SANTA ANA – The change started at the top.
Raul Lara did not wear his cap backwards.
Wearing his Mater Dei cap backwards was a regular part of the game-day style for Frank McManus, Lara’s predecessor as Mater Dei’s football coach.
It was a small thing that irked some of the older-school Mater Dei faithful, and certainly was not among the bigger things that convinced the Mater Dei administration to limit McManus to one season as Mater Dei’s head coach, even with all of the winning the Monarchs did in 2023.
Mater Dei dismissed McManus after the team won CIF Southern Section and CIF State championships. But there were problems, among them the football program’s poor relationships with other school programs and with school administration. The players’ behavior during games was too often lacking character and discipline.
Lara, who coached Long Beach Poly to CIF championships and most recently was coaching at St. Anthony in Long Beach, was brought in to settle down Mater Dei football and to reinstall Monarch tradition. He did not wear a cap, backwards or regular style, Thursday when Mater Dei beat Centennial of Corona 42-25 at Santa Ana Stadium in the season opener for both.
New sights from Mater Dei football, new coach in Raul Lara and new uniform twist pic.twitter.com/orH8oYhfUP
— Dan Albano (@ocvarsityguy) August 23, 2024
What Lara did bring to the game were some signs of getting the program more grounded than it was last year.
During pregame warmup, a Mater Dei player walked to the 50-yard line that separates teams during warmup as something of a demilitarized zone. He got in a few words directed toward a Centennial player on the other side of the 50 before he was told by an assistant coach to stop, and Lara called the player over to him for a quick discussion. That sort of behavior was tolerated and not confronted last season.
Names of players are not on the backs of the uniforms. Team-first is more important than me-first.
The Mater Dei football team prepares to take the field before the start of their game against Centennial in Santa Ana on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (Photo by Paul Rodriguez, Contributing Photographer)
The Mater Dei athletic department is hearing from the school’s teachers that this year’s football players are easier to work with.
Bruce Rollinson, who coached Mater Dei to CIF-SS, CIF State and national championships during his long run at the school, was at the game along with several members of his former coaching staff.
Rollinson made it to one Mater Dei game last year when he probably was not used as often as he should have been, given the great resource he can be.
Before the game and at halftime a video of Bruce Rollinson, shot around 2000 or so, talking about Mater Dei was shown on the video board. Rollinson spoke of the pride, poise and courage that was central to his program.
That video probably should have been shown to the team in the locker room at halftime, because pride and poise were missing at times.
A dead-ball personal foul penalty against the Monarchs in the third quarter, when Mater Dei was hanging onto a five-point lead, turned what could have been a doable fourth-and-short-yardage situation near midfield to a fourth-and-long punting situation.
The 15 yards assessed on that play were among the 121 yards on 13 Mater Dei penalties, some of the personal-foul nature. That’s sort of an average night of penalties for Mater Dei over the past few seasons, but that’s still too many. It’s an area to clean up before Mater Dei plays Bishop Gorman of Las Vegas in two weeks at Santa Ana Stadium. Maxpreps’ national rankings have Mater Dei at No. 1 and Bishop Gorman at No. 2
So there is work to be done. But Thursday was a good start.