Sanchez puts his stamp on UNLV football program

When Tony Sanchez got his first head coaching job, at lowly California High School in San Ramon in 2004, he saw a football program that lacked attention to detail, that didn’t look like it had been cared for at all.

He took many steps to upgrade the program, to turn a loser into a winner, and one of the most important was to listen to the advice of others.

Sanchez even invited Ron Lynn to attend practices and give his insight. Lynn, a longtime NFL defensive coordinator and assistant coach who is now Stanford’s director of player development, took copious notes and provided his thoughts to Sanchez.

Some Sanchez agreed with and adopted. Others he discarded. In the end, Sanchez knew the program would rise or fall based on his decisions, and whether others provided input or not, he had to be the one to make the calls in the end.

“You can’t always be a consensus builder,” Lynn said. “You don’t always have time for that. There are some decisions that have to be made instantaneously. I think the more solid the foundation of your philosophy is, the easier it is to make those quick decisions.”

Sanchez, 41, takes over a similarly downtrodden program at UNLV, and he will run his first spring football practice at 4 p.m. today at Rebel Park.

He’s had a small circle of advisers who have helped reach this point and still provide advice. Lynn is one. Former Fresno State coach Pat Hill is another. Kelly McKee, who was the coach at Onate High in Las Cruces, N.M., where Sanchez began his career as an assistant, has been influential as well.

Sanchez might not be at UNLV without their counsel. But just like at California High, turning around the Rebels — who have finished eight of the past 11 seasons with two victories — ultimately will be on him.

“I’ve got very strong beliefs and convictions, and I’m not going to let anybody make any decision for me,” Sanchez said. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to own this. Your name’s on it. At the same time, you want to make informed decisions.

“I wouldn’t say I’m easily swayed to do things I don’t believe in, but at the same time, there are things that I want input on.”

Speak with Sanchez for any length of time, and he will pepper you with the phrase “at the end of the day” throughout the conversation.

He’s very much a bottom-line guy, and he knows attention to detail is crucial to achieving the desired results. Sanchez, who was hired in December, walked into the football offices at Lied Athletic Complex and was appalled at the dust and dirty carpets. Now, the dust is gone and new carpet and furniture are in place, thanks to a donation of about $100,000 from the Rebel Football Foundation, which went to upgrades throughout the building as well as academic needs.

The locker room no longer has the gamey odor that permeated it in years past, and inspirational signs that once hung in Bishop Gorman High School’s locker room (“Through the door passes the hardest working football team in America”) are now at the Lied. Sanchez won the state championship in all six of his seasons at Gorman, going 85-5, and also claimed the mythical national title last year.

Among the signs in the locker room:

“Rebel Football Commandments

Treat women with respect

Do not lie

Do not cheat

Do not steal”

DETAILS AND TRADITION

Attention to detail and doing it the right way.

That was Sanchez’s approach to his first head coaching job at California High, a program that been losing forever. Cal High went 2-8 the year before Sanchez arrived, then proceeded to go 35-21 in his five seasons there, making the playoffs three times.

Looking back, Sanchez called taking that job a bigger risk than the one to leave Gorman for UNLV because his family was comfortable in Las Cruces.

After being hired at Cal High, Sanchez, his wife and two young children moved into the spare bedroom belonging to the parents of his best man. They lived there for six months, and Sanchez went to work each morning thinking, “You cannot fail.”

He didn’t. The daily determination to succeed paid off and ultimately got Gorman’s attention, which at the time was a very good but not elite program. The Gaels won the state title in 2007, but it was their first since 1983. Gorman also lost 50-14 to Palo Verde in the 2008 Sunset Region championship game, prompting the school to make a coaching change.

Even though Gorman wasn’t in a UNLV-sized hole, Sanchez still had work to do when he took over the high school. He oversaw the addition of an 11,500-foot weight room that helped bring the Gaels into the big time on a national level. Now, he’s looking at plans for a new training facility at UNLV that will be available to several sports.

Sanchez, however, can be quite traditional, particularly when it comes to his team’s preferred style of play.

That could be seen in one of his first acts at UNLV, turning down a complimentary Mercedes in favor of a pickup truck. This will be a program — even with its newfound presence on social media and the expected array of uniforms and helmets the Rebels will wear — that will be about hard-nosed football.

“He’s going to try to instill his personality in that football program, I’ll guarantee that,” said Hill, who not only coached Fresno State for 15 years but also was an assistant at UNLV in 1981 and 1982. “He’s going to work very hard. I think he’s going to be an awesome recruiter, and I think they’ll be very fundamentally sound. Now how long will it take to get the personnel to compete at the level they need to? I don’t know that.”

In trying to find players who can help turn around the UNLV program, Sanchez is focusing on recruiting athletes who have the right attitude, not only on the field but also socially and academically.

“How many kids would cut their arm off to access a free education?” Sanchez asked. “We need to make sure our kids appreciate that and take advantage of it, and that will show up on the football field because all of the sudden you’ve got committed people. People that know you’ve got to get up at a certain time. You’ve got to get to class. You’ve got to do your work.

“It does come into the X’s and O’s because those guys don’t jump offsides, those guys finish plays, and those guys don’t quit in the fourth quarter because they don’t quit on anything. That’s the biggest thing is you can’t compartmentalize success. You’re either a successful person or you’re not.”

THE BIG LEAP

The question, of course, is whether Sanchez himself will be successful at this level.

Any turnaround, if one occurs, probably won’t come quickly. Not with a schedule next season that includes road games against Michigan and Northern Illinois and home games against UCLA and Boise State. But in the next two or three years, UNLV will know if its decision to hire a coach directly from the high school ranks was the right one.

The sample size is small. Only three have tried since 1974, and all three failed.

Many coaches, no matter their professional background, have failed at UNLV, which has produced just four winning seasons since 1987.

“There’s a lot of hype, and people are excited about what’s going on, but let’s be honest, this is a tough job,” Sanchez said. “We’re not winning any football games by talk and hype and all of that. We’re going to have to go out and we’re going to have to do our due diligence of taking care of details, building for success now, at the same time setting ourselves up for sustained success in the future.

“We can’t look for the quick fix here. There are a lot of issues and a lot of things that need to be addressed.

“We have a lot of battles to fight, and they’re not just on the football field.”

He has used social media and other available resources to try to sell the program, be it to recruits who might consider playing at UNLV or boosters who might consider helping fund the program.

“We all work hard and want to do better for ourselves,” Sanchez said. “It’s why you buy your first home, and you work hard and then you may buy a second home. You know why? Because you can. You worked hard for that. You don’t plan on driving the same car you did in high school because you want a little nicer one. We need to do that. We need to buy some houses and cars around here.”

Maybe Sanchez, who does possess some college experience as an undergraduate assistant at New Mexico State in 1996, will be the one to move UNLV into a more upscale neighborhood.

It’s quite a gamble to hire a coach directly from the high school ranks, but this is Las Vegas, after all. Maybe this is just the right city for it to work.

Those who have watched his coaching career evolve say if anyone can make the leap, it’s Tony Sanchez.

“I always felt Tony would work his way to college football again,” McKee said. “I think the timing is really good right now. The college game and the high school game are more applicable to each other than the NFL game. Right now, it looks like the high schools and the colleges are kind of playing the same game. And so, yeah, I think that makes a natural bridge to go from one division to the other.”

Contact Mark Anderson at manderson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2914. Follow him on Twitter: @markanderson65.