and calmly completed a pass that went for a 40-yard gain and a first down. Crespi ran out the clock and went on to win the Southern Section Big Five Conference title. “It’s always a great call when it works,” Benkert said.

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The origin of deceptive gadgets can be traced to the sandlots, where fingers indelibly draft strategy on blacktop, palm or T-shirt.

Some kids don’t grow up, they just get more sophisticated. In high school football, chicanery--especially, it seems, the kind sketched on coasters--helps win games. Coaches in the region run double and triple passes, hook-and-ladder plays, fake punts, bounce passes, lost tee plays, several flavors of reverses, even rugby scrums.

Buena Coach Rick Scott, a noted innovator, said such plays are found “with bottle caps in the dirt.” Harry Welch, the former Canyon coach, recalls a time when a novice coach could find a trick play on the back of a cereal box.

Nowadays, coaches simply beg, borrow and steal from each other. And they hope that what goes around doesn’t circuitously come back to bite them. Four years ago, Westlake scorched Buena by lining up for a field goal and acting out the scenario that the kicker had forgotten his tee. The Westlake players on the sideline played right along, holding up the tee and shouting.

The kicker jogged toward the sideline--presumably to get the tee, but actually in motion--the ball was snapped to the holder, and the kicker turned up field and caught a pass.

Benkert said he learned the play when he was a Crespi assistant and Hart’s sophomore team burned him with it. Ironically, Scott, now at Buena, was Hart’s coach at the time.

“I’ve often wondered if Rick knows I learned that play from his sophomore coach,” Benkert said.

During his tenure at Crespi, St. Francis Coach Bill Redell occasionally accepted plays designed by booster club members. “If they worked,” he said, “I took the credit.” At Hart, coaches routinely receive suggestions from Dale Basey, the school’s activities director. “His playbook is bigger than mine,” said Dean Herrington, Hart’s offensive coordinator. “When he gives me a play, the first thing I do is check to see if there’s 11 players.”

Most coaches prefer to draft their own schemes. Each day at lunch, Benkert said, the Westlake coaching staff conjures up new designs on napkins and place mats. “Coming up with things that are new and fun is part of the fun of coaching,” Scott said.

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Reseda Coach Joel Schaeffer was rooming with former Hart Coach Carl Sweet in the dormitories at Cal State Northridge as they prepared the South team for the annual Shrine all-star game. The topic of conversation was gadget plays. “Coach,” Sweet said to Schaeffer, “I’ll show you a bootleg that’s a real barn-burner.”

The words had barely left Sweet’s mouth when a fire alarm went off, sending both coaches hustling from the building.

“He was drawing the play on the back of a napkin when we left the room,” Schaeffer said. “I never did see the rest of that play.”

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One coach’s dream is another’s nightmare.

Kennedy Coach Bob Francola only occasionally attempts gadgets, but he readily recalls the frustration of defending against a “fumblerooski” employed repeatedly a few years ago by cross-town rival Granada Hills.

As gimmicks go, the fumblerooski is a relatively common ploy. After the ball is snapped, it is set on the ground just behind the center while the offensive backfield creates a diversion by running what appears to be a routine play toward a chosen side of the field. A lineman then scoops up the ball and heads in the opposite direction.

“When we beat them in ‘91, their guard had more yards than their tailback,” Francola said. “It was a little embarrassing. And it was interesting to be on the sideline and hear your defense call, ‘Watch the guard! Watch the guard!’ ”

Creative coaches rejuvenate old gimmicks by adding new wrinkles based on their team’s personnel. Hart used to run a fumblerooski with a former lower-level quarterback, Doug DeGroot, a 250-pound lineman, throwing the ball.

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The score was tied, 14-14, but Eddie Lopez, Sylmar’s quarterback, was struggling in a playoff game against Carson. Every pass he threw, it seemed, went array. The perfect setup.

With less than two minutes to go in the game, Coach Jeff Engilman called for a play in which Lopez bounced a lateral to one wide receiver, who was to scoop it up and throw a bomb to another wide out cutting across the field.

Lopez took the snap, turned, rifled the ball into the dirt and . . . the Carson defense stopped. Sylmar receiver Victor Cardenas picked it up and hit Dwight Patton with a touchdown pass.

“That pass he threw into the ground,” Engilman said, “looked like one of his normal passes.”

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Crafting a strategy to bamboozle the opposition is a lot like concocting a good joke. Timing is everything.

Chaminade Coach Rich Lawson saves his best hoaxes for big games because he believes other coaches “get conservative and stick by the book in those situations.”

Many times deception provides a knockout punch. Last year, just after Buena took the lead in a close game against Santa Barbara, Scott called for an onside kick. When it worked, he followed with a gimmick play called the “Bazooka Reverse”--a handoff to the tailback, who gives to the flanker on a reverse, who tosses the ball back to the quarterback, who throws to the split end. The play went for a touchdown and Buena cruised from there.

“That was the perfect opportunity because it was called at a time when their kids already were hanging their heads a little,” Scott said. “That was our chance to blow the game open.”

Gimmicks also are used as a means of recapturing lost momentum. Herrington recalls Hart trailing Dana Hills, 14-0, in a 1989 playoff game before a touchdown on a double pass helped turn the tide in the Indians’ favor. Hart went on to win, 40-14.

Three years ago in a playoff game, Loyola turned the tables on Saugus with a play that resembled a rugby scrum on the return of the second-half kickoff.

As the first Loyola player gathered in the kick, his teammates formed a tight circle around him. When the circle broke, Loyola players scattered in all directions, leaving Saugus players to guess which of them had the ball.

The play went for a touchdown, tying the game. Loyola went on to win, scoring another touchdown later in the game on a halfback option pass.

Loyola hadn’t run the kickoff play--called Circle ‘em Up--since the mid-1980s. “I wish I had a piece of the action with the air time of that play,” Loyola Coach Steve Grady said. “We were in a bar in Bakersfield last year on a scouting trip and saw it on some TV blooper show. We looked up at the screen and said, ‘Hey, that’s us!’ ”

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Reseda lacks its typically strong returning cast this season, so opposing coaches had best beware. Schaeffer, who has been pacing the Reseda sideline for 16 years, can be unpredictable.

Schaeffer has a reputation for being conservative, but he also has what he calls a triple flanker reverse and another sequence which is run without a huddle and includes the talents of four quarterbacks on the field at once.

“I like to think of myself as Felix the Cat and his bag of tricks,” Schaeffer said. “I’m going to pull them out one at a time.”

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Underdog teams are especially likely to conceive deceptive schemes as a way to stay with a physically superior opponent. Faced with the unenviable task of meeting Muir early in the playoffs one season, Westlake devised a double-pass play.

“Bad call,” Benkert said. “We scored, but all it did was make them mad.” Muir won, 52-13.

Some coaches consider trick plays no-lose situations.

In Dave Bennett’s debut as coach last year, Harvard-Westlake ran a double pass on its first play from scrimmage. The second pass, thrown by the tailback, fell incomplete, but Warrior players gave each other high-fives anyway.

“We still accomplished what we set out to do,” Bennett says. “The kids knew the play worked--the receiver was open--so that was a lift for them. It also sent a message. Everyone knew we weren’t going to be conservative and boring.”

If nothing else, designing new ways to hoodwink opponents is a good way to ease the drudgery of practice. “There’s nothing better than a goofy play to break things up,” Buena’s Scott said. “They’re fun, and very rarely do kids miss their assignments on gadget plays because everyone is so in tune.”

Engilman, the Sylmar coach, recalls adding a fumblerooski to the Spartans’ playbook before a playoff game last year and noting a difference in the performance of the guard who was assigned to run it. “The play didn’t work, but that kid was fired up all week,” he said.

The psychology of a initiating a trick play also applies to future opponents.

“You benefit just by the effort,” Scott said. “Showing something even once makes everyone else you play spend practice time on it.”

Teams that routinely incorporate gadgets demand more attention than others. Crespi Coach Tim Lins and his staff were especially wary as they prepared to meet San Clemente in last season’s playoffs.

San Clemente has a reputation for deception, but even knowing that didn’t help the Celts. San Clemente recovered an onside kick to start the game, then ran a fumblerooski for a touchdown on the first play from scrimmage.

“We laughed,” Lins said. “What else could we do? We got suckered.”

Well, for one thing, Crespi got even. In the fourth quarter, the Celts tied the score, 21-21, on a reverse they used only once during the regular season. Crespi won by a field goal in overtime.

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Trick plays make unlikely heroes. In a 1987 playoff game, Reseda had the ball on the South Gate 10, trailing, 13-12, with time running out.

On third down, Schaeffer, the Reseda coach, called for “Special K”--summoning place-kicker George Konstantinopoulos (one writer called him “The Human Sentence”) into the game. Reseda lined up in field-goal formation when suddenly the Regent sideline exploded in sound. Konstantinopoulos was without his kicking tee.

As Schaeffer dramatically called his kicker to the sideline, the ball was snapped and Konstantinopoulos bolted up field.

A pass was thrown and the kicker pulled it in, one-handed, in the corner of the end zone for the game-winning touchdown.

“Best catch I’d seen in 30 yards,” Schaeffer said, “and it was made by my kicker.”

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Most coaches save time during their weekly routines specifically for practicing trick plays. “You can’t just draw them in the dirt,” said Grady, the Loyola coach.

Oh no? Try telling that to Simi Valley Coach Roger McCamy, who jogged onto the field and used a stick to diagram a double pass in the dirt before the final play of a game against Agoura last year.

It worked, and Simi Valley won, 13-7.

Some teams create special names for their inventions like the “Swinging Gate” and “The Lonesome Pole Cat.” Village Christian runs trick formations called “Crazy Cajun” and “Big Bayou,” named after their coach, Mike Plaisance, a Louisiana native. The Crusaders also have “Beautiful Joyce”--the name a tribute to the coach’s wife.

Westlake has a play called, “The Naked”--which says nothing about the scheme itself. “We call it that because if it doesn’t work, we get caught with our pants down,” Benkert said.

When Welch coached at Canyon, the Cowboys ran a fake punt in which the snap went to the up-back, who handed off to a lineman through the receiving player’s legs. That play also carried an unusual name, one which Welch said, “Probably isn’t polite to print in the newspaper.”

While some of their names stretch the boundaries of good taste, the plays themselves occasionally boarder on unethical.

Until rules were written prohibiting “substitution to deceive,” coaches routinely attempted to confuse opponents while exchanging players. Once in a while, a player going toward the sideline would stop just inbounds and the quarterback would quickly zip him the ball.

Westlake adjusted to the substitution rules by designing a play in which two players line up in the same position. On cue, the players frantically look to the sideline where coaches are emphatically urging the alleged extra man to come off.

As the player jogs toward the bench--ostensibly in motion--the ball is snapped and the quarterback targets him as the primary receiver.

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Sometimes you can fool the wrong people.

Bennett, the Harvard-Westlake coach, reminds officials before using trick plays, which occasionally only adds to his frustration.

As a high school coach in Massachusetts, Bennett told an officiating crew of his plans to use a bounce pass. The play worked perfectly, going for a touchdown, but it was called back because an official blew his whistle when he saw the first pass, a lateral, hit the ground.

“I blew it, what can I tell you,” the official lamented.

Bad call. Bad pun.

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Lawson, the Chaminade coach, estimates that gadget plays work “80-85% of the time.”

Welch, the former Canyon coach, agrees that, if practiced, they work more often than not. However, he added, “Rarely when you need them to work most.”

Darryl Stroh, who retired this year after nine seasons as coach at Granada Hills said, “A steady diet isn’t healthy. If you’re good, you don’t need them very often. If you’re not good, they’re probably not enough to bail you out.”

Some coaches consider the use of gimmicks a sign of weakness, but Royal’s Uebelhardt seems to speak for the majority when he says he can live with armchair quarterbacks who might second guess.

“Coaching is a personal thing,” he said. “What one coach calls weakness might win a game for somebody else.

“If it wins a game, then I’d rather be weak.”