Working the Guidelines : Reynolds Coaches at SCC, Counsels at Bolsa Grande

In Bill Reynolds’ world, March Madness has little to do with basketball.

Reynolds is the men’s basketball coach at Southern California College, but the Vanguards barely made it out of February before being knocked out of the postseason. Reynolds is also a guidance counselor at Bolsa Grande High, where the season can seem never-ending.

This week, Reynolds, like Bolsa Grande’s two other counselors, is having individual conferences with about 175 students to help them make academic plans for the next school year. Next week, it will be much the same: more students, more choices. But that isn’t the hard part of the job.

High school students face a host of personal issues--from sexual to self-esteem, from drugs and alcohol to suicidal feelings--and counselors are often called on to help relieve the pressure.

Reynolds, 56, who keeps tabs on about 500 students, has been doing it since 1979, and it’s not getting any easier. “There are so many dysfunctional families that the personal counseling part of the job has changed a lot,” he said. “It’s like anything else, you’re playing the percentages. Some kids benefit a lot from these opportunities and some are still having problems four years later.”

Reynolds believes the success rate is high at Bolsa Grande; he hopes higher even than his winning percentage at SCC, where he is 335-169 in 16 seasons.

The level of basketball is small college--the Vanguards play in the Golden State Athletic Conference, rarely in front of crowds of more than 1,000--but to do what Reynolds does requires big-time effort.

During basketball season, Reynolds splits his days between the schools, usually making it from Bolsa Grande in Garden Grove to the SCC gymnasium on the Costa Mesa campus by the start of practice at 3:45 p.m.

“I think I would go bananas,” said Fred Johnson, a longtime friend of Reynolds’ and a counselor at La Quinta High. “But he seems to hold it together.

“I admire the fact that he’s able to do both jobs with a great deal of success.”

Said Reynolds: “I think I have the best of both worlds. If there were 48 hours in the day instead of 24, it would be even better.”

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Reynolds’ day at Bolsa Grande starts at 7 a.m. after a drive from his home in Irvine. His office is neat, spacious and minimally decorated--an oil painting of a matador, the school’s mascot, in the center of one block wall, posters of fluffy dogs lining another.

The only basketball mementos are a trophy unceremoniously stashed in a corner and a small plaque next to one of the dog posters. They are both coach of the year awards Reynolds won as Bolsa Grande coach in the late 1970s.

This is where he meets with students, where he can be a friend, a disciplinarian or both, depending on the circumstances.

“We like to think we’re advocates for the students,” Reynolds said.

One day recently he was meeting with the parents of a runaway student. The next day, he was handing out detention to a teenager who had been arriving late to his physical education class.

Noticing the student was failing the class, Reynolds gave him a firm, but gentle, reminder: “The only thing you need to do to pass P.E. is suit up and get there on time.”

Reynolds knows his P.E. In 1963, his first job after graduating from UC Santa Barbara was as a physical education teacher in the first year of La Quinta High’s existence. He was a varsity basketball coach for 12 years at La Quinta and two at Bolsa Grande, before becoming a counselor.

His career change came during a period of major change for Bolsa Grande. In 1975, the children of the first Vietnamese refugees to come to Orange County after the fall of Saigon enrolled at the school.

Not long thereafter, the area that surrounds the school became known as Little Saigon. It now boasts the largest concentration of people of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam.

The school’s demographics also changed; Bolsa Grande’s racial mix is now 54% Asian, 22% Latino and 19% white, and there were some rough moments during the transition.

Reynolds remembers an incident about 20 years ago when a Vietnamese student--apparently fed up with being taunted--grabbed a butcher knife from the cafeteria and chased a white student across campus.

That conflict was resolved without bloodshed and now, Reynolds said, Bolsa Grande is a fairly tranquil place. “We’ve come a long way as a campus community,” he said.

During a recent lunch hour, Reynolds strolled through the campus parking lot with a walkie-talkie. Bolsa Grande’s three counselors each patrol a designated area during the break.

In the parking lot, Reynolds mostly tries to keep students from loitering in cars. “When they sit in cars, they tend to smoke,” he said.

It’s usually uneventful duty and it often allows Reynolds time to collect his thoughts and prepare for his daily metamorphosis. “Sometimes,” he said, “I can start planning what I’m going to do at basketball practice.”

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Reynolds won’t be preparing any more basketball practices until next September because Westmont defeated the Vanguards in the first round of the GSAC playoffs this month. But he still must keep busy with basketball.

Recruiting is an ongoing process at the small college level, but this is an especially busy time of year. SCC’s place on the college basketball food chain isn’t high; Reynolds and assistant coach Bob Hubbard basically are foraging for scraps left by NCAA Division I programs.

That means many night and weekend scouting trips to high schools and community colleges--and this time of year all-star--games. But much of the work is done by telephone. “We probably have a bigger recruiting budget than some high schools,” Reynolds quipped.

The situation is not unique to SCC. Most small college basketball programs operate similarly. But remember Reynolds is doing all this after he finishes his real job.

He is the only men’s basketball head coach in the Golden State Athletic Conference without a full-time position at his school.

SCC, which pays Reynolds a $7,200 yearly stipend, looked into the feasibility of hiring him full-time several years ago but couldn’t come close to Reynolds’ salary as a high school counselor.

Reynolds has made peace with the situation, although as recently as last season he wasn’t so sure. After two consecutive losing seasons, he wondered whether the disadvantage of being a walk-on coach wasn’t too much to overcome.

“I guess you can always have a sense of the grass is greener, but if you put in the time, you can always find players who want to excel,” Reynolds said. “I came to that realization after a period of frustration.”

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These aren’t the type of compromises Reynolds expected to have to make when he started his coaching career. He had visions of becoming a major college coach. And given his rapid early progression, that didn’t seem such an outlandish goal.

At 24, when Reynolds became the varsity coach at La Quinta, he was the youngest head basketball coach in Orange County. Lute Olson, then at Marina High, now at Arizona, was among his peers.

Reynolds went to coaching clinics, studied John Wooden, picked Jerry Tarkanian’s brain, and his high school teams were moderately successful. In 12 seasons at La Quinta and two at Bolsa Grande, he compiled a 167-139 record before resigning because his wife, Shirley, was ill with a stomach condition that went undiagnosed for a year.

At about the same time he became a counselor, which would have ended his high school coaching career anyway, because Garden Grove Unified School District rules prohibit counselors from coaching in the district.

Those rules didn’t prevent Reynolds from coaching elsewhere, and after Shirley’s illness was found to be treatable with medication, he took a position as an assistant to SCC Coach Ed Moriarty in 1980. Moriarty resigned after the season and Reynolds was hired to take his place. “It wasn’t like they went on a national search,” he said.

If they had, it’s doubtful the Vanguards could have found a coach who was a better fit for SCC, a Christian liberal arts school with an enrollment of 1,200.

“It’s a wonderfully wholesome environment,” Reynolds said.

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Before every home game, the audience in “The Pit,” SCC’s tiny gymnasium, is led in a prayer. Then it can become an inhospitable place for opponents to play.

More than one person has noticed that the Pit looks as if it jumped straight out of “Hoosiers.” Fans in the front row of the wooden bleachers are so close to the action, they could easily reach out and trip someone.

It’s usually a hot and steamy environment: the only air conditioning is what looks like two household ceiling fans far up in the rafters. Only one works.

Built in the 1940s as a service club for the Santa Ana Army Air Base, converted to a gym by Orange Coast College later in that decade and moved in three pieces to SCC in the ‘60s, the Pit probably doesn’t win over many recruits. But once they arrive, Reynolds said, they love to play in it. And the Vanguards rarely lose there.

Reynolds says the college sells itself, but he also can offer 10 full-tuition scholarships and an up-tempo style of basketball as enticements.

Reynolds stresses fundamentals on and off the court. Players and former players say coming to SCC is like joining a family. “If you talk to all the guys who played for Bill, every one has such respect for him,” said Todd Dixon, a former point guard and assistant coach.”He’s such a genuine person.

“You find out that he cares about you more as a person than as a player.”

Dixon, now the boys’ varsity coach at El Toro High, is one of five former Reynolds players who are currently high school head coaches. The others are Larry Hirst (Newport Harbor), Mike Murphy (Sonora), Robert Aviles (Whittier Christian) and Andre Smith (San Bernardino). Two others--Ollie Martin and Sherwin Durham--are assistants on the SCC women’s basketball team.

It’s a legacy Reynolds cherishes. Along the way, Reynolds has given up his major league ambitions but is comfortable with the choices he had made. He says his first priority is his work at Bolsa Grande, but it’s clear what is priority 1A.

“My wife asks, ‘How long are you going to keep doing this?’ ” Reynolds said. “I say, ‘I don’t know, as long as I still enjoy it.’

“But I’m surrounded by such wonderful people at both places, I enjoy coming to work in both places. Why would I want to stop?”