THE MAKING OF A MONARCH

Bruce Rollinson had just been named Mater Dei’s football coach, and he wanted the whole world to know it.

He whisked his car out of the school parking lot and onto Bristol Street that December day in 1988, his mind teeming with ideas about how to restore his alma mater to the powerhouse it had been when he was a standout running back there in the mid-1960s.

He would bring back the tradition and the winning ways that had somehow eluded the Monarch football program over the last few decades. Pride, poise and courage--the school motto--would once again mean something.

The more Rollinson thought about it, the more enraptured he became. He knew there was no stopping him.

Until he spotted the flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

It was then that Rollinson realized that his foot resting on the accelerator had turned to lead and that the stoplight he had just passed was not yellow but indeed red.

He pulled into a parking lot with a Santa Ana police car on his tail, and jumped out of his car. He was still so giddy about the Mater Dei job that he might have leaped into the air if the policeman, gun drawn, hadn’t yelled, “Get up against that car!”

“I just turned around and I’m going, ‘I just became the head football coach at Mater Dei,’ ” Rollinson recalled. “I’m babbling. The guy goes, ‘What are you talking about?’ I’m lucky I didn’t get my head shot off.”

Rollinson got off with just a warning. But perhaps the caveat should have been issued to the rest of the football coaches in Orange County that winter day. After all, Rollinson was right: There was no stopping him.

His intensity and singular focus would make him into arguably the most successful football coach in the county. Who else has won 85% of his games, nine league championships, five Southern Section Division I titles and two mythical national championships?

“The only two guys that I can think of that put Mater Dei on the map were Dick Coury and Bruce Rollinson,” said Esperanza Coach Gary Meek, a county legend in his own right. “Those two guys go hand in hand when I think of Mater Dei.”

Rollinson, tabbed national coach of the year in 1994 by USA Today, is the first to acknowledge that he hasn’t done it alone. Top-notch players and a steady cast of talented, loyal assistants have contributed more than their share. So has a principal who has offered unwavering support and scores of volunteers and boosters who have helped turn Mater Dei into the equivalent of a small college football program.

Yet, it is Rollinson who has put the defining stamp on the program.

“I think he’s the whole thing. He’s a part of every bit of Mater Dei’s success,” said John Sealy, Mater Dei’s outside linebacker coach. “He has a hand in it some way, whether it’s the motivation, raising money, coaching or hiring coaches and learning their strengths. Bruce Rollinson is Mater Dei football.”

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His intensity came from his father, his drive to succeed from his former coaches. And his idea of fun? Well, that’s uniquely Bruce Rollinson.

“Fun is when you tee it up across from the guy and you just knock his head right off, you drive him off the football, you look at him and say, ‘You’ve got 25 seconds because I’m coming back,’ ” he said.

Rollinson has been knocking heads off since he played Pop Warner football as a seventh-grader for the Garden Grove Jets. His desire to “get after it,” as he puts it, came from his coach, Fred Di Palma Sr., who pushed him to his limit but always treated him fairly and had something positive to say.

As he moved into his teenage years, Rollinson learned the meaning of intensity from his father. Bob Rollinson was a Garden Grove mailman who always ensured that his son finished the list of workouts that Monarch Coach Coury sent home. Then, for good measure, Bob added a few routines of his own to sharpen his son’s resolve.

“A lot of my personality, it’s my dad,” Rollinson said.

In 1965 and ‘66, Rollinson was an All-Southern Section running back under Coury, who instilled in him a fierce work ethic, a devotion to Monarch pride and a “never-say-die” attitude--principles that remain with him today.

Rollinson went on to play for two Rose Bowl teams at USC before taking a coaching job at Los Angeles Salesian High, where he had limited success.

“I think that was good for me because we didn’t win a game one year,” Rollinson said. “I saw the other side of football. We got lit up weekly 40 and 50 to something.”

He returned to Mater Dei as an assistant in 1976 and began a tenure as a U.S. history teacher that has stretched to today, but six years later he left his coaching position for another one at Rancho Santiago College, now Santa Ana College.

Seven years later, he was back at Mater Dei.

The Monarchs, who had fallen on hard times since the Coury era, brought in Rollinson to shake things up.

Mater Dei had not won a section title since 1965, Rollinson’s junior season, and the traditions that had forged a power under Coury had eroded under two successors.

If anyone could restore the Mater Dei tradition, it was Rollinson.

“He understood the tradition and the history of what it meant to be a Mater Dei football player and what it meant to go through this school,” said Monarch offensive coordinator Dave Money, a member of Rollinson’s staff since the beginning. “He was able to teach that to all the players because he had lived through that experience.”

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Rollinson’s first order of business was to bring back the red helmets with the three white stripes and the red uniforms with white piping on the shoulders that he had worn under Coury. There was more to the move than simple aesthetics; it was a not-so-subtle nod to the way things were done in the old days.

Rollinson also brought back the “Monarch March,” in which the team gathers in one corner of an end zone before games to hear its coach deliver an inspirational speech before racing to the sideline.

“I remember before some games he would almost have me crying,” said Joey Boese, a former Mater Dei standout who is now a junior strong safety at Wisconsin. “He touched emotions in me that I didn’t know I had.”

But the team didn’t respond immediately--and neither did the support staff.

The buses that were supposed to take Rollinson and the Monarchs to Fountain Valley for his first game as Mater Dei coach never showed up. So the players and coaches had to pile into their own cars to make the trip.

“This was big-time Mater Dei, and we showed up in our cars,” Rollinson said. “I was a wreck by then.”

He was a wreck more often than not during that first season, when the Monarchs started 0-3 before edging Edison and rallying for a 6-5 finish.

More changes were in order.

Motivation became a cornerstone of Rollinson’s coaching style. And motivation, to Rollinson, meant yelling. When a lineman slid off a block, when a quarterback made the wrong read or when a running back missed a hole, the player could rest assured that he would hear about it.

“I’m not afraid to get in a kid’s face,” Rollinson said in his throaty fashion. “But usually there’s a point to why I’m upset. I’m not going to yell at somebody just for the sake of yelling at them. We have kind of a standard rule around here that if we’re going to get in a kid’s kitchen a little bit, we’re going to tell him we love him before he leaves the premises.”

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Another big piece of the coaching puzzle was delegation.

Rollinson served as the offensive coordinator his first two seasons but since has focused on the running backs. He leaves the bulk of the Xs and Os to a legion of knowledgeable assistants that currently includes three former high school head coaches.

Rollinson said he could count on one hand the number of times he’s overruled a call by Money, the offensive coordinator, over the years.

“I’ll stack him against half the college coordinators out there,” Rollinson said. “He’s a tremendous football mind.”

Rollinson also credits Eric Johnson, the defensive coordinator until leaving to coach Fountain Valley after the 1998 season, with helping put Mater Dei back on the high school football map.

The Rollinson-inspired, assistant-crafted Monarchs began their meteoric rise in 1990, when they made it to the semifinal round of the section playoffs. The following year, they won the whole thing. And they were just getting started.

National titles, as awarded by USA Today, followed in ’94 and ’96. So did four more section titles, including last season’s co-championship with Long Beach Poly. But that wasn’t--and isn’t--what matters most to Rollinson.

“I don’t base my success on the win-loss record,” he said. “I’d like to say that my success is the fact that my players are loyal to me. My players know that I would take a bullet for them, that I will always be there for them no matter what as long as they don’t lie to me.”

The highest praise comes from his former players, who visit regularly.

“He’s the best motivator I’ve ever been around,” said Boese, the Wisconsin safety. “He instilled in me things that are still values in my life, like what you put into something, you get out of it.”

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Rollinson, 51, has spent more than half his life at Mater Dei, but his days as the school’s football coach are far from numbered. He said he would entertain offers to coach at the college level, but his desire to coach a group of young men wearing red-and-white uniforms still burns deep inside.

The challenge confronting Rollinson and his Monarchs in 2000 is one of their greatest. They face Concord De La Salle (possibly the best team in the nation) and Edison (possibly the best team in Southern California) in back-to-back weeks this month. De La Salle has handed Mater Dei a loss in each of the last two seasons as part of its national-record 100-game winning streak.

Said Rollinson: “Somehow, some way, I have to figure out a way to end that streak.”

Rollinson has already instilled this mission in his players. He recently pulled aside Matt Leinart, the starting quarterback, and told him: “It’s all in your shoes. You’re in charge of this team. You’re going to lead us to a championship.”

Monologues such as that, Leinart said, “make me want to play for him.”

And, every fall, they get Rollinson ready for one more season.

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MAKING HIS MARK AT MATER DEI

Rollinson’s Numbers

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Year Record Championships 1989 7-4 1990 7-6 1991 13-1 Angelus League champion, Southern Section champion 1992 9-2-1 South Coast League champion 1993 12-2 South Coast League champion, Southern Section runner-up 1994 14-0 South Coast League champion, Southern Section champion * 1995 10-2 South Coast League champion 1996 14-0 South Coast League champion, Southern Section champion * 1997 13-1 South Coast League champion, Southern Section runner-up 1998 13-1 South Coast League champion, Southern Section champion 1999 11-2-1 Serra League champion, Southern Section co-champion Totals 11 years 123-21-2 Nine league championships, five Southern Section championships

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* National championship awarded by USA Today