COACHING STALWARTS

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Al La Rocque spent 35 years in coaching, the last 15 at Durango High School, before announcing his retirement at the end of this school year.

Cliff Frazier’s 33-year coaching resume includes a 16-year stint as Basic High School’s football coach — a position he held until he stepped down at the end of last season.

La Rocque and Frazier are among the last of a dying breed: coaches who spend decades in the same job at the same high school.

Turnover among coaches in the Clark County School District, and in many other school districts, is common. (An estimated 20 percent of the country’s 750,000 high school coaches change jobs each year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.) Part of the reason relatively few coaches in the county have spent 10 years or more at the same school is the explosive growth the area has experienced during the past two decades, according to Ray Mathis, the School District’s athletics director.

“Years ago, there was not a lot of movement among coaches because we were opening one school every six or seven years,” Mathis said. “But lately there has been a lot of movement because we’ve been opening a new school almost every year.”

The number of Clark County high schools that field athletic teams at the Class 4A level (with enrollments of at least 1,201 students) has grown from 10 to 31 in the past 20 years. That, Mathis said, is the reason for the high turnover in the local coaching ranks — “not necessarily because coaches are getting out before it’s time.”

It was precisely that growth that led La Rocque to Las Vegas from Southern California in search of his first coaching job in the mid-1970s.

“One of the main reasons I moved here was because you had to do 10, 12, 15 years as a JV coach in Southern California because the head guy wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “My college roommate, he was an assistant coach for 17 years. I had an opportunity to be a coach at a young age and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going for it.’ ”

The countywide growth has proved to be a boon for younger coaches in that respect.

“It used to be a coach had to serve at the assistant level for six or seven years before you even had the qualifications to apply for a head coaching job,” Mathis said. “Now, we’re gaining positions every year and there are opportunities to get (an assistant coaching position) for people fresh out of college.”

Frazier, who started his coaching career at Clark High in the mid-1970s as a wrestling coach, said he doesn’t believe coaches will stay put in the future for as long as he and La Rocque have.

“I’d like to say that the chances are getting better, but there are all kinds of factors that enter into” why coaches move from school to school or get out of coaching altogether, he said.

“I think guys get into it and they see this glamour tag that’s attached to being a head coach, like you’re the man in charge. But there’s a lot of work to be done. You’re still a grunt, just like everybody else — and probably more so because you have to go out and do the really hard labor.”

La Rocque also said he doesn’t see many coaches in the future putting in 34 years, as he did, because the demands being placed on coaches today, including a greater emphasis on winning.

“I don’t know, if I was just starting out, if I could do it that long,” he said. “There are so many rules and regulations being put into place that it’s really becoming trying just to stay in coaching. Back in the day, the head coach was basically in charge of basketball and the gym. Now, we have risk management and the central office is involved and you can’t run a summer league, you can’t run a tournament, without having 15 pounds of paperwork submitted and 800 signatures.

“With the evolution of liability and lawsuits, it affects us all the way down. Here you are, you just want to coach basketball and have fun with the kids and you have to be a paper pusher more than anything. And it’s through nobody’s fault other than that’s the nature of the society we live in now.”

While coaches commonly complain of ungrateful and uncoachable kids at all levels of athletics these days, both Frazier and Mathis said they don’t see that as a reason for the coaching turnover in Clark County.

“Certainly, kids are different than they were 10 or 15 years ago,” Mathis said, “but the students who are participating in athletics are still coachable. I don’t see that as being a concern or a problem.”

Frazier agreed.

“Kids that are involved in athletics and student activities, they still want discipline, they still want commitment, they still want to know that you care about them and they still want to succeed,” Frazier said. “As much as they’ve changed ... they’re still looking for those same foundational issues and it’s up to us coaches to stay on that track, regardless of how much society changes, and give them those things so that when they walk out that door, they’ll be successful.”