Eagles Not Ruffling Feathers

Jerry DeBusk was trying to monitor his players’ comments Saturday. At the same time, he struggled to keep his 22-month-old daughter’s attention occupied.

On the podium, Santa Margarita players went on and on in a feel-good session that was their postgame news conference. DeBusk listened, well off stage, while shifting Kaylee from one arm to the other.

Finally, DeBusk sighed, sat Kaylee down, and calmly said to her, “You’re starting to make me wish I had left you with Mom.”

It was the closest DeBusk had come to an admonishment all day.

Those stressful 32 minutes that got the Eagles their second title in three years seemed like child’s play to DeBusk. Riverside North made marathon-like runs. Referees made could-go-either-way calls. Strategy formed and was reformed. Through it all, DeBusk stayed cool, resting, as always, on his right knee, while relying on his players.

“I feel like a jockey on a great horse and that horse can run,” DeBusk said. “I’m along for the ride and try not foul it up.”

So this is what a head boys’ basketball coach at a high-powered Catholic high school can be like?

The job is supposed to come with stress and innuendo. Up the Santa Ana Freeway that might be the case. But in the Saddleback Valley, the difference is like McNight and day.

It has been nine years since Santa Margarita set up shop and eons, it seems, since the fear of such a place circulated and percolated among neighboring basketball coaches. Well the behemoth is here, winning championships with players who in the past had attended public high schools. Yet, no one seems to squawk.

Even coaches close to Santa Margarita--some who originally thought they were too close for comfort--don’t seem to get their feathers in an uproar when the Eagles are mentioned. How concerned had they been in the past? Rich Schaaf, the school’s first basketball coach, had trouble getting into tournaments that first season. The only coach who didn’t slam the door was this Newport Harbor guy named DeBusk.

Five years later, Schaaf was the athletic director when this same guy called about the basketball job. It was Schaaf’s turn to say come on down.

That was the first time DeBusk had seen the Santa Margarita campus. He was coming off three years as an assistant to Bob Boyd at Chapman and thought he wanted to remain a college coach. Some might say that being at a Catholic school qualifies is similar to being a college coach. But such talk doesn’t seem to attach itself to DeBusk, and it has nothing to do with Teflon.

No one has flung a bandit-school label at Santa Margarita. Not once has a Santa Margarita official griped about low attendance from opposing schools, as their cousins to the north have. Saturday, against North, DeBusk commented on referee calls only twice. First, with a Siskel-and-Ebert gesture--two thumbs up to plead for a jump ball. The second was a quick roll of the hands, in an effort to get a traveling call. He never raised his voice, never even spoke, on those two occasions. Addressing referees with respect, what a novel idea.

You can start to see why no one uses words such as arrogant or bully when describing Santa Margarita’s basketball program. Right or wrong, people have attached those labels to the Mater Dei program.

In character, DeBusk debunks such notions of comparison. But when you get right down to it, the way you act in victory determines whether you are a winner.

DeBusk, as always, calmly coached from that one knee Saturday. In the news conference afterward, he remained in the background, juggling Kaylee.

“She never asks me whether I win or lose,” DeBusk said. “She just knows Daddy goes to ‘hoop ball.’ ”