Building contender takes discipline, fun

DANA POINT - Football is not indigenous to the harbors and cafes and mini-mansions of Dana Point.

There is temptation. There is little natural motivation. There's the beach. There's the pool, where many of the good athletes go for swimming and water polo (they're the Dolphins, after all).

"There isn't any history or tradition," said football coach Brent Melbon. "When they built this school they could have gone into a lower football classification, but instead they went right into the South Coast League. And we've been paying for it ever since. We've never won a league title."

Bumping up against Mission Viejo and San Clemente and Tesoro and, before that, some strong Capistrano Valley and El Toro programs, would be enough to make a coach or a player use inappropriate language. But you don't hear any of that at Dana Hills.

Maybe that's where this story begins. Maybe that was the first step on what is becoming an astonishing journey, one that might prove that no high school football predicament is irreversible.

Dana Hills, which was 1-8-1 two years ago, is 9-2. Last Friday it beat Orange Lutheran, which had been the most consistent program in the county over the past few years. It was the Dolphins' first playoff victory since 1992.

They have only lost to the county's top two teams, Edison (34-17) and Mission Viejo (49-17). If you remove the loss to the devilish Diablos, Dana Hills' spread offense has scored at least 34 points in every league game.

On Friday night the Dolphins meet Edison again, at Orange Coast College. Should the ride ends there, you won't hear any cursing. At least not around Melbon.

"We had to come in with discipline and accountability," Melbon recalled. "One of our first rules was no cussing. The penalty was only 15 push-ups. But the whole team had to do them. After a while we didn't have that problem anymore.

"We set up a program where the teachers would e-mail us if a player missed class. If we kept having those problems, then he'd have to do blocks. That's when he takes a couple of cinderblocks and goes up and down the stadium steps. You've seen our stadium? It's pretty steep. And he has to do it 10 times."

Since surfing and beach volleyball don't often carry such deterrents, football is not yet a mass-participation sport at Dana Hills. There are only 42 players on the team. Since they run a no-huddle offense, and since some of them play both ways, conditioning is vital.

Melbon knew that Dana Hills couldn't win on regimentation alone. He made sure the misery was fun, or at least could be combined with company.

Every Thursday night during the season, the Dolphins dine at the home of a team parent. Every Friday during the off-season, they cook cheeseburgers together. And since the "skill" players get all the applause, Melbon and defensive coordinator John Donnelly take the linemen to a local steak house, give them T-shirts, shine a light on their heavy lifting.

"And when we started doing that, their intensity in practice and the weight room went way up," Donnelly said.

"We had to create a family atmosphere," Melbon said, "because that's really what a football team is. And a lot of people talk about that. But we showed these kids that we say what we mean and mean what we say."

Add an accelerated weight program supervised by Joe Mitchell, and the Dolphins were set. They dropped some hints last year with Sean Schroeder quarterbacking, but when Schroeder went off to Duke, Melbon wasn't sure who would follow him.

"Josh Dean is a senior and Trent Mason is a junior," Melbon said. "I wasn't sure Trent wouldn't beat Josh out. And Trent did play a couple of games and did well. But Josh accepted the challenge. He's a great athlete. He can do some things Sean couldn't do."

Dean has thrown 17 touchdown passes with five interceptions, and Zach Alario averages nearly 20 yards per catch and has scored 11 times. And Mason is ready-made for 2010.

It's been a nice start for Melbon, who coached Matt Barkley in All-American Football and was a teacher and an assistant coach here before he took the job.

"But we need to keep it going," he said. "And we need to keep the good players here. We have good athletes in this area. Carson Palmer grew up in these boundaries (but went to Santa Margarita). We have to win to make it attractive, to make players and parents say, hey, they're good and it's a good school and it's free."

No, football doesn't grow naturally in places like Dana Point. Sometimes you have to force-feed it.

Steak sauce helps.