Beloved coach, who won 10 L.A. City Section titles (two with Banning) remembered for making difference on and off the field.
Sure, there were 310 career victories. There were also 10 L.A. City Section championships.
Which made the rare defeat at Carson High a bitter experience, always reflected immediately by Gene Vollnogle, but only before he got to the locker room.
"He was always steady, it was always a teachable moment," said one of his greatest performers, Al Washington. "A little bit more solemn, but even in victory he wasn't doing a dance. We didn't showboat. He always said, 'When you leave the locker room, show some class.'"
Generations of Carson High Colts and even some of his vanquished opponents gathered Saturday at Carson to pay tribute to Vollnogle, the coach for the first 28 years of the school's existence.
Coach, yes. And much more to those who paid tribute following Vollnogle's death on Sept. 6.
"I wouldn't be a man if it wasn't for that man," said George Malauulu, quarterback of the 1987 City finalist team.
In the quad in the middle of the Carson campus, about 200 friends, family members and the Colt family gathered. Pictures, posters recounting his victories, and simple tributes like a "Vollnogle 1" T-shirt were visible as the atmosphere took on
that of a reunion as much as a celebration.And it wouldn't be Carson in the Vollnogle years without the looming presence of statistician extraordinaire, Tim Finney, a former teacher at the school.
He carried a folded paper listing the Vollnogle record, from his first 10 years at Banning - where he won two City crowns - to Carson, to his nine years as a JV coach at Los Alamitos High.
Years: 47. Wins: 384, Losses: 91. Ties: 1. Winning percentage: 80.78.
Yes, those are just the stats, man. This was about the man.
Vollnogle could be seen simply as the larger-than-life figure on the football field, ready to run his troops ragged with detail after detail. Sure, he had the look of the old-time coach down, from the shorts to the windbreaker and the whistle dangling from his neck.
A throwback? Maybe to some, but blessed with an inordinate amount of talent from the surrounding community, he was a coach who commanded attention, sometimes fear, and always respect.
But while he delivered the same message year after year to his players, he was never afraid to be on the cutting edge on the field.
The longtime Los Alamitos resident could go from a cloud-of-dust offense to an all-out passing scheme when many thought that would be crazy.
He pulled from a community of all walks of life. Your name could be Jimmy Sander, Samoa Samoa, Wesley Walker, Perry Klein, David Elecciri or Carlos Ruiz. You played football for Carson, you became a football player and more.
"What I remember most," Elecciri (1968) said, "was the tough, serious surface and the positive man on the inside."
And then Elecciri, who later coached with Vollnogle, would draw laughter by imitating his coach's famous mannerisms, from licking his fingers or jiggling his belt.
If there is a coveted season in Carson lore, it's the 1971 team that went 12-0, won the City title and was pronounced national champion.
That hit a member of that team, Kise Fitatoa, as he watched "Remember the Titans," the story of T.C. Williams High in Virginia that went undefeated in a time of racial strife. What struck Fitatoa was that in the movie, it was noted that T.C. Williams reached No. 2 in the nation.
Behind Carson.
"Coach Vollnogle, he was open-minded about some of those things. That's why he was such a great, great coach," Malauulu said. "It takes those kind of coaches to show the humility part of coaching.
"Some of these coaches nowadays - it would be a remedy for some of their problems.
"He was ahead of his time."
As intimidating as Vollnogle could be, he would always find time to allow the warm side to emerge.
After the Colts earned the 1988 City title with a 55-7 rout of rival Banning at the Coliseum, Vollnogle marveled at his team's ability to pick up huge chunks of yardage with two quarterbacks, Klein and Fred Gatlin, and shifty running back Errol Sapp, among others.
"It was zap, zap, zap, then zap 'em with Sapp," Vollnogle said, chuckling at his own words.
It was an overlooked side to his personality, but his daughter, Teri Hargreaves, had plenty of recollections.
"He did have a sense of humor," Hargreaves said. "There was one time when Carson was playing a (San Fernando) Valley school and the Valley school was not as diverse, let's say, as the Carson team. I think the Carson line at the time was made up mostly of Samoans, so one of the strategies was Dad had the Samoans get up and start chanting to intimidate the boys from the Valley, and it did the trick.
"Coaching to him was fun and he always said that playing football had to be fun. He had a great sense of humor."
And Vollnogle was no small figure in turning the culture around for the Polynesian community, particularly, the burgeoning tight-knit Samoans in Carson.
"He gave us opportunity," Malauulu said. "He opened the door. He allowed us to kind of be who we wanted to be at that point in time.
"A lot of the guys from the early years were coming from American Samoa just to come to school here. If you went to school back home in American Samoa, as far as you trying to obtain a scholarship, slim chances and if it was, it would probably be one out of the whole island.
"We all knew once you got up there, Vollnogle would take care of you and sure enough, it was definitely the truth."
phil.collin@dailybreeze.com
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