He’s in It for the Kids : Coach Young Likes His Role as a Father Figure

Though no snarler, Jay Young is as synonymous with Warren High School as the ferocious-looking bear painted on the gym. “I’ve been here longer,” Young said. “The bear was put up in the early ‘60s.”

Arriving in 1958, Young had the distinction of being the Downey school’s first wood-shop teacher, a fact only Buck Taylor, the baseball coach, is still around to affirm.

Four years later, Young became the Bears’ basketball coach and started carving a distinctive career that is now in its 29th season. A strategist with a knack for knocking off more talented teams, he ranks among the top five active California coaches in victories.

He also has evolved, at 59, into a father figure with silver hair--yellowish beneath the gym’s mercury vapor lights--and this role is more satisfying than his 508-345 record.

“People think a coach is in it for the wins and losses,” Young said. “It may sound corny, but I enjoy the kids, I’m really in it because of them. The greatest part of the job is taking kids who have had problems and trying to make citizens out of them.”

A minister’s son, Young has patterned his demeanor after former UCLA Coach John Wooden. He explains patiently, corrects and reprimands firmly, but it is not his nature to berate.

He has always taught health or driver’s education. On a recent morning, his students looked attentive in the company of this man, who, while demonstrating CPR, wore a V-neck sweater with “Coach Young” stitched on it.

“I’ve never had to send a kid to the office,” Young said. “I guess I have decent control because I’m a coach. I like a friendly, relaxed atmosphere.”

And he always has been in control as a coach, incurring a technical foul only once, for merely standing up a few years ago when coaches were not allowed to.

“He’s the old master,” Principal Ed Harcharik said.

The years at Warren, though they have etched his face, still sit rather lightly upon Young. “I still feel physically and mentally like I did 10, 20, 30 years ago,” he said. “I still have the same enthusiasm.”

To his players, most of whom he had as pre-teens in his summer basketball camp, Young is as much an idol as a father figure.

“I always wanted to play for Coach Young,” senior guard Ryan Dominguez said. “I always wanted to be in that huddle at halftime. He can motivate you at the most down times. If you walk in there at halftime when we’re losing or winning, it’s just great. I love the way he talks to us. It’s just from the heart. I love playing for him.

“Everyone here has the utmost respect for him. He wants to win and he wants us to have fun. He hasn’t let any of us down. To see the look in his eyes when he talks to us about plays and stuff . . . he just loves this game so much.”

Young’s job has become more challenging in recent years with his teams’ lack of height. He works more with Latino and Korean students now, their numbers in the student population having increased substantially.

That leaves the 6-foot-2 Young, a guard in the early 1950s at Long Beach City College and the University of Redlands, taller than any of his players.

“The GPAs (grade-point averages) are going up here, but the size is going down,” he said of Warren students, who come from the west side of Downey Avenue, which divides the city in half. “You don’t see anyone 6-3 walking around the campus.” Downey High students come from the east side.

Yet Young never tires at the challenge presented by the imposing teams from Lynwood and Dominguez high schools in the San Gabriel Valley League. Often, his slow-down tactics have disrupted their free-flowing styles.

“He’s resourceful. If you turn your head, he’ll beat you,” said former Dominguez High Coach Ernie Carr, now an assistant at UC Irvine. “He takes what he has and does the best he can. I admire him a great deal. He’s not egotistical, a tremendous role model.”

Young had one of his great victories--on the road over highly ranked Dominguez, 51-48, on Jan. 4--but is in danger of having only his fourth losing season. The Bears were 8-12 overall and 2-6 in the San Gabriel Valley League before Wednesday night’s game with Lynwood.

The memories of Young’s 19 playoff teams and 13 all-CIF players are in boxes in the blue-and-gold varsity locker room. Old flashlight shots taken in the 1960s and ‘70s show a packed gym. And team photos of players in striped knee-high socks are posed in a semicircle behind the big “W” at center court. Among the players are Rick Burleson, who went on to major-league baseball, and Paul Ruffner, who later made the NBA.

With the exception of the games with Downey High, Warren home attendance has dwindled to a couple hundred a game, and that saddens Young.

“Not a whole lot of parents come to the games any more,” he said. “I can’t form a booster club. (Parents) don’t seem to be geared to simple things in life, like enjoying a good basketball game or getting involved in school spirit. It’s too bad because I think the kids work as hard and are as dedicated as ever.”

Young considered leaving for Cerritos College, once in the ‘60s and once in 1981, but those thoughts were halfhearted. “I just enjoy the high school level,” he said. “To me, recruiting doesn’t seem like fun, and I was probably a little fearful of that.”

Illegal recruiting occurs at the high school level, but Young said he has never been tempted to cheat in his pursuit of a CIF title that has always eluded him.

“Unless I lessen myself to going out and hustling around the world, I just don’t think realistically we’re ever going to win one,” he said. “I feel with my philosophy of taking what I have, I don’t know if I can ever be competitive with people who are accumulating all-star teams.

“But my kids have got a Superman image of themselves as a bunch of 6-footers. They feel they can beat anybody.”

And so this attitude sustains Young and encourages him to analyze videotapes of opponents even more thoroughly and subscribe to yet another coaching journal and reread Wooden’s words of wisdom on the plaques in the den of his Seal Beach home.

His dedication is so unwavering that he has never missed a Warren game, although that streak was in jeopardy recently until his daughter, Cynthia, changed her wedding date from Jan. 4 to New Year’s Day so her father could coach the Dominguez game.

He looks forward to another one of his players getting a college scholarship--68 already have.

And to a 15th former player becoming a high school or college coach.

And to a 30th season.

“He gets up every morning whistling and singing,” said Connie Young, his wife of 37 years. “He loves his job, he loves it.”