YIELD OF DREAMS

It Can’t Be Done

--Sign posted in the Hueneme High locker room

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Don’t tell 49 Hueneme football players they can’t venture out of their drab, working-class neighborhood, jump on an airplane and fly across the country chasing their dreams.

Don’t tell them they can’t raise nearly $50,000 in three months.

Don’t tell them a hurricane is going to disrupt their plans.

They’ll prove you wrong on every count.

“Can Do” is more than a slogan to the Vikings. Today they are giving the words fresh meaning, enjoying the time of their lives at the DisneyWorld Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Fla.

On Thursday night, they were guests at Epcot Center for a dinner and fireworks display called “Festival of the Athletes.”

On Saturday night, they will play Daytona Beach Mainland High in a regionally televised game at the 200-acre Disney Wide World of Sports Complex.

On Sunday, they will visit Disney/MGM Studios or Disney’s Animal Kingdom before returning home.

On Monday, they will be immeasurably richer for an experience skeptics said would be impossible to pull off, pure fantasyland.

“When we floated this idea last spring, a fellow coach at another school rolled his eyes and laughed,” said Tony Pinedo, the Vikings’ offensive coordinator. “He said, ‘Hueneme? No way.’ ”

Yes way. Somehow, some way.

Larry Miller, the perpetually positive Hueneme coach of six years, wouldn’t hear otherwise. Where others saw insurmountable obstacles, Miller recognized opportunity.

He received the same fax as hundreds of high school coaches across America in February, inviting his team to play in one of 29 games in Orlando organized by the nonprofit Kaylee Scholarship Assn.

Hundreds of other coaches dropped the letter in the circular file. Miller went to work.

“I thought, ‘With enough support from the community, this is possible,’ ” he said.

Miller mailed 1,100 letters to Oxnard companies, friends, and friends of friends, requesting donations. He required his players to sell “scratchers,” something of a reverse lottery ticket. The holder rubs the card to reveal how much he or she will donate.

Oxnard Union High School District officials were receptive to the trip because of Miller’s outstanding reputation, but cautioned that no public funds were available.

Hueneme last season made an overnight trip for a game in San Diego. The hotel manager wrote to district Superintendent Bill Studt, praising the players for their exemplary behavior and commenting that “not so much as a towel was missing.”

The manager of the buffet restaurant where the team ate wrote a similar letter, explaining how “the players held the door open for senior citizens and displayed impeccable manners.”

Who knows? Maybe Miller, an All-Southern Section running back at Hueneme in the 1960s, requested the letters, realizing he’d need endorsements for a more ambitious trip. But they were written with sincerity.

“Don’t underestimate Coach Miller,” Pinedo said. “The man will do anything for these boys. They are all like his sons.”

Said Miller: “We overcame a negative image of Hueneme High and built credibility with the district. This experience is about kids learning that if they have a dream and a goal, and put forth the effort to reach it, they will achieve it.”

Getting his players to understand that the world extends beyond south Oxnard is as important to Miller as winning football games. He was chosen Ventura County Coach of the Year by The Times in 1998 for leading the Vikings to the Pacific View League championship and the Southern Section Division IV semifinals.

Yet he’d rather talk about leading his players into adulthood with solid values and the tools to succeed.

Last year, Miller and Jim Lane, the Hueneme athletic director, drove lineman George Tapia to LAX for a recruiting trip to Utah State. As their car turned from the Pacific Coast Highway onto the Santa Monica Freeway, Tapia said to Miller, “Coach, how do you know where all these roads go?”

“Here’s this big old 6-4, 260-pound guy about to get a college scholarship and it dawns on me that he’s never been out of Oxnard,” Miller said.

“I decided we could do something about that.”

To the astonishment of everyone, funds streamed in steadily. Two celebrity softball games were followed by a Hawaiian luau. Miller spoke at Rotary Club luncheons. Not a penny came out of the players’ pockets.

“Larry Miller is the kind of person who, once he decides to get something done, it gets done,” said Tom McCoy, Hueneme’s vice principal for athletics.

As the trip to Florida neared, a mix of anxiety and excitement pervaded the team. For all their outward cool, the players felt like 6-year-olds on Christmas morning.

The team had a walk-through practice Wednesday morning after packing their equipment and uniforms in white laundry bags donated by two Ventura County linen companies.

Players were singing and laughing as they helped trainer Joe Knopf load a truck.

“It’s going to be really fun,” said Keary Colbert, a wide receiver and top college prospect.

“As it got closer and closer to this day, I knew we were going to go. All the doubts were erased and the excitement started building.”

Maybe the Vikings had difficulty concentrating on their first opponent, Alemany, which trounced them, 65-30, last Friday. More likely, they were simply beaten by a better team.

The same might be true against Mainland, one of Florida’s top programs.

In fact, in little more than a week, Hueneme will have confronted a trio of feared aerial menaces: Alemany’s Casey Clausen, rated the No. 4 quarterback in the nation by SuperPrep magazine; Mainland’s 6-foot-4, 205-pound Brandon Sumner, rated the No. 9 quarterback; and Hurricane Floyd, which early this week threatened to derail all of Hueneme’s best-laid plans.

“Everybody was stressing on the weather,” said Pinedo, laughing. “Everybody except Coach Miller. He was in a state of denial.”

More of that positive thinking.