SGV/Whittier Prep Sports Zone: Escarcega on Preps: Reset or Relapse? Bishop Amat’s Football Program (and School Administration) Faces a Defining Moment.

The End of an Era: Steve Hagerty’s Resignation and the Future of Bishop Amat Football.

(Escarcega)

The news that Steve Hagerty resigned as the head football coach at Bishop Amat last Friday morning was not surprising to those who call themselves “insiders” in the area. For many, it wasn’t a question of whether he would resign; the only question was when it would happen.

Last week, we wrote a column about the situation at Amat and the noise from disgruntled fans and parents outside the football office. We also mentioned that Hagerty had more than earned the right to hit the ejection button.

That happened on Friday.

Those who think Hagerty didn’t do a great job in his 17 years as coach show alarming ignorance. Let’s turn back the clock to the 2007 season.

Much in the same way as 2024 developed, the Amat program was under great scrutiny. Before the season started, several high-profile players transferred out to other public school programs: Dorian Wells (South Hills), Bryce McBride (Los Altos), and Brandon Sermons (Diamond Ranch).

I was an assistant coach at South Hills, and I can tell you that no one from our program recruited Wells to come to the school. He decided to attend South Hills independently, which was a godsend. He took the program to another level, with the Huskies making the semifinals in the Southwest Division before losing to El Dorado.

McBride made a similar impact at Los Altos for the late Greg Gano, and Sermons was a playmaker for Roddy Layton at Diamond Ranch. These were the most notable of 10 players who left the Lancer program before the start of the 2007 season.

However, the Amat team was still loaded with talent. With players such as Isaiah Bowens, Brent Seals, Sheldon Price, Jerry McClanahan, and others, hopes were still high that Bishop Amat would turn the corner from 2006 (in which they didn’t make the playoffs with a 5-5 record).

They didn’t.

While Wells, McBride, and Sermons were on winning teams, the Lancers could never find their groove and finished the season with a 3-7 record. In the days when fans could leave comments on blogs without their names associated with them, Verti became an easy punching bag for bloggers.

It didn’t help when Wells turned in a stellar performance against West Covina on a Thursday night in front of a Fox Sports West 2 national TV audience on the CIF Southern Section Game of the Week. He rushed for 230+ yards and scored four touchdowns in their win. Throughout the broadcast, former Amat standout and commentator John Jackson had to keep referring to Wells as an Amat transfer. If you were a part of the Amat program, the optics couldn’t have looked any worse.

Then came the first week of January 2008, with Verti deciding to step down as Amat's coach. Like last week, the decision was no surprise.

“I wish things could have been different,” Verti said to Fred Robledo of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “But in the end, and after months of thinking about it, I think it was the best thing to do for Bishop Amat and myself.”

It’s not like Verti was not a good coach. He was (and still is) considered one of the top offensive minds in the area. He was the offensive coordinator for then-head coach Mike DiFiori… and was successful.

Being the head coach at Amat is not the easiest job, and Verti came to terms with it when he turned in his resignation. “I knew coming here there was pressure to win, and win now,” Verti said to Robledo. “Previous coaches had told me that, and I knew it. But it’s a little different when you’re actually here. We had some great victories and made some strides. But there were lots of ups and downs, and obviously, some really tough weeks that build on you and your family.”

The school administration decided to hire Steve Hagerty, a former football player at the school, as its next football coach less than a month later. He had been a CIF Southern Section champion coach at Citrus Hill High School as their offensive coordinator and won sectional titles at Paraclete.

The marriage looked tremendous and felt perfect. A previous assistant at the school that had gone to other programs and turned them into sectional champions was coming home.

And the best part of school officials – he wanted to be the face of the program.

“When I heard that the Bishop Amat position was available, I practically begged them to hire me,” said Hagerty to Robledo. “I knew there would be (coaching) opportunities after we won a championship at Citrus Hill. But I told myself if I was ever going to be a head coach again, it was going to be at Bishop Amat. I was going to hold on as long as it took, and fortunately, the timing couldn’t have been any better.”

From a football point of view, it seemed like a perfect marriage. The Trinity League was not as powerful as it is now, and players were not transferring at the rate they are today. The bottom line was simple: You could still do things “the old-school way” at Amat and have a successful program.

Hagerty to Robledo: “I don’t know that the culture has changed that much. You come to Bishop Amat to be on a championship football team and to enjoy a wonderful academic experience. When I look at Bishop Amat, I see a championship program that has been dormant for a while. It just needs to be lit on fire and resurrected a little bit.”

Keep that quote in your hip pocket as we progress through this column.

Despite ruffling some feathers from parents inside the program, Hagerty and his staff hit the ground running immediately, and the results spoke for themselves.

In his first year, the Lancers were 7-4 and lost in the first round of the Pac-5 playoffs. They got even better in his second (10-2) and third seasons (9-2), and all of a sudden, the players that Amat would lose to other area schools were now coming to Amat.

Players like Wallace Gonzalez, Julian Gener, Dairen Johnson, Rio Ruiz, and others were putting Amat back on the SoCal map, and Hagerty was reaping the benefits. It all reached its apex in 2014 when the Lancers went 9-4 and advanced to the Pac-5 semifinals before suffering a brutal 38-37 loss to Corona Centennial.

The roster was star-driven, with players such as Trevon Sidney, Tyler Vaughns (whose older brother Geoff Vaughns played at South Hills), Ryder Ruiz (Rio's young brother), Torreahno Sweet, Brandon Arconado, and others. As the late Greg Gano loved to say, “You can’t win the Kentucky Derby riding a donkey.” Clearly, the stallions from within the area were coming to Amat.

However, the world of high school football was changing—schools such as St. John Bosco, Mater Dei, and others in the Trinity League were pouring money into their football programs. From infrastructure to coaching assistants, no amount was high enough. And that also involved getting many of the top players from the West to come to those schools.

High School football’s version of “The Arms Race” was underway, and you would either get involved or be left at the bus stop. Unfortunately for Amat, they decided not to get involved, and they found out the hard way that it might not have been the most prudent decision.

The Lancers again advanced to the semifinals in 2015 but were destroyed by St. John Bosco 63-10. The talent gap was widening, and it was only the beginning. You can make the correct correlation that teams like Bosco and Mater Dei were the Microsoft and Apple of high school football and schools such as Amat were like Intel and IBM.

Times were changing, and the administration at Amat held its nose and refused to have forward thinking. This makes the years from 2016 through 2022 all the more remarkable when you consider that the Lancers won several Mission League championships, never had a losing season, and made runs in the playoffs with a talent level that was not close to many of the teams they were playing in the Mission League.

Which only gave the administration more ammunition to answer the critics that Amat didn’t need to play “The Arms Race” game.  Yes, Amat was winning, but there always seemed to be a ceiling to the team. If they played an elite Division 1 or Division 2 team, the results were the same: lopsided losses.

2018: First round loss to Mission Viejo 24-7

2019: Quarterfinal loss to Mater Dei 63-23

2021: Quarterfinal loss to Alemany, 54-38.

If there had been a chance for the administration to look at the program (in a positive light), it should have been in 2022. The Lancers advanced to the semifinals in Division 2 but lost to Sierra Canyon, 29-23. This was the second time that both teams had played, with SC winning in double overtime, 31-28.

It should have been clear to the school administration that the time had arrived for the program to pivot and for the school to invest vigorously in it. Sierra Canyon made that decision five years earlier and is still reaping the benefits today (not just in football but all athletic programs).

There is a saying that good athletics is good business for private schools. If you invest in your athletic programs and they become successful, it will be a boon for school enrollment, donations, and much more.

The problem was that the school administration at Amat decided investing in a performing arts center was more important than a football program. Kids began looking elsewhere when word began circulating in the SGV football community that Amat was not serious about football. Players from families with a legacy attached to the program went to other programs, such as Orange Lutheran and Rancho Cucamonga.

Throw in the other factor that the school administration at Damien decided to allocate resources to get players to come to their school, including one from Amat, and it was clear that what happened to Verti in 2006 was coming full circle in 2023 to Hagerty and his program.

All the factors that led to Verti stepping down in 2006 were about to send Hagerty into the same hurricane. The first indication came in the 2023 season, when the Lancers finished with a 4-7 record and a 48-14 loss to Serra in a Division 2 first-round game. That was coming off a 48-28 loss to the Cavaliers several weeks earlier.

It all reached its apex in 2024, when the Lancers finished the season with a 2-8 record and didn’t make the playoffs for the first time under Hagerty.

Let me make one thing clear: Steve Hagerty did the best he could with the cards that were dealt to him in the last several seasons. Not many coaches could have done what Hagerty did with Amat over the previous seven seasons. He won league titles with players who were not as talented as other teams in the Mission League. He is a ball coach in every sense of the word.

He had his faults. He was not the most cordial person with the media, but we, as reporters, are much at fault. We want quotes from him, but whenever something goes wrong, we are the first to blame him and say he is not a big-time coach on platforms such as Twitter Spaces and blogs.

Luckily, my relationship with Hagerty has improved tremendously in the last couple of years, and I think we are “in a good situation.” This experience taught me a valuable lesson: treat people the same way you want to be treated—not for retweets and likes on X.

I do not hold Hagerty responsible for what has happened to the program in 2023 or 2024. Instead, I hold the school administration accountable. Their actions spoke louder than their words. They wanted to win a football championship cheaply, and that is not sustainable in today’s competitive football world.

However, the excellent news for the school administration is that opportunity has arrived at the front door. There are precious few times that a school administration can hit the reset button, take a hard look at themselves, and decide that it’s time to restore the glory of a football program with a brand name that resonates throughout Southern California.

That time is now.  

The time has arrived for the school administration to flip the script and show everyone in the San Gabriel Valley (not to mention Southern California) that they are serious about producing a winning football program. It’s time for President Richard Beck and Principal Gabriel Escovar to deliver a powerful message that they are “All In” regarding its football program.

The question becomes, “How do you do it?”

We understand that many coaches will turn in their resumes to the La Puente-based campus and promise that “they are the man to turn the program around.” They probably have impressive resumes that stand out compared to the competition.

Here’s the deal. The hire had to be a splashy one. It has to be a Freddy Freeman Game One World Series Home Run hire. It has to be at the level that USC did in 2022 when they hired Lincoln Riley as their football coach. Did you see the reaction to that hire?

That needs to happen right away at Amat.

This observer believes that only one coach in Southern California can come to Amat, flip the script, and immediately impact the program. That person’s name is – Matt Logan!

That’s right. It’s time for Amat to open the checkbook, drive down to Corona, meet with Logan, and not leave without him giving them the thumbs up to be the next football coach. Logan is close to getting full-time retirement benefits, so he can do what Harry Welch did a decade ago: retire from Centennial with full benefits, get a 401K working at Amat, and name the price of his salary.

It’s called double dipping.

There is a huge caveat to this, and this would be the gold pass that could be the final straw that brings someone like Logan to Amat. Logan has to have all of the resources available to his program. That means resources are needed to bring elite kids athletes to the school from a financial aid point of view. The word “no” can’t be used at all.

What better way to infuse excitement into a program that the administration has allowed to become dormant the last couple of seasons? Do you want kids from the local Pop Warner teams in the area to come to your school? I can’t think of a better way to show everyone that you are “All-In” than hiring someone with the reputation of Matt Logan.

Consider this: all of a sudden, those elite student-athletes who never considered coming to Amat would probably take a good hard second look and then transfer in. In today’s age of high school football, you are either getting better or worse.

Yes, I know that this is crazy – and I’ve been called a “nut job” several weeks ago.

However, it’s time for the administration at Amat to think outside the box. Right now, the football program is the equivalent of the 2000-made Toyota; you are just another car on the lot. What will you do to become a Tesla and stand out from the rest of the programs in the area?

The SGV and Bishop Amat football stakeholders, Mr. Beck and Mr. Escovar, are waiting.

To borrow a phrase, you are on the clock!