BOND MEASURE

Gene Noji was a desperate man in the spring of 1997. He was offensive coordinator for a high school football team that had lost 26 games in a row. Noji knew he and the rest of Woodbridge High’s coaching staff weren’t hired to break an all-time record for futility.

“I figured we’d either be fired or we’d have to step aside if we didn’t start winning,” Noji said. “We had to be willing to take a risk.”

Noji had been reading a book by former Northwestern football Coach Gary Barnett titled “Taking The Purple to Pasadena.” Barnett, now the coach at Colorado, had guided the Wildcats to the 1996 Rose Bowl. His book had some pretty wacky ideas about how to motivate a football team, but it got Noji’s attention.

“I thought, ‘If he could turn the program around there [after 43 losses in a row], with the constraints of the Big Ten, I need to take a serious look at this book,’ ” Noji said. “Some of the things were really out there. But I had begun to doubt myself as a coach and I needed to at least try them.”

Some of the most appealing ideas were also the corniest. Things like getting players to memorize and sing a “team song” each day after practice, going away on a preseason camping trip and setting up group motivational activities.

Noji appropriated Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes” from Barnett and ever so subtlety introduced it as the team song. He played the song as background music in team meetings, but never said what was significant about the song.

He also borrowed a few team-building exercises from Ed Lombardi, coach of Sacramento Elk Grove High and a teammate of Noji’s at Cal State Northridge in the late 1960s. Rick Gibson, head coach at Woodbridge, picked the camp site--Little Harbor, a remote spot of land on the northeast side of Catalina Island.

That fall, “High Hopes” was the Warriors’ rallying cry and the Catalina bonding trip became the foundation for one of the greatest single-season turnarounds in county history. Woodbridge went from winless to 8-2-2 and the second round of the Southern Section Division V playoffs.

Last year, the Warriors skipped their camping trip to play the season opener in Hawaii. Gibson and Noji acknowledged that staying in hotels, surfing and touring Honolulu didn’t bond the team like the Catalina trip had. Nevertheless, Woodbridge went on to win the school’s first section football title.

Two months ago, Woodbridge was back at Little Harbor--singing, sumo wrestling, playing blanket volleyball, going face to face with grazing buffalo and pouring out their emotions in late-night campfire chats.

“When I first heard about this, I thought it sounded kind of hokey,” sophomore defensive end Grant Hustedt said. “But it was great. It totally bonded us. It opened me up to the team. I feel a lot closer to everyone.”

While Catalina brought Woodbridge’s football team together, a week-long camping trip to Mammoth Lakes was the winning recipe for the school’s section- and state-champion girls’ cross-country team, and a weekend of camping and rope-climbing at Lake Arrowhead jump-started the Laguna Beach girls’ tennis team toward the section Division V championship last season.

The Teamwork Ethic

The concept of team-building through various group sports activities has been employed by corporate America for more than 20 years. But sports teams have essentially ignored team-building through off-season group bonding retreats until recently.

“It’s ironic, really,” said Mark Maier, founding chairperson of Chapman University’s organizational leadership program. “A lot of sports people thought all you had to do to build a team was to have a common goal. But it takes a lot more than that, things like having a common vision for each other and learning how to work together. The U.S women’s World Cup team proved that.”

Noji said he came to realize the same thing.

“It doesn’t matter what scheme you’re using if you can’t get to the players,” he said. “And if they don’t have the same collective desires, it doesn’t matter how talented they are.”

Said Woodbridge defensive coordinator Kirk Harris: “We tell the senior, ‘You better get to know the sophomore. He might be starting next to you this season.”

Venture Up Inc., a team-building company in Phoenix with clients such as American Airlines, Charles Schwab and Paramount Pictures, has been helping large corporations bridge that kind of communication gap for 17 years. Venture Up uses more than 100 strategic games that are geared toward developing better communication and problem-solving skills.

“We get clients when different departments aren’t working well together, or when companies are merging and they want people to get to know each other better,” said Matt Kiefer, information services manager for Venture Up. “It’s almost like we’re developing the same skills that are successful for athletic teams, but to a different end.”

Ropes courses have become one of the more popular methods of team-building in corporate America. Typically, courses are strung together on telephone poles about 30 feet above the ground. Individuals are harnessed into rope safety systems, pushing their comfort zones while teammates support from below.

Last year, Laguna Beach’s tennis team had a productive and somewhat terrifying experience on a ropes course in Lake Arrowhead.

“Some of the kids were leaping 100 feet off a platform while they were in the harness, then it started to rain and hail,” Laguna Beach Coach Michelle Foster said. “You really have to believe in yourself and your teammates below. It was fun, but I was really nervous. I decided I’d rather be on the ground this year.”

So Foster took her team on a safe hike around Lake Arrowhead. No matter what the activity, Foster believes it’s a good idea for teammates to spend time with each other off the court. She’s big on potluck dinners and beach barbecues.

“If you can learn to laugh with each other off the court, then you become closer on the court,” said Foster, who played at Capistrano Valley and later at UC Irvine and Long Beach State. “And that’s especially important for doubles teams.”

It was also important that the team got to know its best player, freshman Ashley Maddocks.

“The rope climbing really helped reinforce teamwork,” Maddocks said. “You had to be confident in your partner, or it wasn’t going to work. But it was nice just being up there, getting to know each other. Tennis is such an individual sport, it’s important to learn that team concept.”

Foster knew Maddocks had bought into the team concept during last year’s section finals match against Carpinteria Cate.

“Ashley was getting beat pretty badly in the first round, so I went out to talk to her,” Foster said. “She said, ‘I’m not going to let you or the rest of the team down.’ For someone who had never played a team sport, it was such a team thing to say. Those kinds of things make our summer trip worthwhile.”

Maddocks recovered to win her first set and the next two in Laguna Beach’s 12-6 victory.

Woodbridge’s George Varvas also coaches a rather individualistic sport--cross-country. Although some runners are faster than others, Varvas knows he needs everyone running his or her fastest or the team won’t win. So every August for the past 12 years, he has gone camping with his boys’ and girls’ teams to a secluded section of Mammoth called Twin Lakes.

Each day starts with a grueling run up hills. One trek begins at 8,500 feet and climbs to 11,000 feet. During the day, Varvas leads his runners on hikes or takes them fishing. At night, they play charades, name that tune or they simply sit around the campfire and chat.

“This year’s camp was great,” said Varvas, whose girls’ team won a Division II section and state title in 1997. “I do it because I think you get better teamwork and more quality efforts from everyone in the group. You’ll always have a few fast people, but you aren’t going to be successful without the three, four and five people. If they don’t feel a part of the team, they’ll just go through the motions.”

Woodbridge is among several cross-country programs that retreat to the mountains for summer training and team bonding sessions. But football programs don’t have a history of going away for the sole purpose of becoming a more united, productive and motivated group. They might play a road game in Sacramento, Chicago or Hawaii, but they don’t go camping together for four days.

“A lot of teams do little things here and there, but it’s an immense amount of time to organize something like our Catalina trip,” said Gibson, in his 12th season as the Warriors’ football coach. “We chose to do this instead of competing in a passing league. To us, this is more important than winning a summer passing league title.”

The four-day retreat to Catalina would have cost each varsity player about $50-$60. But fund-raising reduced those costs to $15 per varsity athlete. That $15 bought more than the usual hot dogs and beans. Thanks to some parents of freshman players, the menu included pepper steak and rice, beef stew and homemade spaghetti.

Growing Closer

Senior Justin Valentine, a starter at fullback and middle linebacker, has been on both Catalina trips and he is convinced they work.

“I played football for a lot of years in Junior All-American and I always thought we won a lot because we knew each other so well,” Valentine said. “When I first got to high school, I thought there was something missing. But each time I’ve come back from Catalina, I’ve built a stronger relationship with people I already knew and developed friendships with people I’d never met.”

Blanket volleyball--the ball will only go over the net when each team member holds up his section of the blanket--appeared to be the most effective team-building game. But players and coaches agreed that the fireside chats made the trip.

“Kids would get up and talk about their life or what football means to them,” Harris said. “Those late-night talks are where a lot of our players become leaders.”

Said Valentine: “Those are the best times, when you go around the campfire and listen to everybody. There’s a lot of laughs and tears. You could tell by the last night, we were a closer team.”

That close-knit unit won its first two games--which means Woodbridge has gone 22-2-3 since the first Catalina trip. But Noji made it clear there is more to Woodbridge’s success than team unity.

“We’ve had a lot of good players, too,” he said. “All the motivational tools have no function unless you have some talent. If it was just that, everybody would be doing this.’