When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition

by Neil Hayes

  Almost every successful high school football program has a summer camp of some sort. Ladouceur has always invited numerous public school coaches to work his camps, which fill up in a matter of hours.

  “They get kids from all over the county that go to that camp,” said former Pittsburg coach Larry Rodriguez. “It’s a good way to get kids on their campus. Is it unethical? No. I don’t believe it is. They are there to teach kids to play football. If they are there to get kids to come play football it would be unethical, but I don’t believe Bob does that.”

  Tyler Scott got a taste of what he describes as “the De La Salle way” at the camp. He was only five feet tall and weighed 96 pounds, but he decided during the camp that he wanted to play football for the Spartans.

  His father scheduled a meeting with Brother Jerome Gallegos. Tyler was an outstanding student. Although it was late in the admittance process, space was available in the freshman class. After a long discussion Gallegos welcomed Tyler into the De La Salle community.

  “I just have to ask you, Tyler,” Brother Jerome said at the discussion’s end. “I find it coincidental that you made the decision to come to De La Salle right after attending the camp.” Brother Jerome’s demeanor changed from accommodating to deadly serious. “I’m curious if any coach led you or guided you or pressured you in any way into coming to De La Salle.”

  Tyler told the truth. He was impressed by the quality of coaching, how everything they were asked to do had a purpose. He liked the way the coaches talked about being a champion not only in football, but in life. He wanted to be a part of it.

  “I’m relieved,” said Brother Jerome, turning affable once again. “If you had said yes and explained what happened, I would’ve had to fire one of my coaches, even if that coach was Bob Ladouceur.”

  “After we left the office we were stunned,” said Scott. “We looked at each other said, ‘Geez, I guess they don’t recruit.’ ”

  Many of the public school coaches who believe that De La Salle recruits admit that they themselves recruit, especially if a quality player in their district is considering attending De La Salle. It’s also not uncommon for public school coaches to attempt to convince talented eighth-graders to transfer to their high school.

  “There’s recruiting at public schools, too,” said former Pittsburg and current Clayton Valley coach Herc Pardi. “I’d be a hypocrite if I said there wasn’t.”

  Patti Rains has taught at a Concord middle school for fourteen years and makes no apologies for steering students such as De’Montae Fitzgerald and Damon Jenkins away from local public schools and to De La Salle, even helping them with the application process.

  She’s convinced that she’s acting in the best interests of her students. She estimates that she has sent twenty students to De La Salle in those fourteen years. Seven played football with varying degrees of success.

  “There’s not a high school in the Mt. Diablo School District that compares to De La Salle,” she says. “There’s not the same support system. I don’t want my kids to go down the tubes.”

  Students in the Mt. Diablo School District are free to apply to any high school within that district. Rains says that she has seen numerous public school coaches attempt to recruit athletes from the middle school where she works, but never a De La Salle coach.

  Many of those who level the accusations know little about the private school’s policies on admittance. Sixteen primary Catholic feeder schools put intense pressure on De La Salle to enroll their students. Prospective students must take a test. They must go through an interview process with the admittance committee; athletic department employees are prohibited from sitting on that committee.

  Of the 443 prospective students who applied for admission into the freshman class for the 2002–03 school year, only 270 were accepted.

  “Admissions is absolutely a loaded hot potato because there are criteria we apply that are not hard and fast but take into account a whole laundry list of issues,” said current principal Brother Chris Brady.

  Boys from the primary Catholic feeder schools are prioritized to such an extent that some consider it a detriment. Some applicants, from both public and private schools, have fathers or brothers who attended De La Salle, or sisters or mothers who attended Carondelet. The school also tries to accommodate those families.

  Typically fifteen to twenty percent of the student population is non-Catholic. This is for the sake of religious diversity. School officials believe that a non-Catholic student population enlivens class discussions and offers students differing points of view.

  Ethnic diversity is another consideration. Many within the De La Salle community, including Ladouceur, are disturbed by the lack of minorities accepted to the school in recent years.

  “We take a lot of Catholic school kids, and rightfully so, but in the past we reserved slots for public school kids and kids that have economic or academic needs,” Ladouceur said. “Now it seems like we take as many Catholic school kids as we can take, which puts us at the whim of our feeder schools’ admissions policies, which tend to be, from what I can see, anybody who can afford to go there. So we get a preponderance of white middle- and upper-class kids and we lose diversity. I’ve always been on the other side of the fence. I don’t care if they play sports or not. The more diverse your school is, the greater the educational opportunities on both sides.”

  St. John the Baptist de La Salle founded schools in France in the seventeenth century for the purpose of educating the underprivileged. That remains a fundamental principle of Christian Brothers schools today, even if it appears as if they primarily educate the privileged.

  Financial aid is available to students who qualify and is based on need only. Financial aid applicants send their information directly to a financial aid clearinghouse in the Midwest that determines whether that student qualifies for assistance; if so, it assigns qualifying families a corresponding number. When the financial aid form is returned to the school, the family is identified by number, not name. This makes it impossible for the clearinghouse to know what students have been admitted, and for school officials to know which students receive financial aid until after they have been admitted.

  “We have an independent firm that validates our financial aid process,” Brother Chris said. “We don’t do it to prove to others that we’re legitimate. We do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

  It was widely believed that D. J. Williams, the most dominant athlete to ever play at De La Salle, was not only recruited to the school but was given a full scholarship. The North Coast Section office was even urged by a public school coach to open an investigation but could not unearth enough evidence to justify further inquiry.

  “People said I was recruited,” says Williams, now a pre-season All-American linebacker at the University of Miami. “I never took any benefits from the school. Nobody talked to me. I took a test like everybody else. I got financial aid, but it’s available to everybody.”

  Far from being recruited, Williams said he had the opposite experience. He attended a game between De La Salle and Pinole Valley during his eighth-grade year; he later approached a De La Salle coach on the field and told him that he was interested in playing football for the Spartans.

  “He shooed me away,” Williams said. “He wasn’t very welcoming.”

  Sherri Gonzales, D. J.’s mother, has heard it all before. She wanted her son to attend private school because she didn’t like the boys he was hanging out with in their middle-class neighborhood in Hercules. She knew D. J. would be running with the same kids if he attended his local public high school.

  She investigated De La Salle but ruled out the possibility because she didn’t know how she would be able to get her son to and from school every day. When she discovered that two boys who lived nearby had enrolled and were willing to carpool, the idea became more realistic.

  Still, she and her husband couldn’t afford it. It was only after they had applied for and received financial ai
d that it became anything more than a remote possibility.

  Williams qualified for a large grant, but his mother still paid as much as $1,930 and no less than $1,430 in annual tuition, according to financial aid records released by the school at her request.

  It was difficult for her to make the payments even with the financial aid. At one point she sold baked goods door to door to raise the money she needed to make her son’s monthly tuition payment.

  “What bothers people is I wasn’t making a lot of money,” she said. “They wondered how I was doing it. I did what I had to do to get him where he needed to be. I wish they did give out scholarships.”

  De La Salle awarded $827,130 in financial aid to 174 students during the 2002–03 school year. Ninety-seven of those students, or fifty-six percent, participated in athletics. According to a 2002–03 Western Association of Schools and Colleges student survey, sixty-three percent of De La Salle students self-reported that they participated in extracurricular athletics at the school.

  The average grant for student athletes was $2,444. Yearly tuition in 2002 is $8,400.

  “The misperception is that kids come here with no strings attached, for free, and grades don’t matter,” Ladouceur said. “It’s not true. Even if you get financial aid you have to pay something. What you did in grammar school matters. If he’s not a good student we don’t even want him. He’s only going to get into trouble here.”

  Others go to De La Salle to avoid trouble. For many, it’s a refuge, a chance to escape the streets, a pathway to a better life.

  Terrance Kelly was raised in the notoriously violent “Iron Triangle” section of Richmond, where street-corner drug dealers and drive-by shootings are a way of life.

  He was raised by his grandmother, Bevelyn, who was determined to keep Terrance from the fate that awaited many of his friends and neighbors. His father, Landrin, encouraged him to pursue athletics in order to escape the streets and coached him in youth football and baseball.

  Terrance was a Catholic school kid from the start, and a cousin attended Carondelet and dated former De La Salle receiver Demetrius Williams. Terrance liked the environment. So did Bevelyn. The suburbs, she reasoned, would be an even safer place for her grandson.

  “A lot of people said he was recruited, but they didn’t recruit him,” Landrin said. “De La Salle offered the best education. It had the best academic record and sent the most kids to college. My mom investigated it. She was determined that he would get the best.”

  De La Salle recruited Marlon Blanton in the mid-1980s. That’s what they believe in Pittsburg. They hold Blanton up as conclusive evidence that De La Salle recruits football players to the school. It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing about Blanton’s life was simple.

  His mother was a heroin addict who would disappear for days, even weeks at a time only to return to beg her son for money to buy more heroin. He barely knew his father, who died a violent death when he was young. His grandmother took care of him off and on as best she could, but she had her own demons—alcohol and mental illness.

  His youth football coach in Pittsburg took a special interest in him. Vic Galli, Pittsburg native and De La Salle graduate, drove him to and from practice and took him home for meals.

  “Vic Galli taught me how to shave,” Marlon said.

  It was Galli who informed Marlon that he would be attending De La Salle after Marlon’s mother disappeared again and the bank foreclosed on his grandmother’s house. He didn’t want Marlon going to Pittsburg High, where nobody would tell him to go to school, get good grades, and stay out of trouble. He didn’t want Marlon hanging out on the streets and joining gangs. He filled out Marlon’s application, collected his transcripts, and talked to people he knew at the school on Marlon’s behalf.

  “I introduced Marlon to De La Salle and talked to some people over there,” Galli says. “He was a good kid who needed a break. I didn’t send him there to make De La Salle a better football team. He needed to be in a different environment. I don’t care if people say I recruited him. I know I did the right thing.”

  Marlon applied for and received financial aid as an independent. Since he had no official income he qualified for a large grant but still had to work in the library and at fund-raisers. Unbeknownst to Marlon, several teachers, after learning his story, wrote checks to help cover his remaining tuition. None of those teachers were athletic department personnel.

  The small-school recruiters interested in Marlon disappeared after he blew out his knee his senior year. Marlon was despondent. He wanted to quit school. He started hanging out with his old friends in Pittsburg and was lucky to be alive after a bullet shot at point-blank range somehow missed him.

  Several De La Salle teachers and counselors refused to let him fail, personally driving him to SAT preparation classes, enrolling him in tutoring programs, and eventually getting him enrolled at St. Mary’s, where he graduated with a degree in health, physical education, and recreation.

  “I was very angry about losing Blanton to De La Salle,” said former Pittsburg coach Larry Rodriguez. “Later on someone explained to me he wasn’t getting the education he wanted at Pitt, and that was a better place for him to evolve. As a person who cares about kids, I thought about that. And I thought, well, maybe that’s what’s most important.”

  Blanton is now the head football coach at St. Patrick’s in the East Bay community of Vallejo.

  “Knowing who I am, knowing where I came from and what I saw,” Blanton asks now, “how could anyone say what Vic Galli did was wrong?”

  22

  FOES AND NEIGHBORS

  The bus carrying the number-one-ranked high school football team in America pulls into the parking lot at Concord’s Clayton Valley High School at 1:30 on a Friday afternoon after the five-mile drive from De La Salle. Students hanging outside a classroom behind the school barely notice.

  Dark, fast-moving clouds reach down and almost touch the tops of the goal posts. De La Salle players, wearing green game pants and carrying shoulder pads and helmets, walk from the bus to the field, skirting standing water on the cinder track and admiring the geese and gulls feeding in the puddles behind the visitors’ bleachers.

  Bob Ladouceur walks straight onto the field, the saturated ground squishing under his black sneakers, mud soiling the cuffs of his khaki slacks. “It’s sloppy, but not real muddy,” he tells trainer Mike Blasquez after he has examined the playing surface.

  Erik Sandie stands on the sideline looking longingly out onto the field, where the grass gives way to black ooze between the hash marks. The smell of earth and mud and impending rain fills his flared nostrils.

  “This is a childhood wet dream,” he says, grinning.

  Teams often struggle when playing in the unusual afternoon games at Clayton Valley. Ladouceur told his players cautionary tales about teams that weren’t prepared to play their best so early in the day.

  It’s obvious why players could fall victim to uninspired play. There’s no pageantry to be found. Clayton Valley students have yet to be released from classes. There’s no sign of the red and blue–clad Clayton Valley Eagles. Five fans dressed in rain gear huddle under the press box on the home side of the field.

  It starts raining, and the way it comes down—incessantly and in big, cold drops—makes it seem as if it might never end. De La Salle fans, who outnumber their Clayton Valley counterparts two to one, open umbrellas and hold garbage bags over their heads as a public-address announcer with a sense of humor sends Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain” crackling over the public address system.

  A dozen De La Salle players urinate on a vine-covered fence that separates a gravel lot on school property from the backyards of residential homes. The place they choose is down a slight incline from the field, providing good cover.

  An irate homeowner is immediately on the scene, walking hurriedly, windbreaker flapping in the breeze. Blasquez and Mark Panella try to placate him, but he ignores them and demands to speak direct
ly to the head coach. Joe Aliotti intercepts him, apologizes, and tries to act as an intermediary. The man blows past him with a determined stride.

  He locates Ladouceur walking down the sideline. The man obviously is upset, his large meaty hands gesticulating purposefully, his white hair dancing in the wind. The words “Those kids should know better” are picked up and carried by the wind. Ladouceur apologizes again.

  “But suppose I hit you in the mouth and said I was sorry,” the man says in a thick European accent. “What good would that do?”

  “What?” Ladouceur asks, baffled.

  “It was like something out of a Fellini movie,” he would later say. “We were wrong. There were outhouses on the opposite end of the field and we could’ve used them, but that’s one of the things that bothers me about Clayton. They don’t provide a locker room or a place to go to the bathroom. When I played, I had to go every five minutes.”

  Terry Eidson was delayed by a meeting at school and shows up just in time to don rain gear and hustle to the sideline before kickoff.

  “What do you want to open up with?” Ladouceur asks Panella as Eidson gives last-minute instructions to his kickoff team.

  “How about a stretch?” Panella answers, referring to a basic running play.

  Ladouceur scowls. “I opened with a stretch against them four years ago and got nothing,” he says.

  “He’s unbelievable,” Panella comments when Ladouceur is gone. “He’ll remember a play we scored on in 1994. He’s got a great memory, but then he’s also always watching film, so he’s constantly reminding himself.”

  Clayton Valley gains two yards on its first two running plays and then completes a six-yard pass. Damon Jenkins muffs the punt, but the Spartans recover and Erik Sandie bounds onto the field with purpose.

  Maurice Drew runs off tackle and slips after gaining three yards.

  “Maybe we should try running something outside where it’s not so muddy,” Eidson says, loud enough for Ladouceur to hear.