CV grad Garrison hits coaching milestone

When last I chatted with Steve Garrison, the former Central Valley athlete had just coached Monrovia High to its third straight California CIF-Southern Section Division 10 championship football game and had compiled a 60-12 record and three Rio Hondo League titles.

That was 1999 and Garrison not only was a rousing success at Monrovia, but 20 years after his graduation from CV had told an entertaining tale to tell of how he arrived in Southern California.

I caught up with him again last week. Coaching in his 14th year at Monrovia, Garrison had just won his 100th game.

On Friday, Monrovia lost 22-20 in the waning seconds to West Covina, a team that plays three divisions higher than the Wildcats.

California has so many schools that the Southern California section alone has 13 divisions, based on school size and strength of conference. They haven’t had state championships per se. At season’s end, their playoffs consist of 13 16-team tournaments in the southern half of the state – a region that runs from north of Pasadena down into San Diego.

I called Garrison to congratulate him on reaching the century mark and the man of many words answered, “I’m not keeping count. Every game’s just the first game every week. I’m just hanging in there. As a football coach you think every year might be your last.”

He pointed out that 1999 was the last year he’d reached the finals, a level of success that has made him something of a legend at Monrovia. He’s the 80-year-old school’s longest-tenured coach.

After his team’s 3-1 start this year, it appears that Garrison could be back in the Division 10 hunt.

He has a running back on the college recruiting radar in James Davis, who gained over 150 yards in the second half last Friday that rallied Monrovia to a 20-19 lead with 50 seconds remaining, only to lose on a game-ending 33-yard field goal.

“We’ve struggled for awhile,” said Garrison, “so now we have a better chance to get back into the final games.”

Garrison was a lanky lineman with good feet at Central Valley where he graduated in 1979, a three-year varsity player.

He wound up at the University of Montana as an offensive guard on the 1982 Big Sky champions and student-taught in Great Falls before heading south.

“I was chasing a girl, who moved to this area,” he told me in 1999. The relationship never took, but his self-proclaimed gift of gab enabled him to talk his way into a teaching position at ethically-diverse Monrovia.

“Here I was an Eastern Washington boy; it was 100 degrees and full of smog, with people who didn’t speak English. It was something,” he told me then.

After nine years as head track coach he took over football in 1993. The lure of year-round golf and nice weather has kept him in California. He admitted, however, that during his annual summer two-week visit to his parents in Spokane Valley a couple of years ago, he snooped around about the possibility of finding a coaching job here.

But after taking over a team that had gone winless in league for four years, then averaging nearly eight wins per season over the last 13-plus, it would have to be difficult for Garrison to leave.

In 1999 he was named High School Football Coach of the Decade in California’s West San Gabriel Valley by the Pasadena Star-News. And now he has reached the 100-win plateau in his career.

“People have been very gracious in their recognition, but I’m more embarrassed than anything else,” Garrison said of the milestone. “I’ve just been grinding away and really didn’t know (I was close) until last year when someone mentioned it.”

Then he added that for fans it’s about winning league titles and championships anyway. “If you get your butt kicked, no one gives a damn about Coach Garrison’s 100 wins.”

Prior to reaching the milestone Garrison told a Pasadena Star-News reporter that he’d trade all 100 victories for a CIF championship. Given his start this year, there’s the possibility he’ll get another chance.

Garrison said that, more than anything else, he is doing what he likes – teaching history and coaching football. “I’m at a happy place in my life.”