Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Ron Kantowski visits Clark High School, where the football team has lost 34 consecutive games

It is just before the end of fifth period at Clark High School when a visitor who has stopped by to chat with Don Willis, the school's football coach, is told to wait while he is summoned.

"Have you seen Coach Willis?" the receptionist says to the person who has picked up the phone in the teachers' lounge. "Willis," she says again, sounding slightly perturbed. "W-I-L-L-I-S."

The visitor makes a note of this, thinking that if the person picking up the phone in the teachers' lounge in the middle of September doesn't know the name of the football coach by now, Clark might be in for another long season.

A few minutes later, the visitor is sitting in a stuffy weight room, talking football, expressing sympathy, almost, to a sturdy man with a shaved head. But Don Willis doesn't want my sympathy. He just wants to win a lousy football game.

The reason Don Willis wants to win is that in a couple of hours, 24 seniors at Clark High will suit up for practice having never experienced what winning feels like.

That's because Clark High has lost 34 football games in a row.

It wasn't always like this. As is the case with most of the so-called inner-city schools, Clark has had its glory days, and you don't need the memory of a pachyderm to recall them. In 1993, Clark won its last state football championship, capping a triumphant two-year period during which it won state titles in six sports.

Shortly thereafter, the bulldozers began rolling. New schools with lots of amenities were popping up like Sammy Sosa with the bases loaded. And when boundaries were redrawn to stock them, the kids who were playing ball in the inner-city began doing it on the outskirts of town.

"In 1992, I think we won six state championships," Roger Schumann, the longtime Clark athletic director, told me for a previous story on how Las Vegas' urban sprawl has had an impact on schools such as Clark. "Then Durango opened in 1993, and the next year, our starting point guard is playing up there."

It wasn't that long ago Clark, wedged between Valley View and Decatur boulevards on Arville Street, was considered the outskirts of town. But if you flew above it now in a helicopter, it would appear that somebody had taken a giant X-Acto knife, carved out a little square from the modest apartment complexes that dominate the landscape in that part of town and dropped the Clark campus smack dab in the middle, next to the swimming pools that need a good cleaning.

While waiting for practice to begin, I took a walk down Pennwood Ave., which runs parallel to Collis Stadium and the other Clark athletic facilities. Within two blocks, I came upon what used to be a strip mall that is now home to the Panaderia y Taqueria, Esmeralda's Beauty Store and Discoteca and Computadoras Reparcion, which is where Guillermo Gates might have his hard drive fixed.

Behind the strip mall, there are a few transmission and auto repair places, some of which even have signs. The entire complex has barbed wire around it, and one of those rolling cyclone fences that can be pulled across the entryway late at night.

This is the closest thing to a gated community in the Chargers' neighborhood.

But none of this seems to concern Willis very much. Sure, he says, he would rather choose his roster from a 150-player pool instead of one where the deep end only goes to 100. And while he respects what Clark has done in the past - "I can see the banners on the wall" - he's more worried about the present, which would be today's game at Sierra Vista.

As for the losing streak, well, who's counting? Not Willis. Not his players. In fact, of the dozen or so people close to the football program that I asked, none could tell me how many games Clark had lost in a row.

I mentioned to Willis that according to the Sun archives, it appears to be 34.

"Sounds about right," he says.

"I don't know if that's the exact number. But everybody around here knows it has been a while since Clark has won."

Don Willis grew up in Stroud, Okla., an interchange on the Turner Turnpike, the ribbon of highway that runs through the middle of the Sooner State, connecting Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Stroud's primary/only attraction is the "World Famous" Rock Cafe on old Route 66 - the actress Bonnie Hunt recently dropped in for a Buffalo Burger and an official Route 66 root beer while promoting the movie "Cars," which was quite the whoop-de-do. But there's not much to do in Stroud now that the Mother Road has been paved over and the Interstate 44 signs have gone up. Not much to do, that is, outside of high school football on Friday night and cheering for Bob Stoops and the boys over in Norman on Saturday afternoon.

So that's what Don Willis did. And still does. "Love 'em," he says of the Sooners.

He was a backup linebacker at Northeast Oklahoma in Ada, and got a job right out of college as an assistant at Coalgate, Okla. , a tiny farming community near the Atoka Reservoir. If that doesn't tell you much, suffice to say that Coalgate is so small it doesn't have a McDonald's.

"No McDonald's - Sonic," Willis says of the drive-in restaurants that may be the Sooner State's most famous export, now that the Wishbone offense and Barry Switzer are no longer in vogue.

Willis had moved up to head coach at Coalgate, where the high school football team was a perennial state title contender in its division. But when he turned 30 last year, he decided to move to Southern Nevada on a whim. "Something different," Willis says, understating the obvious.

He was Clark's defensive coordinator last year before becoming the Chargers' third head coach is as many seasons.

He says he liked the kids he coached in Oklahoma; he likes the kids he is coaching at Clark. About the only difference is the ones here don't drive tractors. And the ones there believed playing football was mandatory, not an option.

To wit, Willis says he spotted two big kids walking the hallways at Clark and asked if they had ever played football. Uh-uh, they said.

Now those two big kids who had never played football are the Chargers' starting offensive guards.

It is after school now, and those two rookie guards and the rest of the Clark players are trudging toward the practice field. Some interact with the basketball players who have assembled for a preseason workout; some nod toward the girls giggling in the shade under the press box; some engage in a bit of horseplay.

Maybe these kids have never enjoyed the thrill of victory. But if the agony of defeat is bumming them out, it's hard to tell.

Then No. 54, a big kid wearing a linebacker's number and sporting a linebacker's physique, shuffles past. Actually, he's not shuffling at all. He's walking tall. His helmet is on and his chin strap is fastened. His name is Chris Luscombe. He's the best player on the team. And he's tired of losing.

During the summer, he thought about transferring to Spring Valley or even Bishop Gorman because winning football games there is as routine as brushing your teeth, and losing 34 games in a row can leave a bad taste in a guy's mouth. But that would almost be like cheating, like acing the midterm by copying off somebody else's paper. That's why Luscombe didn't transfer. "It wouldn't mean that much," he says.

Having once been a substitute teacher, I know how cruel high school kids can be. So I asked Luscombe if his classmates are still supportive of the football team.

"Some of 'em," he says.

And the others?

"They just think we suck."

The first quarter was almost over against Desert Pines last Friday, and Clark had yet to start playing like a Hoover. The Jaguars mounted what seemed to be a 38-play drive, but the Chargers held.

A couple of minutes later, the Clark punter somehow managed to down the ball on his own 12-yard line. The next time he tried to punt, what had been an absolutely still and tranquil evening turned gusty, and his kick recoiled in the breeze, as if it had a rubber band attached. It traveled all of 7 yards before being slapped to Earth by the football gods at the Clark 11-yard line.

The next time Desert Pines had the ball, Clark forgot to watch the counterplay that Willis had told them to watch for. Seventy-eight yards later, Clark was down by three touchdowns.

This is what happens to teams that haven't won in three years. They take a knee or the wind blows at the worst times. Then they forget about the counterplay.

"We're fighting it right now," Willis says. "These kids have lost and lost and lost and lost."

Then when something bad happens, he loses them. It's hard to fix a losing mentality by calling timeouts, although I saw Willis try it three times in the first half against Desert Pines.

He says what Clark needs now more than anything is a big play, a lucky bounce, a big gust of wind when the other side is punting.

His kids, he says, need something to hang their hats on.

His kids, he says, need a win.

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