A No-Cut Contract : Everyone Who Tries Out Makes Woodbridge’s Track Teams, but That’s Only Part of Varvas’ Success

George Varvas smiles and laughs generously, telling a joke on himself. But there’s plenty of evidence he remembers the sting that came with the long-ago verbal slap.

He was an 18-year-old freshman at UCLA when he approached longtime Bruin track coach Jim Bush and asked if he could compete as a walk-on. As a senior at Inglewood Morningside High, Varvas had finished eighth in the mile at the state meet.

“All he said was, ‘Did I recruit you?’ I got the hint pretty good.”

Varvas laughs again.

And hundreds of budding and not-so-budding high school athletes have had the last laugh.

Varvas began helping his former high school coach, Bill Pendleton, at Morningside as a way to keep “the competitive juices flowing,” changed his major to get a teaching credential, and in 25 years as a high school track coach--the last 17 at Woodbridge High--he has never told anyone he or she didn’t make the team.

“Every kid should have the opportunity to play high school sports, experience the excitement of being part of a team and build self-esteem by being challenged to reach levels they didn’t think they could achieve,” he says.

“Ability has never been a determining factor in whether or not someone will be on our team. We always find spots for them, and their success is based on the team’s success and achieving the best they can for themselves.”

In South Orange County, parents of 14-year-old AYSO all-stars hire professional players to train their daughters in hopes they can make the freshman soccer team at schools such as Capistrano Valley and Mission Viejo. All you have to do to make the Woodbridge track team is show up for the first practice.

“We’re just as excited for the girl who breaks six minutes in the mile, a girl who won’t earn us any points in a meet, as we are for the best athletes on the team when they reach a milestone,” Varvas said. “Our philosophy is that if every kid who came out was to do their best, then the team would be the best it could possibly be. And that’s all we could ever ask.”

Along the way, Varvas has discovered a delightfully rewarding side effect of his no-cut policy.

“I’ve had kids who showed no athletic potential whatsoever, by all rights you should have cut them,” he said. “But you can’t just go by a stopwatch because the human spirit doesn’t always follow the norm. And sometimes, against all odds, these athletes end up contributing heavily to the varsity program in a couple of years.”

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George Varvas is a coach and a teacher--he would be quick to tell you there is very little difference--who sees high school sports in a way that too few do these days.

“He reminds me of my high school coach,” UC Irvine track Coach Vince O’Boyle said. “He makes everyone feel part of the program and I think that’s why he gets such huge numbers of kids to come out. Track and field isn’t usually the sexiest sport, but it’s the talk of the school over there.”

Word of mouth is Varvas’ greatest recruiting tool. Friends bring friends, sometimes very fast friends. And Woodbridge wins a lot of meets with depth.

Sure, winning is good and Woodbridge is very good at winning. Varvas’ boys’ and girls’ track teams--they train together, often doing the same workouts--have won more than 85% of their meets under his guidance.

But it’s not about the victory lap; it’s about the lessons learned getting there.

“Preparing to win is very, very important, but if your team performs up to its ability level and you lose and you can’t cope with that, then you should be in a another profession,” he said. “Sports are a bridge that will help take these kids from being dependent on everything being done for them to becoming independent adults.

“You put them in tough spots. They face failure. But you always give them the opportunity to come back and succeed. These are real-life lessons and kids appreciate that. And that’s the only reason you can justify sports on this level.

“We’re not professionals. If you’re judged on wins and losses, as tends to happen in our society, and if kids see the value placed on winning by their parents and schools, it makes it very tough for us to do the job we should be doing.”

Varvas is very clear about his mission, just as he is clear that this philosophy is a widely held belief of many “educator-coaches.”

Thus, he’s not sure what makes him special.

Senior Mary Moore thinks she knows.

“He’s just an awesome coach who’s always there for you, whether it’s track or school or personal problems,” said Moore, who finished eighth in the 1,600 in last year’s state meet and has narrowed her choice of colleges to California and Washington. “He helped me fill out all the recruiting stuff, all the questionnaires. He got all the transcripts and SAT scores sent.

“When I went on recruiting trips and talked to other recruits, none of their coaches did anything like that for them.”

Meisha Wilson-Duvall, now a junior at Purdue, thinks she knows too.

“My faith in God, my family and Varvas are all that got me through high school,” said Wilson-Duvall, a member of Purdue’s Big Ten champion 1,600 relay team. “He’s such a passionate coach. He loves track and field and he makes you love it. Even the kids who don’t like it at first end up loving it.

“One of the things I always respected about him was that if he gave you a workout you thought was too tough and you started to moan and groan and say, ‘This is too hard, let’s see you do it,’ he’d do it with you.”

Wilson-Duvall, then a sprinter, had a difficult senior season at Woodbridge because of nagging hamstring injuries until she finally took Varvas’ advice.

“He moved me from the 100 and 200 to the 400, which I hated because that’s a very painful distance. But he knew what I wanted, a full scholarship and a good education, and he told me, ‘I know I can help you if you let me.’

“I took him at his word and now I’m a three-time Big Ten champion and loving school. I still call him all the time, especially when things aren’t going great.”

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Wanda Rommelfanger is positive she knows.

Her oldest son, Rich, a senior middle distance runner at Fresno State, was always very serious about track. Her second son, Robert, who graduated from Woodbridge in 1994, was considerably less dedicated but enjoyed the camaraderie of being a member of the team.

And her twin sons, Ryan and Russ, compete with the track team for only one reason: to get faster for football. Both play quarterback and receiver.

“I’ve known Coach Varvas for a long time and one thing that really stands out is that he’s totally honorable, he always follows through on what he says,” she said. “But I think the key to his success is his ability to bridge the gap between all the different levels of ability and commitment on the team.

“There’s a whole range of kids out there, from the deadly serious like Rich was, to the ones who just like the social aspect, to ones like the twins, who have other motives. He understands their goals and is willing to deal with each individual differently.

“I’ve really been impressed with how he’s handled Ryan and Russ. Their whole focus is football and a lot of coaches would have a problem with that. We’ve been through more than our share of youth coaches and they usually have a major ego problem when there are conflicts with other sports.”

It’s hard to imagine Varvas letting his ego get in the way of any of his young charges’ progression from adolescence to adulthood. His 1988 and 1997 girls’ track teams went undefeated, as did his 1994 boys’ team, but he says his greatest rewards come when a former student--a scholarship track athlete or one who never ran a day after high school--calls to tell him how his or her life is progressing.

They’re all the same to him, fast or slow, boy or girl.

“From the beginning, boys and girls have been together in our program,” he said. “They’re coached equally, we have the same expectations for them. To do otherwise would just send mixed messages and prolong this thing about differences between two.

“There’s no sense in keeping them separate. Sure, girls have different needs, both emotionally and physically, but still the important thing is to say you’re a capable individual, here are your standards, and you work just as hard as the boys to reach them.”

During his first year as a high school coach at Morningside, a young woman asked him about running on the cross-country team. There were no girls’ track and cross-country teams in those days, so he let her run with the boys.

“She was very competitive and ended up beating most of the boys,” he said, smiling. “There was no CIF meet for girls, either, but the next year they had a state meet and she finished second in the state.”

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Although he has a number of teachers who help as assistants, Varvas runs from event to event during practice, prodding young men and women to push themselves, test their limits and revel in their accomplishments. He’s giving a tip on technique to a hurdler one minute and talking quietly with a distance runner who’s not happy with her workout the next.

“I’ve got my nose into everything,” he says, “and this is one of the areas I really feel good about myself as a coach. You need to know every single athlete, their strengths and weaknesses. So I spend most of my time roaming.”

Varvas also spends time serving as race director for the Southern California Half Marathon, which began 10 years ago and raises $10,000-$25,000 annually for the Warriors’ track and cross-country programs.

He somehow he manages to be all things to all Woodbridge track athletes, past, present and surely future.

A hint from Rommelfanger, though. You might want to skip the season-ending banquet.

“He has the longest banquets on record, but it’s really amazing,” she said. “He’ll introduce all 125 kids, recite their best times in their events, the progress they’ve made, and it’s all in his head.”

And in his heart.