Guest View: Remembering Coach Guthrie and Live Oak’s first football championship

Fifty Years Ago this spring will mark the beginning of an astounding march towards Live Oak’s very first Football Championship clinched in a dramatic last game of the season mud bowl 13-0 victory over San Lorenzo High School on November, 14^th, 1965.  While I was hiking last year with my good buddy and old teammate of that team Kim Moreno, we noted the 50 year anniversary would be upon us soon and that our ancient march towards that football championship in 1965 had actually begun 3 years earlier when Dr. Howard Nicholson, Superintendent of our huge rural school district, hired Darrell Guthrie as an English, Math, PE teacher and Head Football Coach. When Coach Guthrie assumed the football helm in 1963, Live Oak played in the Mission Trail Athletic league (MTAL) where the terms used to describe Live Oak Football was “the Live Oak Acorns were the perennial league doormats” winning only one league game for the entire decade of fielding a football team. Morgan Hill, then with a growing population of almost 4000, was the smallest town in the league with the football power houses of the day usually being Carmel, King City, San Lorenzo and Pacific Grove. Even our neighboring town of Gilroy, with our arch rival the Mustangs, was twice the size of Morgan Hill in those days.
So in the Spring of 1965, here in our small “Ag” farming town of Morgan Hill, where orchards of cherry, peach, but mostly apricot and prune trees along with vineyards dominated the valley floor landscape, a rag tag bunch of mostly farm boys started to assemble for football “spring practice”. This “spring practice thing” was a new regimen introduced by Coach Guthrie to us football players eager to play varsity football in the coming fall. Live Oak High School, Morgan Hill’s only high school then was a 4 year high school and was located at the “old campus” (now Britton Middle School) where Highway 101 ran right next to it and on through downtown on Monterey Road. We had 3 primary sports seasons at Live Oak then: Football, Basketball and Baseball and they basically didn’t overlap. Many top athletes played and lettered in all 3 sports. So having football practice during baseball season seemed odd at first and kind of a nuisance. Football was for the Fall, basketball was played in Winter and Spring was for baseball, track, tennis and swimming, etc. But that was how Coach Guthrie started preparing his players physically and mentally as a team to play competitive football when our “real” football season started with practices beginning in the hot dry days of August. That’s when our local fruit farmers were in the middle of the seasonal prune harvest and the local “dehy’s” (fruit dehydrators) was running full tilt. Sunsweet used to run a “dehy” for decades down at 4th and Depot where students/players sometimes had a summer job.
In just 3 years, the football program initiated by Coach Guthrie, not only produced a competitive team but produced the very first championship football team at Live Oak. All year physical fitness training, weight lifting and isometric exercise programs, spring practice, a totally new “play book” which included very dynamic offense and defensive line blocking and stunts (there were no dumb linemen), opponent game scouting, filming games for post game analysis “Monday chalk talks”, proper hydration methods and practices that reduced injuries from previous years but still prepared the team to peak at their physical and mental best at game kick-off time following his inspiring pre-game “coach talks”. These were all elements of coach Guthrie’s program. The days of simple tackling dummy drills and merely pushing a sled around the field where gone. My brother Bob and Kim’s brother Glen had played football the 4 years before us and Kim and I played one year under the previous football program and the difference was dramatic and effective after Coach Guthrie arrived. Way more cerebral than the previous hard discipline “take a lap” if you made a mistake or didn’t “shout it up” enough with maniacal enthusiasm. Coach Guthrie knew how to teach, inspire and motivate his players. He collaborated with his assistant coaches to maximize each player’s abilities and put them into situations in which they would be most successful and productive to the TEAM. With only 33 players on our roster, Coach Guthrie’s skill at doing this was critical in winning that 1965 Championship.
Before that 1965 football season started, the Santa Cruz Sentinel sports writer Mark Bergstrom described Live Oak as “the traditional cellar-dweller” of the MTAL but then added “The Live Oak Acorns, born and raised in the Mission Trail cellar(ouch) are looking forward to their best football season ever.” Well that was a very low bar to achieve considering our past and that we lost ALL our games in 1964. So how surprised was sports writer Mark Bergstrom and everyone else in the league, in our school and in our tiny home town when that team of 33 rag tag farmer and orchard boys lead by Head Coach Darrel Guthrie with his assistant coaches Larry Koester and Duane Asplund from “Morgan’s Gulch” pulled off upset after upset with a final mud bowl shut out over the San Lorenzo Cougars to clinch the 1965 MTAL Football Championship? That first Football Championship for the Live Oak Acorns was an astounding and unexpected accomplishment orchestrated by Head Coach Darrell Guthrie. A feat that was not repeated for 12 years until 1977 after various league changes and a tremendous growth to our home town of Morgan Hill with a 1977 population by then of about 15,000.
What made that first Live Oak Acorn football Championship possible? There were many contributing factors. We had some great athletes but the most important and obvious factor was the leadership and coaching genius of Head Coach Darrel Guthrie. So Kim Moreno and I began to wonder why Coach Guthrie was not yet in the Live Oak Sports Hall of Fame? Just overlooked like many athletes from that era before the Hall of Fame was established we surmised. Plus the very basic fact that our little farm town grew by over 10X with people that simply were not here to even remember those times when Darrell Guthrie was our head coach. No one thought to make a nomination as our farm community grew into the “Silicon Valley” era that we are in now. The years blew by and those days were forgotten as many other great Live Oak Championship teams came to pass. Fifteen football championships is my count. There were many stellar players on that 1965 team but it was a TEAM first and foremost and Coach Guthrie’s masterful coaching was most responsible for making that 1965 team the very first Live Oak Football Champions.
So Kim and I felt that even if a bit overdue an effort to nominate Coach Guthrie for induction into the LO Hall of Fame would be appropriate to recognize him, his accomplishments and that first football championship team from half a century ago.  And hopefully with his induction into the LO Hall of Fame this fall to coincide with the 50 year anniversary of that championship season. It will be up to the hall of fame induction committee to determine whether his achievements and credentials warrant his initiation. That is up to them. We can only bring Coach Guthrie’s accomplishments to their attention in a nomination request letter(s) that we are drafting. Anyone who would like to do the same can also contact the LO Athletic Hall of Fame induction committee or me, Ed Ferri, at the following email address: ac***********@hu****.net and I will pass it along to the committee. Also Kim Moreno with this goal in mind has set up a Facebook page: www.facebook.com/pages/Acorns-1965-Championship-Reunion/321345668052968.
In the event that Coach Guthrie is inducted this fall (got our fingers crossed), it would be nice to get as many team members out there (or anyone else from that Live Oak football era) to honor our great coach and to possibly get together in some way or another to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of that 1965 championship.  We are trying to put together a current contact list of all the 1965 team and others who may be interested in coach Guthrie’s nomination and a possible reunion get together… or just to say Hi, or share your thoughts and memories from those exciting Morgan Hill football days so long ago. If so, email me (Ed Ferri) or Kim Moreno at ac***********@hu****.net .
Ed Ferri
Team Member 1965 LO Football Champions
Coach Guthrie left Morgan Hill to pursue his doctorate at Brigham Young University which he received in 1971. He taught biomechanics of human performance and many other courses related to Applied Coaching, Teaching and Ergonomics for over 20 years at California State University, Northridge. He also coached football and skiing at Utah State University. Dr. Darrell Guthrie, PhD. and his wife Patt are retired and living in Farmington, Utah.