Against All Odds:
Coaching the Man, Not the Game
“In the summer of 1960 I am at home after Sunday Mass and the phone rings and I answer. A woman’s voice, with a thick Irish accent asks if she could speak with Larry Toner. I say, ‘Yes, this is Larry Toner speaking.’”
To be clear, this was not Larry Toner, the coaching legend. This was Larry Toner, 19 year-old college drop-out and bum. He quit college and sat at home on the sofa, drinking soda and watching TV for an entire year. Every day his mom would ask him, “Are you ever going to get a job, Larry?” Every day. Every three weeks his dad would say, “Have you looked in the papers? What did you see?”
“Nothing I liked.”
Every three weeks. But his dad wouldn’t say anything. He could have, but he didn’t. Had it been one of his three other sons, he would have killed them. But the Old Man always handled Larry differently. Larry didn’t understand why his father always gave him space to figure out things for himself. In the end, he understood exactly why his father raised him that way.
“This be Mother Mary Catherine. I hear you are a coach…”
Larry said, “No Sister, I’m not a coach. I don’t know who told you that.”
Larry had been asked to sit on the bench during his eighth-grade brother’s games in order to have an adult present at practices. But he was not a coach, more like a piece of furniture. But an adult piece of furniture, and that was all that was needed.
“Oh come on now, lad, you’re a coach. Could you come to the convent? Next Sunday would be fine - about three o’clock.”
“But Sister….”
“Yes, three o’clock would be fine.” And she hung up the phone.
Larry is thinking, “Who in Sam Hill is Mother Mary Catherine?”
When the Old Man comes in the door, Larry asks him who Mother Mary Catherine is. His dad has no idea either. Larry tells his dad that she was calling from St. Columban’s and she wants to talk to him about a coaching job.
“Well, you’d better go talk to her. And you’d better be there on time.” That was the only time he talked to Larry about a job during the entire year he was sitting at home.
So Larry goes over to the convent, and that’s how he started coaching eighth- graders in basketball, football, and softball. He was nineteen years old One day, Mother Mary Catherine gave him an envelope with money. He thought it was for athletic equipment. He didn’t know of any equipment that the team needed. He told Sister he didn’t understand. She told him it was not for equipment, it was his paycheck.
A paycheck? He opened the envelope, there was one hundred bucks cash inside. A hundred bucks a month! Larry was shocked that he was paid for coaching eighth-graders. He thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had never dreamt that coaching could be a job.
Larry’s coaching resume was a blank sheet of paper. He had played two years of basketball in high school and one year at a junior seminary. In the only year he played football, he was a scrawny, undersized benchwarmer. He only played a single down during his very short football career. It was the last play of the last game of the season. His coach sent him on, figuring if he was a defensive end Larry could do little damage. The play was a sweep to the opposite side of the field. The final whistle blew, and that was the end of the season, and the sum total of his football playing career.
Yet he coached the eighth-graders for two years. The first year his football team lost every game, but the next year they didn’t. His second year, his basketball team won the Mater Dei grade school tournament during an undefeated season. His team of eighth-graders then proceeded to beat the Mater Dei High School JV team.
After those two seasons Larry hung up his coaching hat and headed off to the seminary. After a couple of years at the seminary, his Rector sent him to the Gregorian University in Rome for four years of study, a very prestigious and demanding graduate school attracting scholars from all over the world.
He was the only American, in a house full of foreigners. The house language was French. His housemates targeted him and he had to deal with their constant anti-Americanism. But Larry was a competitor, bound and determined. He didn’t relish washing out. It took him a while to get his legs underneath him. In the end - in his own words - he made them eat it.
There was only one exam at the end of the year and it was conducted in Latin During the exam students had to argue fifteen theses for metaphysics, fifteen theses for cosmology, and fifteen for epistemology. In Latin.. And you had one crack at it.
In spite of the obstacles, Larry persisted and earned degrees in Philosophy and Theology. But in the process, he realized he was not cut out to be a priest. When he reminisced about his two years coaching eighth-graders, he remembered how every day he awoke with excitement and purpose, and couldn’t wait to meet up with his teams. That enthusiasm for the priesthood was not there. But his coaching experience clearly convinced him that he wanted to be a teacher.
After a short stint selling insurance, in 1970 Servite High School hired him to teach French and a religion class. In spite of his limited football career, he was assigned to coach freshman football as well as basketball. That first semester he didn’t know the students, he didn’t know the school. He was hired to coach football, a sport I knew nothing about. He was a rookie teacher with a lot to learn.
From the very first class at Servite, he believed it was important for kids to know who they are. This would be the main button he pushed, all the time. He would ask them: who are you?
When he went to Rome in 1963, there was not much of a drug problem in Southern California, but when he got back in 1967 there was. When he stepped off the plane, he heard this song about going to San Francisco and guys putting flowers in their hair, over and over. He realized lots of things had happened since his four years in Rome.
He couldn’t believe all the families who had been hit by drugs. The parents didn’t know what to do or what to say. Many of the kids he coached in grade school were going through this, many of them ended up at Servite. Many, many kids he knew had ended up on drugs, in jail, in a psychiatric ward, or even committing suicide. That’s why he wanted to teach at Servite, and why he applied to Servite first. When he was offered the job teaching at Servite in 1970, he accepted. He had wanted this job four years before. He was right where he wanted to be.
He didn’t know anything about the whole drug thing, but he knew the school had to find a way, a better path. When he started his first year teaching he ran smack dab into it. There were kids who were loaded in the classroom. He pulled one kid out of class. The kid didn’t know what planet he was on. When Mr. Toner started talking to him, the kid started chirping like a bird. Then Mr. Toner knew: this is what drugs look like. In class the kid let everyone know he was on drugs, he didn’t care. It destroyed him, destroyed a lot of kids. Many parents had no idea this was going on, but Mr. Toner knew, because he saw it every day.
He thought that it isn’t just about getting rid of the kids. That’s not what you do. He knew the school needed to address it, and address it vigorously. It took years to get that in place.
Mr. Toner says, “It comes down to this: if you don’t like who you are, you do really crazy things. You end up on drugs, in jail, in the psychiatric ward, or you commit suicide. I had a guy blow a four-year full-ride athletic scholarship to a Division I university due to drugs. I had a guy thrown off the top of a building by his ‘friends.’ Things like that.
“Any time I come across a guy doing drugs I know there is something inside him that he can’t come to grips with. He doesn’t like himself, he is dissatisfied with himself, or he doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t realize he already has the things he has been searching for. You have to bring that out. When you bring it out, a lot of times you end up saving that kid, because once they see who they really are, they are satisfied. They like it. They like what they see.”
Larry never was a school counselor. He was a teacher and a coach the whole time at Servite. What he learned, he learned as an observer. He tried to find out who was having a problem and to get them to talk to him. Most of those guys with problems were good kids. If he could get them at a quiet time - maybe two days since they had taken drugs - he could see the guy himself was sitting on a gold mine The kid just didn’t know it. The kid is listening to people telling him that he wasn’t good enough, but he is. He just has to dig.
Right away he started. He wanted to get to that person right away. He felt that if he was insistent enough on the correct measures, he would not be losing young men to drugs. He got to most of them. Many were able to prevent themselves from ruining their lives. And yet, every year there were one or two kids he wasn’t able to save.
Larry believed that most people have no idea of their potential. Mr. Toner made it his business to help people discern who they are. Know who you are. Stand up for yourself Understand you are a very valuable person, and you are to be treated as such. That’s what he tried to help them discern.
He knew that the crucial idea is asking the question - who are you? That is the way he started. It was the very first thing he asked the new freshmen at Servite. When he had his very first frosh football team in 1970, he gave them a sheet of paper with 29 questions. Questions like “Put these four adjectives in order of importance for a football player: quick, mean, smart, tough.” He had the players fill in their answers. He took the pages home and divided them into two stacks based on how they answered the questions. He wanted to know who were the delicate guys and who were the aggressive guys.
He wanted to know which hot buttons he could push. He wanted to hammer them because he wanted them to learn to assert themselves and step forward. So he would do that. That’s how he started. He knew that it all had to do with knowing who you are. Knowing who you are is really important in determining how well you will do, whether in football or in life.
In 2004, Larry Toner was called to a meeting with the President of Servite, Mr. Pete Bowen, and the Principal Mr. Dunn. They asked him to sit down. Mr. Bowen started by saying “Well, you know how your football players are different…” Larry didn’t answer that question. He wanted to hear what they had to say, so he said, “No, I don’t know the difference.”
Mr. Bowen went on to describe the difference. He said Larry’s football players walked like they knew where they were going. They stood and act like they appreciate who they are. They are focused on the things they are supposed to do. Things of that nature. Larry said, “Yes, I recognize that.” They told him, ‘We want you to do that for the rest of the school.’”
The goal was to have young men stand up for themselves, to know who they are, to understand they are a very valuable person, and to see that they are treated as such. The formation program focused on four concepts: the primacy of faith, mastery of self, the necessity of the other, and the centrality of Christ.
The idea of being a unique person is a very crucial concept. Most people don’t realize how important it is. People don’t go after it. A whole person knows one’s self as unique - and that uniqueness is exactly who one is supposed to be. That is one’s being-ness. One can’t - one shouldn’t - be running away from this, trying to just be one of the guys. The idea that one is unique is a valuable thing, it frees a person to be.
Larry told them that when he first started coaching in 1970, he didn’t know anything about football. But he did know people, and he worked off that. Looking back, Larry realized that the reason his Old Man let him be, was to let him figure things out on his own.
That’s how the Servite formation project started. With a few years of study and planning, Coach Toner and the Servite administration transformed the school into what Servite is today. The rest is history awaiting to be written.
