Monroe’s Doctor : As He Did With 3 Other Patients, Cuccia Cured Vikings of Maladies

Make no mistake about who is responsible for the turnaround in the Monroe High football program.

His name is Fred Cuccia. And wherever this coach turns up, success is almost sure to follow.

Cuccia, who turned around three high school football programs in the last dozen years, took his magic to Monroe last spring--and the Vikings have been blossoming ever since.

Monroe, which had won no more than two games in each of the past five seasons, earned its first playoff berth since 1988 in Cuccia’s first season.

Not only did the Vikings make the playoffs, they have advanced to the City Section 3-A Division quarterfinals with a 34-6 victory over Gardena in the first round.

Tonight at 7:30, the Vikings (6-5) will play Birmingham (5-5-1) at Monroe.

“We’re really excited,” said Jackie Wyse, vice principal in charge of athletics at Monroe. “The school spirit is really positive right now. I don’t know how they’re gonna fare (against Birmingham), but it sure has been a tremendous turnaround.”

There is an added element of drama in tonight’s game. Former Monroe Coach Dave Lertzman, who resigned his coaching position last year after a five-year stint, is now an assistant to Coach Chick Epstein at Birmingham. Epstein announced his retirement last week and Lertzman has expressed interest in the job.

Several Monroe players are under the impression that Lertzman, who still teaches at Monroe, has been bad-mouthing the upstart Vikings, going so far as to predict the Braves’ margin of victory.

“It’s personal now,” said Jair LaFon, a starting guard. “We want to get him good.”

Lertzman denies making any derogatory remarks about his former team and even went so far as to say how much he likes the Monroe players.

“If they’re saying (that I said that), then some adult is telling that to them to get them fired up,” Lertzman said. “It’s just not true. I have and I will continue to conduct myself in a professional manner.”

Regardless of who wins tonight, Monroe can savor its turnaround--and look forward to the future. Monroe’s junior varsity finished 9-1 and earned the Valley Pac-8 Conference title.

Monroe is not the first team to benefit from Cuccia’s tutelage--and the way Cuccia gets around, it probably won’t be the last.

Cuccia has worked his magic at Hoover, South Pasadena and Poly in the last 12 years.

His salvation streak started at Hoover in 1983, when he took over a team that scored only seven points in league play the year before. Three years later, the Tornadoes posted an 8-2 record and were ranked second in the Coastal Conference at the end of the regular season. They were bumped from the playoffs after they were forced to forfeit games for the use of an ineligible player.

In 1986, Cuccia moved on to South Pasadena and inherited a team that had won only one game in the previous two seasons. In his second season, Cuccia led the Tigers to a 7-2-1 record.

After a one-year stint at California High in San Ramon, where his team went 4-6, Cuccia took over at Poly just four days before the start of practice in 1989. His task was to turn a team that had won only four games in two seasons into a champion. It took Cuccia two seasons to accomplish that feat.

After a 1-8-1 finish in his first season at Poly, Cuccia led the Parrots to an 11-3 record and a City 3-A championship in 1990.

“This (Monroe) team reminds me a lot of the Poly (championship team) in how well they work together,” Cuccia said.

Monroe’s instant success has turned many heads--including Cuccia’s.

“It (surprises me) because this team is not as talented as the ones (Monroe) has had in the past,” he said.

One of the reasons Cuccia chose to coach at Monroe was its talent base. He always has been aware of the strength of the basketball and baseball teams at Monroe and felt that building a football program would be possible.

But the coaching transition was not widely accepted from the get-go. Several Vikings, including Quincy Brooks, were skeptical.

“In the beginning I was like, ‘Is he gonna do any better?’ ” Brooks said.

But after a couple of victories in passing league games, Brooks had his answer.

Brooks, who moved from tailback to quarterback after the Vikings’ second game, said the difference between this year and last is discipline. Last year, he said, players strolled onto the practice field whenever they felt like it. And that attitude showed itself in games as well.

“Last year it was all about yourself,” Brooks said.

And roaming the halls among disappointed classmates didn’t exactly provide relief.

“They would say things like, ‘There’s no use in you going out there, you know you’re gonna lose,’ ” Brooks said.

Structure and individual instruction were two benefits of the coaching change, according to LaFon and senior linebacker Omar Pacheco.

“If you do something wrong, he tells you what you did wrong and how to correct it,” LaFon said. “He talks to you, not at you.”

Said Pacheco: “The staff and coaching has been a lot different. The coaches work hard with us. They take us and work with us individually.”

Cuccia credits much of his success to a crew of assistants who have been with him off and on for nearly the past decade. Randy Stage has been with Cuccia since his days at Hoover, and Don Senegal, Louie Flamingo and Tony Robinson came aboard during the Poly years.

“I think we have a staff that our kids look up to and we all are on the same page,” Cuccia said.

Simplicity has been the key this season, according to Pacheco, who added that last year he didn’t know what he would be doing from day to day. “(The coaches would) tell us one thing and then, bam, it’s a new thing all of a sudden,” he said.

Pacheco, however, was not the only Viking confused by the old regime. While Pacheco said he played just about every position but quarterback last season, Brooks wasn’t really sure where he played. “I was more of a wingback, I think.”

But despite his short-term memory loss, Brooks said the Vikings are quite clear about their intentions. “We want to win for Cuccia,” Brooks said. “He’s done so much for the team, we don’t want to let him down now.”