In Less Than Seven Years, Calvary Chapel Has Become an Athletic Power

It is an impressive sight.

Row upon row of championship banners hang from the rafters in the pristine gymnasium at Calvary Chapel High, where in less than seven years the Eagles have emerged as a small-school athletic power with a bright future.

Nine Southern Section titles. Four state championships. Almost too many league titles to count. Calvary Chapel’s rise to prominence has been stunning, the result of a hard-working coaching staff, a large church congregation that feeds it and a growing dissatisfaction with public schools.

“We’ve been blessed by some real solid coaches who have stayed with us for years, coaches who have wanted us to be the best we can be,” said Athletic Director Joe Walters, who is also the baseball coach. “The kids see that we care about the program and they work hard at it as well.”

Although the Eagles’ huge wave of success doesn’t show signs of cresting, it has brought problems. At the very least, you could call them growing pains:

* The 600-student high school shares a portion of the 20-acre location at the corner of Sunflower Avenue and Fairview Road with an elementary school and a middle school and is about 100 students over capacity.

Enrollment could rise to 1,500, if school officials, who say they are intrigued by the possibilities, choose to expand. Church officials say they would like to get a piece of the land in the open fields north of Sunflower, possibly through a donation.

* The two-time state champion wrestling and girls’ volleyball teams, among others, benefit from the modern, air-conditioned gym. But the bulk of the other 19 sports teams have to be bused to parks and fields in neighboring cities on a daily basis for practices and games.

* Athletic personnel have had difficulty keeping up with the little things. For instance, Calvary Chapel failed to turn in boys’ and girls’ basketball schedules to the Southern Section in time for them to be printed in this year’s master schedule, which is distributed to all schools and news media.

* And there is that perennial cloud of suspicion directed at private schools with successful athletic programs. As with county schools such as Mater Dei, Servite, Santa Margarita and Orange Lutheran, Calvary Chapel has no attendance boundaries. To some, that implies a freedom to recruit athletes, unlike public schools. Calvary Chapel officials say that is hogwash, that they turn away more athletes than they admit because those applicants don’t share their Christian ideals.

But criticism remains. The wrestling team has won two of the last three state titles, and the team, which includes at least five transfers, has been loudly booed at the last two state meets.

*

It’s likely more championship banners will be hanging in the gym by the end of the school year.

The wrestling team, coached by 1980 U.S. Olympic team member John Azevedo, is ranked No. 1 in California and is favored to win its third state championship in the past four years. The baseball team returns just about every player from last year’s Southern Section championship team. The Eagles were runners-up in 1994.

The girls’ volleyball team, which won its first Southern Section title in 1993, won its second state title this season.

Senior baseball catcher Gabe Gerhardt would have attended Santa Ana Valley, but enrolled at Calvary Chapel four years ago. He says the athletic teams have an advantage over public school teams.

“We feel when we go out there we are out there to show what we believe as Christians,” he said. “We’re not out there preaching to people, but we want people to see the way we act and control ourselves on the field. That’s our testimony to our beliefs.”

Senior volleyball setter Kensy Zulueta, who is considering a scholarship offer from Florida State, transferred from Capistrano Valley Christian. She commutes each day from Mission Viejo (40 minutes, one way), but believes it was the right choice.

“God wasn’t emphasized enough at my old school. It was more like going to public school,” she said. “If a person wasn’t a Christian, he probably wouldn’t like it [at Calvary].”

Calvary Chapel’s success has not been lost on others in the county. After the boys’ basketball team lost to top-ranked Mater Dei by only 10 points a couple of weeks ago, Mater Dei Athletic Director and Coach Gary McKnight suggested that Calvary Chapel should be considered for membership in an all-parochial sports league if one were created.

“They have good coaches, good people and good athletes,” McKnight said. “They are an up-and-coming program and they’re not being wimps about it. They’re playing the best people and they want to win.”

Former Calvary Chapel Athletic Director and football coach Chris Van Hook, now an assistant football coach and teacher at Cerritos High, points out that five former Calvary Chapel athletes are playing at Division I colleges.

“We didn’t have a lot of talent at first, but we got into a small-school league [Arrowhead] and that afforded us an opportunity to get our feet wet and grow, not just get eaten up by some more established schools,” he said.

“To be honest, the success Calvary has had was our vision,” he said of the plan coaches developed when the school opened. “We would not necessarily be able to play with Mater Dei all the time, but we knew we would be the best academically, physically and spiritually that we could be.”

Calvary Chapel High opened at a cost of about $1.5 million with 200 students in 1989, part of a multimillion dollar international religious empire created by Pastor Chuck Smith.

The church rose to prominence in the county in the late 1960s and ‘70s, when many young people reexamined religion but shunned institutional churches.

As the story goes, Smith invited a hitch-hiking Haight-Ashbury hippie to a prayer session and, to Smith’s surprise, the young man brought 25 friends with him.

Smith, now in his mid-70s, capitalized on the idea. Soon, many troubled youths were flocking to Calvary Chapel. Today, many of those form the mainstream of Calvary’s 30,000-strong congregation--church members use the word “fellowship”--that overflow three Sunday morning services. The Santa Ana-based church shares similar doctrine but is not affiliated with other churches of the same name.

The high school’s construction suggests commune-era roots. But this is, after all, a church school and reminders are everywhere, particularly when talking to anyone on campus. Carved into the cement bowl of a quaint drinking fountain at the entrance to the school is the inscription, “JOHN 4:13.” On Bible study nights, Walters said, Calvary Chapel begins its Olympic League basketball games at 6 p.m. to avoid a conflict.

School officials say those kinds of details set Calvary Chapel apart from other religious schools. It also helps them compete.

“This is not a case of us having a whole lot of talent,” said Jim Downey, the girls’ volleyball coach. “We win because we have the chemistry and we work hard. In the state this year, we played a lot of more talented teams than us.”

School Supt. Dave Rolph, a pastor for 17 years, explained that the school, whose enrollment fees are $3,500 a year, is very selective about who it admits.

“We ask on applications, ‘Why do you want to come here?’ and some of them say, ‘I want to play football,’ ” he said. “I’m not going to take someone just based on that. Numerous times we’ve turned down people we knew were great athletes just because they weren’t spiritually a good match.”

The wrestling team, though, primarily because of Azevedo, has been a prime draw. The Eagles are listed on the Internet and Azevedo hosts numerous youth wrestling camps, making it one of the most well-known high school programs in the country.

The waiting list to get into the high school is in the hundreds. Student turnover is estimated at less than 6% a year.

There are skeptics on both sides of the growth issue, but it’s a good bet that Calvary Chapel will expand its high school in the near future, if for no other reason than to keep up with others in the Olympic League, which some feel is a sleeping giant just now beginning to awaken.

Whittier Christian grew by a third to more than 900 students in the early ‘90s, but has since retreated. Orange Lutheran has nearly a thousand students, and Cerritos Valley Christian is contemplating doubling its capacity of 500 students in the next two years.

Whether Calvary Chapel admits additional students or not, the athletic department expects to improve on a yearly basis. Boys’ and girls’ soccer and golf were added this school year, and the baseball team just received permission to play its home games at Southern California College, rather than a park nearby.

“Our plan was to add a sport or two a year as the need presented itself,” Walters said. He pointed out that more than 50 players tried out for the varsity soccer teams this fall.

Calvary Chapel may not achieve the athletic prowess of Mater Dei, Walters said, but at least that’s a goal worth shooting for.