When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  That’s when he realized he had underestimated the profession. It was at that very moment that Bob Ladouceur realized he could make an impact on kids’ lives by coaching football.

  Bob was an assistant coach at Monte Vista the following year. He coached the varsity defensive backs and to this day considers it his most fulfilling coaching job.

  “Coach Lad was a big brother to us,” said Mike Shepanek, a defensive back at Monte Vista in 1978. “You looked at him and he was a total stud. He was the fastest guy on the team. He’d run sprints with us and it wasn’t even close. He would get down and show us technique all the time and would run the drills before we did.”

  Shepanek had never played football before his senior year. He was a basketball player but decided to try out for the football team because his friends were playing. It wasn’t easy, even though he was a good athlete. He was way behind fundamentally.

  “He was raw, didn’t know how to hit, but he was athletic,” Ladouceur remembers. “I felt I could make him a football player. I could teach him the game. His improvement from the start of the season to the end was so dramatic it boosted my ego tremendously. I knew I could coach. That was the kid who convinced me of it.”

  The young coach and the raw player had a profound impact on each other. Shepanek developed into a key contributor and enjoyed his experience so much he didn’t even go out for basketball because he didn’t think he could end his high school athletic career on a more satisfying note. What Ladouceur learned would serve him well in the future.

  “He had the skill set to take a guy like Mike Shepanek and turn him into a football player,” Stockberger said. “That was probably the key factor his first couple years at De La Salle, because he probably took kids who had not had a lot of football experience and made them into football players quickly, kind of like he did with Mike Shepanek.”

  Ladouceur was even more convinced he had found his calling after the 1978 season. He thought he could be an effective coach. More important, he knew he could make a difference. He just didn’t know where to begin. If this was what he was going to do, his four years spent pursuing a criminal justice degree were wasted.

  He wasn’t qualified to teach anything, not even PE. He didn’t even have a teaching credential when he read the article in The Catholic Voice, a small newspaper serving the Oakland diocese. The headline on page eleven of the September 23, 1978, edition read: HALL RESIGNING POST AS DE LA SALLE COACH.

  The Voice’s sports pages were filled with fawning articles about Catholic Athletic League teams and their coaches. The Spartans had never had a winning season, but they made replacing Ed Hall seem virtually impossible.

  Catholic Athletic League “football circles were stunned to learn of the resignation of Ed Hall, the head football coach at De La Salle, effective at the end of the season,” the article began. It ended: “He will certainly be a tough act to follow at De La Salle.”

  Ladouceur didn’t know De La Salle existed until the fall of 1978, when he and Stockberger went to scout a game there. They had to stop and ask for directions.

  “We sat in those crappy stands in the heat of the day and watched California High beat the tar out of De La Salle,” he said. “I remember watching the De La Salle kids and thinking, ‘Man, these guys are horrible.’ ”

  The article intrigued him, however. Bob had friends who had gone to Catholic grammar and high schools, and he envied the sense of community and belonging they felt.

  When he discovered the school was also looking to hire a religion teacher, a light went on. The theology classes he had taken qualified him to teach religion. Plus, he didn’t need a teaching credential to teach at a private school.

  “I was confident I could do the job, but I didn’t have enough confidence to think they would pick me,” he says. “I thought they thought I was probably too young to do this, or that I didn’t have the experience, which I didn’t.”

  De La Salle Principal Brother Michael Meister reevaluated the program after Hall resigned and decided he wanted a teacher first and a coach second. He wanted something different, a coach who believed in the Lasallian philosophy of putting the student first. He wanted a coach with a genuine respect for young people.

  Athletic director Chuck Lafferty headed the search committee. A local high school coach was brought in to help gauge each candidate’s knowledge of the game.

  The application included ten questions of a philosophical and theological nature that took Ladouceur ten typewritten pages to answer. “I wasn’t even trying to appeal to the football side of it,” he said. “I was trying to come in as a teacher. I wanted them to believe I could be a religious studies teacher. I had a feeling they weren’t looking for a football coach. You could tell by the program. As it turned out, they didn’t know anything about football.”

  Lafferty was in charge of sifting through the applications.

  “When the résumés came in, I started putting the folders together,” he said. “Ladouceur didn’t pay any attention—of course this is not unusual—to how many letters of recommendation he had to have. Here was a twenty-three-year-old, and he submitted a file three inches thick with people just raving about the guy—football coaches from high school and college, church people, professors. He had it all.

  “But the killer was it didn’t matter whether I liked him or not. I knew Brother Michael was not opposed to doing the unexpected, and there was one thing in Ladouceur’s file that gave him an edge—the religion courses. I’m wondering what the hell a religion teacher knows about football, but I interviewed him. Nice man. I interviewed the other candidates. Nice men. I had the faculty guys interview them all separately and everybody came back with glowing reviews about Ladouceur. He blew them away.”

  Ladouceur kept working at juvenile hall while awaiting word from De La Salle. He wanted the job, even if people he respected thought of the fledgling program as a hopeless cause, a dead end.

  “De La Salle was such a nonentity we never gave them a second thought,” Tom Jr. said. “They had no lights and played on Saturdays in 106-degree heat. I thought it was a death sentence, him going there.”

  “I told him not to take that job,” Fred Houston, his high school coach at San Ramon, recalls. “Bob told me he liked the setup because of the religious part. I’d never given that any consideration. I told him I still wasn’t sure I’d do that.”

  He was called back for a second interview. After ten minutes with Ladouceur, Brother Michael was convinced he’d found a religion teacher who could also coach football.

  “We went through the process three or four times, and I wasn’t satisfied with the candidates,” Brother Michael said. “We were clear with what we wanted and didn’t want to settle for anything less. The last person we interviewed was Bob. He was the right person. It clicked right away. Bob was the one.”

  Others weren’t so sure. As a coach, Ladouceur had only one year of experience, as a paid varsity assistant. As a teacher, he had never graded a paper, or stood in front of a class.

  “Religious studies is a very different area for a coach to be involved in, but it rounds out our staff,” Brother Michael told the Contra Costa Times. “This really crashes stereotypes of football personnel.”

  Ladouceur wasn’t a popular hire. Several coaches with higher profiles had applied, and controversy swirled around the announcement. Even Hall was less than thrilled with the decision. He had written a letter to Brother Michael recommending someone else.

  “The shit hit the fan afterwards,” Brother Michael said. “The phone calls I got—‘Have you lost your mind?’ ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘You don’t have a clue about football.’ Nobody thought I had made a good choice because Bob was unknown.”

  Ladouceur found a pile of antiquated suspension helmets, hand-me-down pants, and frayed jerseys on his first official day as coach. Not only was there no weight room, there wasn’t a free weight on campus. This was an immediate concern to a man who made himself into a player by lifting weights.
An old Universal machine sat in a corner of the locker room, its cables frayed and dangling.

  Now not only was the principal having second thoughts. So was the new coach.

  Ladouceur called a meeting for anyone interested in playing football during the 1979 season. The first thing he noticed was how few prospective players there were. Then he looked at the students themselves. This was a motley crew. Some wore bandanas, while others had scraggly beards and long hair. One had a picture of a marijuana leaf on his T-shirt.

  Ladouceur wrote 5–4 on the chalkboard. That would be the goal for the coming season, which seemed lofty for a program that had only won four combined games the previous two seasons. The next thing he wrote caught everybody’s attention: Beat Moreau.

  “He had really done his homework,” said his best returning defensive player, linebacker Keith Schuler. “Everybody at that school hated Moreau. We had never beaten them, and the year before they scored a 96-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter to beat us. He made that a goal, and we all looked at each other and thought, ‘Exactly.’ ”

  The season would start that very moment. He expected players to attend off-season workouts and weight-training sessions. For the most part, they did.

  “He set the example and everybody caught on pretty quickly,” Keith Schuler said. “Guys were more motivated than I had seen them on my previous three years with the varsity. A lot of individualism was done away with quickly.”

  Ladouceur enlisted his friend and former teammate Blair Thomas to be his offensive coordinator. Thomas had spent one year running Bill Yeoman’s split-back veer offense at Houston. He and Ladouceur chose that as their base offense because it relies on quickness and precision more than size and athleticism, and they believed it gave average high school players the best chance to succeed, and from what they had seen, their players were average at best.

  He didn’t set out to build a dynasty. Ladouceur just wanted to create the type of experience that he sought but never found in college.

  “Our issue wasn’t whether we’d win or score a certain number of touchdowns,” Thomas explained. “We wanted to train kids to play at a level of excellence that satisfied us, and we were people who didn’t play for the adulation. We wanted to take the spirit of the game and infuse it in the kids. He wanted them to play with pure joy and abandonment. Winning was secondary to that. It was a by-product of playing at that level. As starry-eyed as that sounds, that is what he really believes.”

  8

  A PRAYER FOR CAMERON COLVIN

  He couldn’t see his teammates from his seat in the front pew of the First Baptist Church in Pittsburg (California), but he knew they were there: the coaches, the graduating seniors, even the principal. Mourners stole curious glances at Bob Ladouceur when he entered wearing a black leather jacket and a somber expression. The majority of the white faces in the predominantly black congregation wore Spartan letter jackets and sat on folding chairs in the aisles, collar buttons straining against thick necks. When there was no room left in the aisles they were seated in the choir box.

  Cameron Colvin buried his mother on Valentine’s Day, 2002. Five of Veronica Colvin’s eight pallbearers were De La Salle football players.

  Many of Cameron’s closest teammates showed up unannounced at his house that morning, carrying their Sunday clothes on hangers. They dressed together and escorted him to the immaculate white church in the shadow of oil refinery towers, where his mother had been a trustee.

  Few players have benefited from the feeling of brotherhood and community that De La Salle provides more than Colvin. He found comfort in his teammates’ presence, just as he found comfort in the family snapshot he kept in his room. The camera had captured a typical family gathering on a Sunday afternoon. He could still smell the charcoal smoldering in the barbecue. That was the way it used to be, the way he thought it would always be.

  Grandma, wearing the red-and-white checkered apron, stands on the far left. Dad’s in back, smiling. The father-son resemblance is profound: the same wide eyes framed by high cheekbones. Uncle George, everybody’s favorite, is on the right, next to Great Grandma, who always acted more like one of the kids. Cameron’s two cousins were there and, of course, his sister Saimone, who looks so like her mother. Then there’s little Cameron, in a white shirt and black tie, smiling, his mother’s hand resting comfortingly on his shoulder.

  Bob Ladouceur brings a smoldering intensity and an obsession with the game’s most minute details to every De La Salle practice.

  Ladouceur shows little emotion on the sideline, but opposing coaches say nobody makes quicker in-game adjustments.

  Bob Ladouceur reviews his game plan before his team’s 99th straight victory in 1999.

  Ladouceur inventories equipment at the beginning of the 1999 season.

  Pulling tires across the parched practice field during summer workouts has become part of the tradition at De La Salle.

  Former players claim the conditioning program at De La Salle is more demanding than anything they endured in college or even the NFL.

  Ladouceur gives strength coach Mike Blasquez much of the credit for the program’s rise to national prominence.

  Ladouceur watches assistant coach Joe Aliotti make his point during a game at Owen Owens Field at 1999.

  Bob Ladouceur watches as his players fire themselves up before a home game at Owen Owens Field in 1999.

  Offensive linemen huddle on the field in the twilight after another grueling practice leading up to the program’s 100th straight victory.

  Cameron Colvin, De’Montae Fitzgerald, and Britt Cecil (left to right) look longingly at the aqua waves of Waikiki Beach during the team’s trip to Hawaii during the 2002 season.

  De La Salle players walk through the hotel lobby on their way to the bus that will take them to practice at Aloha Stadium.

  Assistant coach and athletic director Terry Eidson performed with Polynesian dancers during a beachfront luau. He didn’t know that television footage would be aired in the Bay Area.

  Bob Ladouceur described the practices such as this in Honolulu as some of the most intense in the program’s history.

  Guard Erik Sandie addresses his teammates during a critical meeting in the team hotel the night before De La Salle’s game against St. Louis.

  Tackle John Chan and his teammates toured the USS Missouri while visiting Pearl Harbor.

  The locker room was eerily quiet before the Spartans took the field against St. Louis.

  Linebacker Parker Hanks was one of many players who wrote inspirational messages on their T-shirts before the game.

  Running back Gino Ottoboni listens to music in the locker room at Aloha Stadium to prepare himself for the biggest game of De La Salle’s young season.

  Cameron Colvin taped a picture of himself and his late mother to his locker at Aloha Stadium.

  Maurice Drew and Britt Cecil lead the Spartans onto the field before a crowd of 30,000 at Aloha Stadium.

  Assistant coaches (left to right) Terry Eidson, Joe Aliotti, and Justin Alumbaugh celebrate a De La Salle touchdown.

  Drew gives the “Hang Loose” gesture after scoring a second-quarter touchdown against St. Louis.

  Britt Cecil hugs his mother Paige after playing a crucial role in a game many wondered if De La Salle would win.

  Tackle John Chan holds up his helmet in triumph after a 31–21 victory over St. Louis.

  Team meetings are held in garages and are integral to creating a bond between players that makes the team greater than the sum of its parts.

  Players relax after dinner during a Thursday night meeting in 1999.

  Defensive coordinator Terry Eidson is as loud and demonstrative on the practice field as he is calm and reassuring during chapel services.

  De La Salle players embrace after every chapel service. Former players agree that the key to the program’s success is love.

  During the season, players gather in either the training room or the weight room to watch films during the
ir lunch hour.

  The feeling of brotherhood—here displayed by (left to right) Mike Pitorre, Terrance Kelly, and Erik Sandie in a game against Clayton Valley during the 2002 season—permeates the program.

  Erik Sandie loses his helmet but sacks the Clayton Valley quarterback.

  A muddy field couldn’t slow down Maurice Drew.

  Nate and Jason Geldermann were two of the fiercest defenders to ever play for Ladouceur at De La Salle.

  Mike Bastianelli was the best veer quarterback in school history.

  Patrick Walsh celebrates a touchdown in the 1991 North Coast Section Championship game. It was the Spartans’ last loss.

  Players recite the Lord’s Prayer before kickoff against Long Beach Poly.

  Players return to the locker room after pre-game warm-ups at the University of California’s Memorial Stadium before the 2002 rematch against Long Beach Poly.

  Bob Ladouceur and Terry Eidson devised the game plan that defeated a much larger Long Beach Poly team.

  2002 captains De’Montae Fitzgerald, John Chan, and Cole Smith join hands and stride to the middle of the field for the coin toss before the game against Long Beach Poly.

  Cameron Colvin’s touchdown catch gave De La Salle a 14–0 lead in a game that many had predicted they would lose.