PREP EXTRA : Beyond X’s and O’s : Problems of Today Force Many Coaches to Act as Confidante, Tutor, Parent, Friend, and Sometimes Savior to Troubled Athletes

You don’t save every kid.

There was an athlete who played football at Santa Ana Valley and had problems with the law. A lot of problems. And that’s why Coach Scott Orloff worked so hard to keep him involved in football, to see if the game might be a way out of the neighborhood.

It was tough, real tough.

“We had a barbecue,” Orloff says, recounting the story, “and he stole a package of hamburgers from me. I told him, ‘If you need something, come to me, don’t steal from me.’ ”

The door is open. Every athlete Orloff coaches has his home phone number. He has been called as late as 11:30 p.m. and as early as 5:30 a.m.

Sometimes the athletes--and sometimes they aren’t even athletes, they’re just students who have noticed an interested party--need rides through troubled streets, or need help, or just need somebody to talk to so they can kill a lonely night.

But this kid, the football player, is in jail now for armed robbery.

“Him I failed on,” Orloff says. “It doesn’t always work out. But the ones you are successful with, they feel pretty good.”

Orloff isn’t alone.

Gary Raya had heard the rumors. The ones about drugs. He doesn’t coach football. He coaches girls’ basketball. And he doesn’t coach in a troubled Santa Ana neighborhood, but in Placentia.

And so he approached the girl because he was worried about the rumors, which turned out to be more than that. And he laid it out on the table in his office at El Dorado High School.

“You have a lot at stake,” he told her. “You have athletics to turn to, you have a coach that cares about you, and you don’t need this stuff.”

And this kid, she was saved.

Coaches get close to their kids. Sometimes too close. A few years ago there was a basketball coach who was found with one of her players in a car in Costa Mesa. Your basic compromising position. She crossed the line.

But kids need help. Sometimes they need discipline and sometimes they need love. And it’s up to the coach, the adult in the relationship, to draw the line.

Kids get help--and sometimes a lot of it--from their coaches, who can serve as parents, pastors, tutors, counselors, confidantes, friends, disciplinarians, academic advisers and hospice workers. They help kids pass the Scholastic Aptitude Test and they help them pass into adulthood, though neither is easy.

Tustin Athletic Director Al Rosmino has been in education for four decades. He has watched high school students fear Vietnam, dance to disco, accelerate through the Me Generation and incorporate “dysfunctional” into their vocabularies.

“It’s a whole new ballgame,” he says, “and maybe school has become a social service center more than an educational program.”

Maybe it has. School isn’t what it used to be and neither are coaches. Their involvement isn’t limited to drawing X’s and O’s or rolling a ball out on the floor. Today, their involvement centers around real-world problems. Athletes today, and kids in general, need more help than ever.

You talk to coaches and the same thing comes up. They keep talking about the way families have been torn apart by divorce. And if the parents are together, they’re both working. There are very few homemakers who raise the kids and wait for their husbands to come home from work. That stereotype is history.

Latchkey children bring with them a whole new set of problems.

“There are so many dysfunctional situations in our society,” Aliso Niguel football Coach Joe Wood says. “It has really manifested itself to where the coach is wearing a ton of hats.”

And the brims are wide. One of the best football players in Orange County spends his nights at his coach’s house. He doesn’t go home because he doesn’t get along with his stepfather. There’s the threat of violence. You’re the kid’s coach. He’s 17 and has a future. What do you do?

What the hell do you do?

And this kid isn’t alone. There are dozens of others who have found housing through their coaches. Not everyone’s a star, and not everyone is on the varsity. But if anyone finds out, it can become a dicey subject. Opponents might think there is something against the rules going on, and often, the only thing that’s really going on is human decency.

Most coaches are decent. And their role has expanded over the years. Today’s high school athlete is too complex not to expand that role.

Boyd Philpot learned his lesson. His first year of coaching in 1979, on the day before winter break, one of his Tustin swimmers came up to him. The kid had broken up with his girlfriend, and his dad wanted him to go to college, but his grades were down and he wasn’t sure he would be able to get a scholarship.

But Philpot knew some people, so he told him they’ll talk after the holiday. And then the kid hanged himself with some bedsheets.

“My christening,” Philpot calls it. “That really hit me. These kids’ problems are immediate.”

There was a beautiful girl whose hair reached her waist, and she had the envy of all her classmates. One day, she came to school with it chopped off at her shoulders. She was upset about it but wouldn’t talk to anyone--except her swimming coach.

“She had been abused at home and finally cut her hair off so that dad couldn’t grab her by the hair and slam her around the house,” Philpot says.

He’s got stories. Such as the girl in his physical education class who tried to kill herself by taking a bottle of pills. Philpot tried to get her out for the swim team, but she couldn’t swim very well. So he made her the team manager and she handled all the clerical work. She finally felt needed, and she blossomed. Today, she’s a preschool teacher working on her elementary education credential.

Go to any coach, and they can tell you stories, or tell you about someone in the coaching community who has stories.

There’s the teen pregnancy issue. And the sexuality issue. And the abuse issue. And the harassment issue. And the race issue. And the drugs. And the alcohol. And the gangs who make for an uneasy walk to football practice at Santa Ana Valley.

“We were having a barbecue at one of the coaches’ houses in La Mirada,” Orloff says, “and the coaches were sitting on the front porch with some of the linemen. A car pulled up in front. It looked like it was lost, so it was slowing down. All of a sudden, the kids hit the floor.

“I say ‘Hey, what are you doing?”

“One kid said, ‘In our neighborhood, when a car slows like that, you duck.’ ”

Orloff knows the kid’s telling the truth. He has had players shot at and players robbed at gunpoint for their jackets.

Orloff, 30, was a coach at Century before he got to Santa Ana Valley. His baby son used to play with the child of one of his own players.

Players have come to him when they think they’ve gotten a girl pregnant and Orloff gives them the safe-sex speech. It has the same principles every time, and he always starts the same way.

“Abstinence is the best policy,” he tells them. “You’re not financially or emotionally stable enough to handle it.”

Then Orloff offers an aside to his interviewer: “Most of the time, that doesn’t work.”

It doesn’t, because Orloff knows what every coach and teacher in Orange County knows. Teen-agers are going to be teen-agers. And that means they’re going to have problems.

“The standard stuff is a problem with their boyfriend,” says Mary Mulligan, who coaches girls’ basketball at San Clemente. “Or they have a fight with their parents or a problem with a friend or teammate. Sometimes you have to help the kid with classes or talk to teachers or their parents. Or the parents are getting a divorce. Sometimes kids have a hard time communicating with parents.”

Those are the minor things, all standard operating procedure for coaches.

The Fullerton Police Dept. and the California Dept. of Education ran a list once that drew a contrast between the 1940s and today’s society. In the ‘40s, the top seven problems facing schools were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of line, wearing improper clothing and not putting paper in the waste baskets. And the top seven today are drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery and assault.

Lucy Jo Palladino is a sports psychologist so she knows about this stuff.

“Coaches who take an active interest and act in a caring and responsible way are doing immeasurable good that will continue to benefit these children 10 or 20 years from now as the result of decisions they make under the coach’s good influence,” she says.

“It becomes even more important for high school coaches to go above and beyond X’s and O’s, if it’s within that coach’s abilities to do so, and still respect the boundaries between themselves and their athletes. There is such a thing as over-involvement.”

But you’ll have a hard time convincing Raya of that. He has dealt with a myriad of problems as a coach, friend, academic adviser and a Dear Abby. It’s tough, sometimes. You mention sexual issues, and he knows first-hand how difficult it is to counsel.

“I’m uncomfortable talking about it, a lot more than talking about alcohol and drugs,” he says. “That’s a subject where you run and hide, and I think you can understand why.”

But he doesn’t run and hide. “If someone cries out for help in those sexual areas. . . .” Raya says, not finishing the sentence. “If there’s a kid crying for help, you have to deal with that.”

So he gives them his perspective and tells a school counselor. Raya may wear a lot of hats, but “dunce” is not one of them. Can’t keep something like that to yourself in a litigious society; he has to look out for his own well-being.

More and more kids today are dealing with grief, too. A few weeks ago, a Dana Hills freshman football player burned to death a day before the first game. An entire school, Laguna Beach High, was affected by last year’s firestorm. And it was football that students rallied around to get normalcy back into their lives.

No one can deny the impact of sports on high school kids. It gives them a common bond, a direction, something to root for. And for those who play, it gives them role models. Raya has two former players now coaching, even though he is only entering his fourth year. That’s the rewarding part, he says, because “face it, coaches aren’t getting paid enough.”

Not when there are stories like this:

There’s a girl who is losing weight. And it’s not as though she needs to lose the weight. But Raya finds out about it. So he goes to the girl’s mother, who has her own suspicions of anorexia. She wants Raya to talk to the girl. So he does. “Just you and me,” he tells her. And he finds out where the girl is coming from.

“I say, ‘Hey, do we need to bring your mom into this?’ And if she says yes, we do it, and if she says no, we bring in the high school counselor,” Raya said. “She chose to tell her mom. But it was going to have to be one or the other because that’s the obligation I have personally, not just as a coach, but as a friend.

“That’s my obligation--to help that kid whether she wants it or not.”

You can’t save every kid, but you can save some. And that kid, she was saved.