PARENTAL PRESSURE : Coaches Find Winning Sometimes Isn’t Enough to Keep Everyone Happy

Last week, a man sprang from the Edison High School gymnasium stands and into the face of a linesman officiating a volleyball match between Edison and Corona del Mar. The man, convinced that the linesman had made a bad call, railed and stabbed a finger at him.

The man was the father of one of the Corona del Mar players. The linesman was a student at Edison.

Where their children and sports are involved, parents and judgment don’t always mix. Just ask a high school coach.

Coaches feel the pressure to win from a variety of sources--themselves, media, school administrators--but perhaps the greatest pressure comes from parents.

The success-oriented parent in Orange County may demand even more. They are fed a steady stream of high school sports coverage by local newspapers, so their knowledge and awareness are high. So are their expectations. Consider:

--Mark Trakh built the Brea-Olinda girls’ basketball team into a perennial Orange County power. He led the Wildcats to a 26-1 regular-season record last season, made it to the 3-A semifinals and felt so disgusted with the whispers that he came close to resigning.

“It seems our resident experts here have never lost a game,” Trakh said.

--Gary Bowden led Canyon to the Southern Section 4-A wrestling championship two seasons ago, only to have a father ask the Anaheim Unified School District to fire him because the father thought his son should have been on varsity instead of junior varsity.

“I think if I had a wish,” Bowden said, “I’d wish I could be a head coach at an orphanage.”

--Dan Glenn led the Newport Harbor girls’ volleyball team to the 5-A championship in 1987 but realized later, “I really didn’t enjoy it.”

Glenn squabbled with parents and players about playing time and realized that even a quick smile and a laugh weren’t enough to make everyone happy.

“That was the hardest thing about it,” he said. “I always thought there was something I could do. But now I realize it comes with the job.”

Of 188 Orange County varsity coaches responding to a Times survey, 23% specifically mentioned parents as placing too much emphasis on winning.

To be sure, there are countless examples of parents who support coaches. They donate time and money, they drive kids to and from games, they pester friends at work to buy candy to support their children’s teams.

That kind of support is a major reason why Orange County has enjoyed such enormous athletic success in the 1980s. The parents fill the stands, and they raise the kind of money that makes first-rate facilities possible.

They care.

Last year, after Charlie Brande, the Corona del Mar girls’ volleyball coach, was fired for insubordination by John Nicoll, the Newport-Mesa School District superintendent, Brande was rehired in large part because of pressure applied by parents. Brande, who is considered to be one of the top teachers of volleyball in the nation, led Corona del Mar to the state championship in 1984.

The parents printed T-shirts and pamphlets and called a news conference covered by most newspapers and all three television network affiliates.

“Good, supportive parents are the norm, and they’re in the majority,” Bowden said. “It’s just that the 10% who are the other way will kill you.”

Paul Weinberger says he was forced to resign as Laguna Hills football coach amid parental pressure. In a statement he issued at the time of his resignation, Weinberger, who had won four games in three seasons, called parental influence at the school “odious and improper.”

Laguna Hills administrators had no comment; they do not discuss personnel matters.

Al Herring is certain that if he had won the last game of the 1986-87 regular season and made the playoffs, he would still have his job as Irvine boys’ basketball coach. Instead, he got a long walk to the principal’s office.

“The first thing they said was, ‘Let’s take a look at your won-lost percentage,’ ” Herring said.

Irvine school administrators also would not discuss Herring’s situation.

“The people here (in Orange County) have worked very hard to create a quality of life,” said Jerry Howell, Foothill football coach. “They’ve created their own opportunities through hard work, and they have the same high expectations for their kids. When something doesn’t bear fruit the way they wish it would, they look for someone to blame.”

Howell speaks from experience. Having completed his first season at Foothill, going 4-6, he says he knows of anonymous phone calls and letters to school officials, asking for his removal.

One parent, who asked not to be identified, said a petition asking for Howell’s resignation had been circulated.

Howell said he didn’t feel that much pressure to perform at his previous job as head coach at East Oregon State. Asked what job came closest, he said his days as an assistant at New Mexico State.

Yet, can parents be faulted for doing what they do?

“Hey, they want to make sure their kid is given a fair shot,” Harry Meader, Irvine vice principal, said. “Sure, it might cause some stress, but I’d rather have that than a bunch of people who didn’t care.”

Meader said Irvine administrators have averted major conflicts about playing time by having parents sit in on a practice “to see what else their child is going against.”

He said it’s an effective tool that has a tendency to “take down the blinders that are sometimes created out of love.”

Jack Kennedy, Edison principal, said his door is always open to parents with a gripe.

“Along with their kids, they are the school,” he said. “They built the school; they keep it going. If they have a problem with something, whether it be a science teacher or a basketball coach, you have to listen.”

Kennedy said he gets just as many complaints about teachers as coaches but admits: “People tend to get far more emotional when they’re talking about sports. You have to try and separate the fact from the passion.”

Should a high school coach who doesn’t win be considered a loser?

Unlike college coaches, public school coaches cannot recruit players. They work with what’s in the neighborhood. Is it realistic to blame a basketball coach for not winning because no one in the district is taller than 6-feet 3-inches?

“I had a team before with weak talent, and we got killed by this team coached by a friend of mine,” Glenn said. “Then a couple years later, I had the better talent, and I beat his team. Does that mean that all of a sudden I became a better coach than him? Of course not. People are blind to one fact. You don’t win without talent. Maybe it’s just too logical. Maybe they don’t want to believe it.”

When a coach is let go for not winning, many believe it sends a message to kids that winning is the most important thing.

“I don’t know what other message you can get from that,” said Dr. David Selder, who has taught sports psychology for the past 20 years at San Diego State. “When high school administrators bow to community pressure, the educational objectives of sports many times become subverted. An administrator should judge a coach as a teacher, not as a winning percentage.”

The only thing more disastrous for a coach than losing might be winning. Absurd? Consider Brea’s Trakh and Mater Dei’s boys’ basketball coach, Gary McKnight.

Both took over undistinguished programs. Brea had gone 4-64 in the three seasons before Trakh’s arrival in 1978. Since then, Brea has been to three Southern Section finals and won the 3-A championship in 1986.

But when Brea lost to a nationally ranked team at a tournament in New York last season, Trakh found out that parents were calling each other saying, “Well, the coach blew another one for our girls.”

Looking back, he says he enjoyed the days building the program much more. Days when there were no expectations.

“The measure of our success has become, ‘Did you win the Southern Section championship?’ ” he said. “I try to keep my sanity with that kind of thinking, but it’s hard.”

McKnight talked about leaving Mater Dei two seasons ago because he was fed up with expectations at the school that anything short of a Southern Section championship was a failure. McKnight has led Mater Dei to five titles in six seasons.

“You give the people what they want, and they only want more,” he said.

McKnight won his fifth Southern Section championship this season, but because his team entered the playoffs at 21-6 and in second place in the Angelus League, he said people thought of him as having an off-year.

“I go 21-6 10 years ago and they’d be marching down Bristol (Street),” he said.

What might distinguish Orange County parents from those in other areas is that they are not only willing but able to spend sizable amounts of money on their kids’ sports endeavors. The median home price in Orange County is $193,563, the most expensive in California.

They have the resources to pay for any one of an army of private instructors who will teach their children everything from running to pitching a softball. They can provide excellent equipment.

“Look at the area I coach in,” said Jeff Roberts, Capistrano Valley wrestling coach. “There are parents who can afford to send their kids to wrestling camps in Iowa, and they are expensive, and keep them there a month. I’ve been at schools that couldn’t scrape enough money together to send a couple kids to a local camp. The people here can invest a lot in their kids.”

To a person who has devoted this kind of support, winning is sometimes not enough. Chuck Gallo, Mater Dei football coach, has never had a losing record at the school but has had numerous players yanked out of his program and school because their parents didn’t like the way Gallo was using their child’s talent.

“I had one guy tell me his son was destined to be the next great tailback at USC,” he said. “He told me his son should be carrying the ball 40 times a game to get ready for college. Finally, he took his kid out and transferred him to another school.”

The player did make it to college, but not USC.

Gallo’s predecessor, Wayne Cochrun, said he resigned, under pressure, not because he didn’t win, but because “we didn’t do it pretty enough to suit the people around here.”

Gallo believes the rewards of coaching are diminishing, in large part because of parental demands. And he believes college scholarships are at the core of the problem.

“Parents are blinded by scholarships,” Gallo said. “A couple years ago, there was a kid who played basketball and didn’t get off the bench in two seasons. I asked the kid if he wanted to come out for football. I thought he might get some playing time and help us.

“His father called me and said to back off. He said he thought basketball was his kid’s best chance to get a scholarship to a small school.

“There used to be a time when all that was really important was earning a varsity letter or to win the big game. Now it’s far more important to get scholarships.”