This Trojan Is No Superstar, but He Might Be the MVP

It’s 9:30 a.m. I’ve been trying to talk to Frank Dorazio, USC’s director of football operations, for the past 20 minutes.

This is not an easy task, because everyone wants to talk to Frank Dorazio.

We are introduced and chat for a few minutes before his cellular phone rings. Dorazio sits down on the UC Irvine field where the Trojans are holding their training camp. Judy Rhoads, the director of student-athlete support services, is calling to discuss how the scholarship stipends will be distributed.

Dorazio finishes his call, stands up and starts to talk again before spotting recruiting secretary Amy Burgett and excusing himself to go talk to her.

He returns, but in just a few moments Coach Paul Hackett calls Dorazio over.

Among the many requirements of Dorazio’s job, as he explains later, is “If there’s a problem that Coach Hackett has, I’m the guy that has to fix it.”

It isn’t only Hackett’s problems he has to worry about. He must contend with hungry bus drivers and overheated offensive linemen. All while learning a new city and a new school.

We talk for an additional nine minutes before the cell phone rings again, with Steve Lopes, associate athletic director, on the line to talk about using the Coliseum.

Then, finally, some rare free time for Dorazio. For the next 40 minutes the only interruption is a wayward football that Dorazio collects and tosses back to the receiver who missed the pass.

Dorazio won’t be joining the large field of quarterback candidates. But he does liken himself to a point guard. He makes sure everyone and everything is where they should be, and everyone has what he needs.

Dorazio, 35, is part of the new wave of staff brought in by Hackett, who replaced John Robinson last December. And one of his first major tasks after getting to USC was coordinating the departure of the entire football program from Los Angeles and down to Irvine for training camp.

Hackett wanted an off-campus environment, where the players had no choice but to focus on football. That meant securing housing and meeting rooms for 157 people for three weeks. Setting up meals. Even searching for entertainment options.

The Trojans brought enough weight sets and exercise bicycles to stock a small health club. They brought 20 video tape decks and editing equipment to splice together practice highlight tapes.

“It’s not just me,” Dorazio says. “The head trainer had to coordinate moving the training room down here. Our video crew. Our equipment staff and our student managers--our student managers worked their butts off.”

Dorazio started off as a student manager when he was an undergraduate at Ohio State. For the past nine years he was at Purdue, where he worked as a recruiting coordinator and in the football operations and compliance areas.

Dorazio is easy to pick out on the practice field. He’s the one with a three-ring binder that’s three inches thick. He has a Palm Pilot electronic data organizer. A fanny pack is pulled to the side around his waist with a watch looped around the strap.

Dorazio kneels down and sets his open notebook on the ground.

“This is my camp bible,” he says.

He flips through the pages, which show the rooming list, a breakdown of nightly bed-check duties, the camp’s daily schedule. Dorazio also has the daily menus, which he helped select with a campus dining hall. Those might be the most important pages, to the players.

“If the food isn’t good and they’re not happy, you’ve got a problem,” Dorazio says. “You’re going to have a long camp.”

Dorazio says he is accountable for “every minute of every hour” by the detail-oriented Hackett, so his notebook is as precise as it can be. But like the team’s playbooks, not everything comes off the way it is designed.

One of Dorazio’s tasks was to arrange for bus transportation to get the players from their rooms to the practice field and the cafeteria. At 7 a.m on the first day of training camp, there was a bus. Only it didn’t have a driver. It seems he was off eating breakfast.

And when there’s bad news it seems as if Dorazio is the one who must deliver it. Like when he had to tell a group of offensive linemen--including 6-foot-8, 335-pound Ken Bowen--that they would have to remove the air conditioners they installed in their campus apartment windows.

“They weren’t too happy about it,” Dorazio says.

It seems that every time Dorazio comes across somebody, they either have a question or some information for him. As he walks into the cafeteria for lunch, the chef runs a couple of dinner suggestions by him. After he sits down, a man comes up with the names and numbers of a couple of bowling alleys (Dorazio is trying to set up a fun outing for the team this week).

What are Dorazio’s responsibilities? One five-minute stretch sums it up best. He made a phone call trying to arrange a church service for the players to attend today. Then he received a call updating him on the condition of the grass at USC’s practice field.

From God to sod, from the heavens to the earth. That pretty much covers it.