Hurley calls it a career
Beloved leader retires from coaching, will remain Newbury Park's athletic coordinator
By Stephen Dorman sdorman@theacorn.com

George Hurley quickly confesses. He knows he's guilty as charged.

All those summer passing camps that the area's high school football teams have now adopted- and the accompanying off-field extension into the weight room on almost a yearround basis- most of that stuff started many years back at Newbury Park High.

"It's like I've said before, I'm probably not very well thought of by a lot of coaches' wives," said Hurley, days after retiring as varsity football coach at NPHS, where he spent 35 years working the Panther sidelines, including the last 19 years as head coach. He remains the school's athletic coordinator.

"I cost people a lot of summer vacations," the 59-year-old said.

It was Hurley, with the help of his longtime offensive coordinator, Gary Fabricius, that changed the face of Marmonte League football, guiding the league from its pro-set, I-formation days of the 1970s and '80s to the multiple wideout, spread formations of the past two decades.

While unconventional at the time, Hurley said the decision to throw the football at Newbury Park was an easy one to make.

"When we won the CIF championship in 1993, we were at 1,475 (students)," he said. "All four teams we beat in the playoffs were more than twice our size.

"We were half the size in school population and half the size in the physical size of our players. We could not play smash mouth with people and be successful. So we threw it- a lot."

Hurley became the Panthers' head coach in 1989, and later that year he guided the team to a runner-up finish in the Marmonte League and the program's first playoff win since 1983.

Before becoming head coach, Hurley spent three years in the early '70s coaching the NPHS freshman/sophomore squad and then worked as a varsity line coach during Ken Cook's coaching reign from 1975 to 1988.

At the tail end of Cook's tenure, during the 1987 and 1988 seasons, NPHS began to throw the football more behind quarterback Wayne Cook, the coach's son who later played for UCLA.

As the years progressed, Hurley and Fabricius expanded their pass-happy playbook. By 1992 Newbury Park was league champion. The following season the Panthers won the program's only CIF title, defeating Hawthorne High in the Division III final at Moorpark College.

Hurley said that win, along with his wrestling team's secondplace finish at the 1985 state meet- Hurley was a grappling coach at NPHS for 12 years- were his two greatest moments as a high school coach.

To this day he still wears his CIF championship ring.

"I'll always wear it," Hurley said. "In terms of academic achievement, it's the highest academic achievement that you can do in this sport."

Newbury Park went undefeated in the 1993, '95 and '97 regular seasons. In 1995, quarterback Chris Czernek set the school's passing record with 4,360 yards.

"At that time we were out front a little bit in terms of being different and experimenting and throwing the ball," said Fabricius, who coached with Hurley for 25 years.

"Kids were buying into it. Our offensive line coach also did a lot to protect those quarterbacks. Plus we had a run of really good athletes that believed in each other and believed in us. We gave them opportunities to be good players, and we weren't conservative. The players did a great job responding."

In his final year at the helm of Panther football, Hurley won his sixth Marmonte League championship and took his squad to the CIF-Southern Section Northern Division semifinal round. The coach finished his career with a 130-81-2 all-time record.

Josh Eby, Newbury Park's assistant principal and the administrator who will work side-by-side with Hurley in the search for a new head coach during the next month, said Hurley leaves behind a tremendous coaching legacy at NPHS.

"As a coach he will be greatly missed because of his impact with the players and that he cares about them as much as people as players," Eby said. "They have respect for him and what he has done. When he says to do something, they do it; there's no questions asked.

"George runs such a clean program. His players stay out of trouble and he does everything right. At the same time, he cares so much about the school. It's not football first and everybody else second. He understands that football fits within the framework of the school, and he's always willing to do what's in the best interest of Newbury Park."

Fabricius praised Hurley for his ability to handle his coaching staff while giving them freedom to experiment on the field and with the game plan.

"He let us have a lot of input," Fabricius said. "He was not a micro-manager. I think a lot of that was based on the trust he had for us as coaches."

Hurley also got along with many of his coaching rivals. For several years, Hurley, Westlake's Jim Benkert, Oaks Christian's Bill Redell and then Thousand Oaks head coach Mike Sanders would get together for breakfast on Friday mornings during the season.

The meetings were initiated by Redell, Hurley said.

"When Oaks Christian first opened up there was so much controversy with kids that were going to his school that he wanted to have a place where we could get it out in the open," Hurley said.

"Sometimes it got intense, but it was always a good way for us to clear the air. Instead of bad blood boiling, we'd sit across the table and talk it out."

Tensions peaked between Benkert and Hurley during the 2004 season when Newbury Park star quarterback Rudy Carpenter opted to transfer to Westlake for his senior season.

"We survived those days by talking to each other, often at those breakfasts," Hurley said.

This year, when Sanders was looking for a coaching gig after transferring jobs from Thousand Oaks to Newbury Park, Hurley brought his former crosstown rival onboard as the Panthers' special teams coordinator.

"It's always a good idea to add a smart mind, and Sanders is a very knowledgeable, very good football coach."

The decision was yet another example of Hurley's uncanny ability to constantly look outside the box in search of success.

"That's the secret to football: be different," Hurley said. "Be good at what you do, but be different."