Gibson Brings Woodbridge Back From the Bottom

OK, now Rick Gibson can laugh about it. But heading into the 1997 season, the 25 games his team went without a victory--including one tie and 15 consecutive losses--had taken its toll.

He told himself, and admitted to his coaches, that if the Woodbridge program didn’t get better, he was going to resign.

Well, he won’t be quitting any time soon. Instead, he will be accepting an award as The Times Orange County Coach of the Year.

“That’s a good choice,” said Los Alamitos Coach John Barnes, the 1994 winner who has never met Gibson. “He’s got a lot more character than I do. People don’t realize how losing even at the smallest school in the littlest area anywhere just wears on you. For him to endure that and bring them back is an amazing accomplishment.”

It was deemed the best job of coaching in a season in which Scott Orloff took Dana Hills (7-3-1) to the playoffs, Jon Looney coached Brea Olinda to an 11-2 season, and Bill Denny directed Mission Viejo (8-2) back into the top 10.

The 25-game winless streak preceded an eight-game unbeaten streak. Woodbridge finished the regular season 7-1-2, its only loss coming at the hands of eventual Southern Section Division V champion Santa Margarita in Week 9.

“The hardest thing to deal with, we had to sell the fact that this was a totally different group,” Gibson said. “We said, ‘That [winless team] doesn’t even exist.’ What you’re going to read in the paper, what your friends are going to tell you at the start of the year, you have to disregard that and believe in what we’re doing as a team.

The end result was two playoff games, a first-round victory over Loara before the Warriors lost to third-seeded Brea Olinda, 27-0, in the second round of the playoffs.

The Warriors finished 8-2-2. Among the highlights, they:

* Shut out San Clemente, 10-0.

* Overcame a 14-0 deficit to Corona del Mar to score a 21-20 victory with 53 seconds left.

* Trailed Irvine, 14-3, in the fourth quarter, and won, 15-14, with 1:17 left.

“I will say one thing--they shut us out, and I haven’t been shut out since 1993,” said San Clemente Coach Mark McElroy, whose offense averaged 27.3 points in its other 10 games. “I’ve never seen a group of football players who swarmed to the ball like those kids, and that’s desire; you can get one or two kids who have desire, but when you get 11 guys like that--that’s all coaching. That’s developing an attitude.”

Attitude was everything at Woodbridge. It had to be. From the first day of the season, the Warriors were known as “the team that hadn’t won in 25 games.”

Gibson credited a more physically gifted group of athletes and his coaching staff, especially longtime assistants Kirk Harris (defensive coordinator), Gene Noji (quarterbacks) and Cliff Nelson (offensive line).

Even after Woodbridge’s third victory, against third-ranked San Clemente, “[The streak] still showed up [in newspapers], and it was like a rallying point,” Gibson said. “It brought us closer together; it was like, us against the reputation.”

Some of the players weren’t even in high school when the winless streak began in 1994, after the team won its first five games of the season.

“We focused on getting rid of the stigma, knowing that we had the talent and we had to have success early,” Gibson said. “If we had the success, we knew it would take off.”

Woodbridge opened with a tie against Pacifica, a game the players were expecting the worst to happen, Gibson said. But a 22-17 victory over Foothill the next week opened their eyes.

“I still don’t think the guys believe they were the best football team that night, but when they left the field, they knew that they could play with anyone,” Gibson said. “Obviously, Foothill isn’t a Mater Dei, but a win over anyone at that point would have given us the message we needed passed on.

“To work as hard as those kids had for as long as they had, they needed verification that good things were going to happen.”

And good things did. Often.