Tarnished Legacy

Michael Moon wants to be just another player on the Moorpark College football team. An undersized safety, he’s trying to make a contribution to one of the best junior college programs in the region.

But it’s tough to blend in when you’re the butt of teammates’ ribbing.

“Jokes are always being made about my [high] school,” said Moon, a 1997 Santa Clara High graduate whose old team was 1-19 in two years. “They say nobody good ever went to Santa Clara. How could anyone good come from an 0-10 team?”

That’s the picture the Saints bring to mind: a downtrodden program facing a bleak future. It’s an image that blots out a glorious past.

During the 17-year reign of Coach Lou Cvijanovich in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Saints won seven Frontier League titles and never finished lower than second. They captured Southern Section division titles in 1963 and 1965.

Ten years ago, Santa Clara advanced to the Southern Section Division VIII quarterfinals. The next season, the Saints, led by quarterback Tim Gutierrez, reached the division semifinals. There was little hint of the troubles ahead.

As Santa Clara prepares for its season opener Sept. 11 at Santa Maria St. Joseph, the team has not won a league game since it defeated Santa Paula on Oct. 21, 1994, a string of 14 games. It has not qualified for the playoffs since Gutierrez graduated and has not won more than two games in a season since 1991.

“People ask me where I went to school and I say, ‘Santa Clara,’ and they say ‘Boy, those guys are having trouble,’ ” said Gutierrez, the offensive coordinator at St. Bonaventure, a rival Catholic school in Ventura. “I don’t know what to say about it. It’s sad.”

Plummeting enrollment is the main reason for the decline of Santa Clara football. The school, which in the late 1980s had more than 800 students, still had 600 students in 1994.

When classes began this month, 273 students were enrolled.

Santa Clara administrators blame economics and competition for Santa Clara’s shrinking size, citing the school’s location in a depressed south Oxnard neighborhood and the allure of more modern facilities at Oxnard High’s new campus, which opened in 1995.

Moreover, a parade of seven coaches in the last 10 years hasn’t helped attract football players to Santa Clara. By the time the Saints hit bottom with an 0-10 record in 1996, they were practicing with 12 players and using garbage cans to simulate opponents’ formations.

Dick Weber, a Santa Clara football standout in the early 1960s and the team’s co-coach in 1994-95, said he looks for Santa Clara results with trepidation.

“You open the paper very gingerly and go, ‘Oh God, how bad was it?’ ” he said. “

Glory Days

Lou Cvijanovich sighs.

“This is going to make me sound egotistical,” he said. “But I think if I were still the football coach [at Santa Clara], we would still have a lot of kids coming to school to play football.”

It works for the Saint boys’ basketball team, which Cvijanovich has guided to 29 league titles and 14 Southern Section championships in 40 years as coach.

When Cvijanovich coached the football team at Santa Clara, the program flourished. The Saints played to packed stands at the old Oxnard High and were trailed by rooter buses and carloads of supporters when at away games.

Before home games on Saturday nights, the players, attired in sports jackets and school ties, ate pregame meals at Rolly’s restaurant on Oxnard Boulevard.

“All the townspeople would meet us there to pick up the tab,” Cvijanovich said.

Larry Lawrence, who coached Santa Clara to the 1989 Southern Section semifinals, became a die-hard Saint football fan when he moved to Oxnard in 1962. He missed only a handful of games in the following 25 years but hasn’t seen the team play since he resigned after the 1990 season.

“People just kind of shake their heads in disbelief now because Santa Clara was a power and it was the place to go,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence’s youngest son, Ted, was a co-captain and the center on the 1989 Santa Clara team. He and Gutierrez, the quarterback, have remained friends. As boys, both shared a dream to play for Santa Clara.

“Anything that had to do with Santa Clara football I wanted to be a part of,” said Ted Lawrence, a Ventura College assistant coach whose brother, Tim, was a Saint quarterback who graduated in 1981. “I used to watch my brother play and hope one day people would watch me play for Santa Clara.”

Gutierrez used to run around the house wearing his older brother Kenny’s Santa Clara helmet.

“I started playing football when I was 9 because I dreamed about playing for Santa Clara,” said Tim Gutierrez, who left the school as Ventura County’s all-time passing leader and third on the Southern Section career list with 7,521 yards.

Santa Clara was undefeated in league play in 1988-89, posting an overall record of 21-4 in those seasons. Gutierrez went on to start for San Diego State and now coaches at St. Bonaventure with Kwinn Knight, a former classmate and running back at Santa Clara.

“We had confidence back then and we just knew we could compete with any team in the county,” Gutierrez said.

Turn for the Worse

Santa Clara’s football decline began in 1990 when the Saints went 5-5. But Lawrence, who resigned after the season because of a disagreement with school administrators, said the team was loaded with juniors and poised to win another league title in 1991.

Instead, Santa Clara finished 3-7. Over the next two seasons, the Saints were 4-16 and Tom O’Brien was fired as coach after the 1993 season.

The school turned to a pair of former players in Weber and 1982 graduate Dan Dolby Jr.

Weber, a businessman, describes his stint as a teacher and coach at Santa Clara as “the most difficult thing I ever did.”

Weber and Dolby found they could not compete with a squad lacking numbers.

“How do you build a football team with 17 kids?” Weber said. “You can’t practice and nobody has to compete for a position. And if you don’t compete during the week, how do you compete on Friday night?”

Santa Clara was Rio Mesa High’s longest-running opponent, but Spartan Coach George Contreras dropped the Saints from the schedule after a string of lopsided victories in the 1990s.

“We just ran the ball up the middle and tried to get the thing over with as quickly as possible,” Contreras said. “But what do you do when the fullback dive goes for 40 yards? It wasn’t a good situation for them or for us.”

Breaking Away

The idea that one player could have turned around the Santa Clara program is farfetched. But what about four? Consider the decision of former Santa Clara students Tomas and Maria Sanchez, who initially enrolled their eldest son, Topiltzin, as a Santa Clara freshman in 1992.

Maria Sanchez said when she requested a meeting with the principal to discuss the school, she did not get a response. She said other administrators brushed her off, prompting her to enroll Topiltzin at St. Bonaventure.

A year later, his younger brother, Teohua, followed and brought with him friends David Bernal and Pepe Villasenor.

Topiltzin Sanchez rushed for 3,217 yards in three seasons at St. Bonaventure and earned All-Southern Section Division X honors in 1995. Teohua, a quarterback, passed for 5,611 yards in three seasons, and in 1996 led the Seraphs to their first and only section title.

Villasenor set a section record for season receptions with 111 in 1996. Bernal, a 1996 preseason All-American, was twice selected the county’s small-schools lineman of the year.

“Pepe and David lived right across the street from Santa Clara and we live five minutes away,” Maria Sanchez said. “I drove them to St. Bonaventure for three years and I’ve never regretted it.”

Bad Memories

Michael Moon was Santa Clara’s best player in 1996, a fierce linebacker and the team’s leading rusher with 611 yards. The physical demands of being a two-way starter took their toll in a game when Moon collapsed and was hospitalized for a bruised kidney and exhaustion.

Despite his experience, Moon arrived at Moorpark College last August and found he was in over his head.

“Everybody [coming into] Moorpark had been given more coaching,” Moon said. “I had coached myself the last couple of years. [Moorpark] put me at defensive back, which is mainly pass coverage, and we’d never, ever worked at pass coverage at Santa Clara. We didn’t have enough healthy players for it.”

Moon is stumped when asked for positive memories from his high school career.

“There really were no best parts,” he said. “We lost almost every game. All of us put in so much effort and it came out for naught.”

Payback Time

Debbie Gormley does not want to see her son Kevin, Santa Clara’s senior quarterback, become as disillusioned as Moon. Nor does she want to see him absorb a similar pounding.

“I go to games and I want [Santa Clara] to score and for no one to get hurt,” she said. “What’s hard on me is seeing your son come home depressed from getting his [butt] kicked. It’s hard to see him hurting.”

Kevin Gormley wasn’t going to play this season, but he changed his mind.

“It was just too hard last year, looking in the paper and seeing that people expected us to lose by 30 points.” he said. “I’d come home and watch [highlights on TV] and see myself getting nailed every game.”

As the season approaches, Gormley, who passed for 526 yards, two touchdowns and 13 interceptions in 1997, has regained his optimism.

“I think this is the year for some payback,” he said. “It can only get better.”

Rebuilding Job

The new football coach at Santa Clara is Eliseo Miguel, a 36-year old Spanish teacher at the school who helps run a family bakery in Oxnard. He played linebacker for the Saints in 1979-80.

Miguel, who coached the Saint junior varsity to a 7-3 record last season, was promoted partially on the hope he could persuade younger players to remain in the program. Michael Moon’s junior varsity team went 9-1 in 1994, but few of those players suited up as juniors and seniors.

Miguel has instituted mandatory weightlifting and promises practices heavy on conditioning and other drills designed to build toughness and character.

“The Santa Clara tradition is hard discipline and hard work,” he said.

There are 26 players on the varsity this season, eight more than last year. But Miguel is concerned that only eight freshmen have come out for football. He sees this season, with the varsity boasting several talented seniors, as crucial.

“This is the decisive year and we have to win,” Miguel said. “But [the lack of players] is a scary situation for a football coach.”

Keeping the Faith

Principal Keith Murphy is the man charged with resurrecting Santa Clara. A courteous, bearded man who attended high school in England and who assumed his position two years ago, he acknowledges that a foundering football team can be detrimental to a school’s image.

“My philosophy about football is that in most schools, a football season kind of sets the tone for the year,” Murphy said. “You don’t need to be kicking everybody’s butt, but if you win five games, you’ve done well.”

Santa Clara’s losses extend beyond the football field.

Murphy points to cutbacks in the military and aerospace industries for putting Santa Clara’s $3,450 tuition out of reach for many parents in south Oxnard.

“The enrollment of teenagers in church programs has not dropped, so we know the Catholic students are out there,” Murphy said.

But so is a criminal element. Police statistics show teen arrests for battery, auto theft and marijuana use doubled between 1995 and 1997 in south Oxnard.

“South Oxnard does have a stigma that it is certainly looked upon as the lower-class end of town,” Murphy said. “We’re fighting that all the time.”

Despite rumors that Santa Clara will soon close, Murphy said the school will be the subject of a three- to five-year study by Catholic school officials before any decision is made.

Murphy said he believes a future enrollment of 400-500 students is realistic and with better numbers and coaching, the football team can be competitive. In the meantime, he asks for support at games.

“There’s a lot of positive talk out there but it isn’t showing up at the turnstiles,” Murphy said. “The players need to feel the community is behind them. The 15 of us in the stands right now doesn’t get it done.

“But we will keep the faith. That’s what we do at Catholic schools.”