When the Game Stands Tall, Special Movie Edition by Neil Hayes

Author:Neil Hayes [Hayes, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-806-4
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2014-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

17

1986–87 COLLISION COURSE

The high school football community was clamoring for it, but it wasn’t going to happen. They weren’t going to play each other. No way. The programs were too intertwined. There was too much at stake. It had nothing to do with football. This was about close friends and family.

Rob Stockberger and Bob Ladouceur worked for the local parks and recreation department during the summer of 1971. Rob had been introduced to his future wife at the Ladouceur home on Broadmoor Drive. Bob and Rob roomed together at San Jose State and drove home together on weekends.

Bob didn’t realize that his future was in coaching until he helped Rob with the junior varsity team at Monte Vista High School. Rob helped Bob land his first paid coaching job at the school a year later.

Bob was twenty-four when he got the head coaching job at De La Salle in 1979. Rob was twenty-five when he was named head coach at Monte Vista in 1981. By 1986 they had built two of the most prominent football programs in the Bay Area, if not all of Northern California. They shared the same philosophies and middle-class values. They started out coaching youth baseball together. Now they were ushering in a new era in Bay Area prep football.

Their training techniques, conditioning programs, and practice plans were so similar that their programs were almost mirror images of each other. Monte Vista played on Friday nights. De La Salle played on Saturdays. Ladouceur scouted Monte Vista’s upcoming opponent on Friday night, and Stockberger returned the favor the next day. Then they swapped scouting reports.

“Rob started his coaching career before me and set a standard for me to shoot for,” Ladouceur said. “I used to go and just watch Monte Vista games. I was a big fan of theirs. I admired the way they executed and the way the kids responded and the heart they played with. I really admired those teams. I wanted to bring our teams to that level.”

De La Salle emerged as a local power in 1982, Ladouceur’s fourth season. That team outscored opponents 425–56 and featured 175-pound all-state nose guard Pat Oswald. It finished 12–0, and won the school’s first North Coast Section 2A football championship.

Stockberger’s Mustangs won the 4A title that same season, on the same night, in the same stadium. It was a memorable evening, with De La Salle and Monte Vista winning championships in back-to-back games at the Oakland Coliseum.

There was a big party afterward. Half of the cake that Bob’s mother cut was decorated with red and white frosting for Monte Vista. The other half was green and white in honor of De La Salle.

The Spartans won the 2A title again in 1984 but weren’t viewed as a regional threat until they thrashed longtime Bay Area superpower Bellarmine of San Jose 37–14 in the 1985 season opener.

That got the attention of USA Today’s Dave Krider, who became an overnight high school football king-maker when his national rankings were introduced in the “nation’s newspaper” in 1982.

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