Football coach knows it’s first and life to go

While channel-surfing Friday night, I landed on FSN Prime Ticket just as high school football coach Jim Kunau gave a postgame interview. His Orange Lutheran team, 10-1 going into the game and a perennial powerhouse in Southern California prep football, had just lost its CIF semifinal game to Long Beach Poly in the most excruciating of ways.

With less than 30 seconds left and trailing by the odd score of 2-0, Orange Lutheran fumbled on second down at Poly’s goal line. Even if the Lancers hadn’t been able to score a touchdown, a field goal from point-blank range would have won the game.

The ending must have felt like sudden death.

Which is why I couldn’t believe what I was seeing from Kunau, as reporter Jackie Pickering interviewed him. Was that a smile on his face? Was that him saying what a great game Poly had played and how proud he was of his team? Was he talking about loving his players?

If you didn’t know the outcome, you might have thought Kunau’s Lancers had won in the final seconds. Instead, as cameras showed, his players at that moment appeared either stunned or tearful at the cruelty of the fates.

“This is a coach,” I said to myself.

Jim Watson, who called the game, had the same reaction. “If you haven’t seen it before,” he said when the camera swung back to him, “that’s called perspective, and that’s called grace and class under pressure.”

I went to see Kunau on campus Monday morning to see how he did it. In a time when so many other leaders fail so miserably, I wanted to rub elbows with someone who does it right.

Not that Kunau (pronounced COO-gnaw) was bubbly Monday. “It was a crushing loss,” he says in his office, relaxing in sweats. “It absolutely was, especially the way it happened at the end, when we were right on the doorstep of taking home the victory.”

Kunau suspects some of his players might still be a bit down, but says, “One thing about teenagers, they tend to be pretty resilient. But I also think it’s very critical what happens in those first 24 hours after a crushing loss like we had.”

As is its custom, the team met at the 50-yard line right after the game to talk. “With the kids,” he says, “it’s about healing those wounds as quickly as possible, because those wounds cut pretty deep. Kids and coaches, even at this level, experience a lot of emotional pain after a difficult loss because, even at this age, these kids invest so much of themselves in time, effort and sacrifice.”

But how do you summon perspective when it hurts so much? “You remind them of how much they’re loved,” Kunau says. “I think a lot of times, especially when you’re dealing with a very masculine football culture, it’s easy to move away from the concept and value of love. But to me, these kids need you a whole lot less after victories than after crushing losses. It’s with defeat that they really need your help.”

This one was tougher, though. And, in an unusual move, Kunau assembled the team again Saturday morning, thinking the 20 or 30 minutes Friday night hadn’t been enough.

The seniors stood up, one by one, whether star or scrub, and listened as either coaches or players talked about what they’d meant to the team. The session lasted about 90 minutes, Kunau says, and “as they were hearing their teammates and coaches say how much respect, love and admiration they had for them, you could almost see the wounds starting to heal a little bit.”

Kunau reminded them that the hallmarks of a great man come from relationships with other people, reaching out to others and in giving of themselves to a purpose larger than himself.

One of the seniors told his teammates that, long after the wins and losses faded from memory, he’d take with him the personal relationships.

“It’s one thing for me to say that,” Kunau says, “but it’s another thing when a 17-year-old gets up and says how much he loves each guy and that what he’ll remember are the relationships.”

Friday’s game wrapped up Kunau’s 15th season as head coach. After a career in business, he became a teacher and coach in his 30s. In 1993, his first season as a head coach anywhere, Orange Lutheran finished 5-5. His record now stands at 155-35-3. Last year, his team finished 14-1 and won both CIF and state championships.

He knows victory well, but, playing at such a high level, he also knows gut-wrenching defeat. I ask how Friday’s game felt. “Internally, personally, I felt crushed,” he says. “But as adults, we have a bigger responsibility than worrying about our own particular circumstances at any given moment. That’s the same for all our coaches. All of them reached out to the kids in their distress.”

People who don’t understand sports don’t understand that it isn’t just a game. Those happen on Friday nights. What sports are really about are the hours of practice, the chance of injuries, the risk of embarrassment, the failures, the successes, the friendships, the shared burdens.

Kunau reminds his teams of the poet Rudyard Kipling’s line to treat the “twin imposters” of success and failure equally. He reminds them, he says, “that losing a game doesn’t make you a loser any more than winning a game makes you a winner.”

As a church school, Orange Lutheran invokes biblical principles in its teaching and coaching. “For them to learn that they didn’t lose anything of eternal or lasting importance in that kind of a loss, they didn’t lose any key relationships, God doesn’t love them any less, their family and friends don’t love them any less,” Kunau says, “that perspective will help them when tougher times come along, and hopefully they can handle it with some class and dignity and strength and perseverance.”

Kunau says he’ll get over the loss too. As always, time is the only cure.

Kunau says he’s happy coaching high school kids, thinking it’s an ideal age at which to shape young lives. Despite his glittering record, at 49 it’s also probably too late in the game to think of moving upward to the college ranks.

To which I say: Thank goodness.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.