STEADY AT THE HELM : After Salvaging Sinking Program at Cal State Long Beach Reisbig Now Ready to Bring Prosperity to 49er Football

In the spring of 1987, Larry Reisbig received some good news and some bad news. The good news was that he was being elevated from an assistant football coach at Cal State Long Beach to the head coach of the 49ers.

The bad news was that the school was on the verge on dropping the football program.

“It’s a very exciting time,” Reisbig said at the time, which is roughly what you might imagine George Armstrong Custer, another head coach of sorts, said when he saw the Sioux nation cresting the hill and collectively frothing at the mouth.

If Reisbig thought the spring of 1987 was an exciting time to be the head coach of the Long Beach football program, he probably likes the idea of being tied to the railroad tracks as a freight train rounds the corner.

But somehow, even then, you had a tendency to believe that this former offensive lineman who just oozes positive thoughts actually did relish the opportunity to pull an entire football program out of the dumper and return it to respectability.

And, in two years, he seems to have succeeded in the salvage operation.

The 49ers, who have won just seven games in the past two seasons, are expected to show Cal State Northridge just what Division I college football is all about when the teams meet Saturday at Veterans Stadium in Long Beach in the opener for both.

The Matadors are considering making the rather gigantic jump from Division II to Division I sometime in the next decade, and Saturday’s game is expected to show the school just what to expect even from a regrouping Division I team, one that has lined up across from powerhouses such as UCLA and Michigan several times this decade.

And, while they came away from those encounters in a somewhat mangy condition, the 49ers were, for brief periods, able to compete against the football monsters.

Can you imagine the CSUN football team playing against Michigan or UCLA?

“Bob Burt has done a great job with that program and they have some real fine football players,” Reisbig said in a traditional pump-up-your-opponent speech. “I think they will make it a good ballgame and I think we’ll have to play well to win.”

Reisbig wasn’t a newcomer to the dump-the-program school of thought when he took over at Long Beach. He coached for nine years at College of the Canyons before that program did a dead carp imitation.

He previously had coached at Hart and Canyon highs. After leaving College of the Canyons, he coached for three years at Pasadena City College.

The former Washington State All-West Coast lineman was CSUN’s second choice for the head coaching job that Burt assumed three years ago. When he didn’t get that job, he went back to his job as an assistant at Long Beach. And when head Coach Mike Sheppard quit late in 1986 as the financial burdens on the program were mounting, Reisbig stepped in and quickly helped organize fund-raisers that netted the football program $300,000. In the next year-and-a-half he was instrumental in raising an additional $500,000 for the school.

Now, the program is back at 70 scholarships, or 20 under the maximum allowed by NCAA Division I, and Reisbig has, for the first time, prepared a 49er team for the football season without the nagging doubts of whether it might be the last season.

“If you look back at what we’ve been through here it’s remarkable, I think, that we’re back at this level,” said Reisbig, 49. “We lost two-thirds of our scholarships the first year I took over and somehow we still won four games. Last year we only won three games, but we were in our last six games right down to the gun and should have won several of them.

“This year, for the first time, I feel very, very positive. We have a new university president in Dr. Curtis McCray and the community has come back to us. We have booster groups helping us out with fund-raisers and we have full fan support once again. And, for the first time since I’ve been here, I had a full recruiting year. We got most of the guys we wanted. The stigma of kids wondering if there would even be a program here the next year is gone. We are here for keeps. The first two years we were just holding on. Now, we’re going to be competitive.”

Reisbig can’t, however, avoid occasionally thinking back to the nightmares when he first began work at Long Beach. For the first 18 months as an assistant he maintained his home in Newhall that he and his family had lived in for 18 years. During the week, he lived on his 30-foot sailboat in Huntington Harbor, returning to his family only briefly on weekends. And while a 30-foot boat is a good-sized boat, it is rather distinctly a bad-sized house, especially for a 225-pound coach who brings reams of football notes back to the harbor with him each night.

“Those memories are still clear,” he said. “It was quite an experience, living on that thing. But at that time, with the football program hanging on the edge, we just felt it was no time to sell our home and make a full, all-out move to the Long Beach area.”

But, Reisbig also is quick to note that while he can’t help thinking about the bad old days, he knows there are some good news days in store for his 49ers.

“The first two years have been very hard on me and very hard on everybody involved with out football program,” he said. “It hurt and it hurt bad. But we were realistic and knew that the most important thing was not making a crazy effort just to win some ball games, but to save the football program first.

“We did that. Now it’s time to make some moves and win a lot of football games.”