Turning Things Around
Chandler finally had the talent to compete with other top programs, turning the playoffs from a hope to a near certainty.
Chandler High School had finally found a level of consistent success in football.
It was then that the high school football landscape changed forever.
The evening is October 15, 1995. Jerry Loper, a two-time state champion head coach and the current head football coach at Chandler High School, pulled his pickup truck through an intersection near his Mesa home at around 10:30 p.m.
Waylon Jackson, 19, arrives at the same time, running a red light. Loper was not wearing a seatbelt, and police suspected Jackson had been drinking that evening.
Loper did not survive, succumbing to his injuries after being ejected from the truck. He was pronounced dead at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital-Osborn, according to the Daily Courier.
Surviving him were his wife, Patty, his sons, Kent and Glenn, and a 3–2 Wolves football team looking to complete the rest of its season. They were looking to pick up the pieces, dropping their next game but rallying to win their last six in a season dedicated to Loper’s life.
The talent was obviously there from a program that had gone 9–1 in Loper’s final full season, but few would have predicted the torrid stretch of football Chandler had before his passing. The Wolves advanced to the 5A state semifinals, taking on local powerhouse Mountain View, which was led by future NFL Pro Bowler Todd Heap.
Trailing 20–17 in the closing moments, it seemed like a deep punt is all Mountain View would need to put Chandler away, but a Yohance Scott punt return led to him getting thrown out of bounds on a late hit. The unsportsmanlike penalty was tacked on to an additional penalty for too many men on the field, suddenly thrusting the inspired Wolves into field goal range. The field goal went through the uprights to force overtime, as the offense would rally to force a pair of extra periods before falling 37–30 in triple-overtime on Heap’s touchdown reception.
The following season, a new high school, Hamilton, would open and debut a football field named in Loper’s honor. The man Chandler was looking to hire, John Wrenn, spurned the offer in order to help open up the new school.
“John Wrenn actually applied for the Chandler High School position, but the parent pressure was to go with some of the staff that was on there before so Hamilton snapped up John Wrenn,” former athletic director Dave Shapiro said. “I often wonder what would’ve happened if John Wrenn had ended up at Chandler instead of Hamilton.”
The Chandler program tried moving on while still honoring their former coach’s style, but the production just wasn’t the same.
“Chandler had a little bit of a lull I think because Jerry had passed, and the program was maybe not what it once was with him.,” former Chandler quarterback and assistant Deke Schutes said.
Schutes would go on to leave the school that season, taking a brief teaching job at Bogle Junior High School before joining Wrenn’s staff as Hamilton’s first offensive coordinator.
“Jerry Loper was an old-school coach, where he’d be screaming and yelling at kids,” Shapiro said. “Jerry had success, heck he came on and we were winning after his second year here. Then he refused to wear his [darn] seatbelt and he got ejected when that drunk driver hit him, but Chandler [football] didn’t change.”
When it came to finally making a change, Shapiro went with a man who saw Chandler for what it could be instead of what it was.
“It really goes back years ago,” Ewan said. “I started my first job in a public school as an assistant at Gilbert back in 1974, and the head coach at Chandler at that time was Jim Wall, who had been at Gilbert before I got there. Chandler just always seemed like it was the only high school with a good sized community and had every group of people you could think of. I just thought, man, someday — never thinking it would happen — that would be a great place to get a chance to be a head coach at someday.”
The opportunity would take years for Ewan to earn, with six years on Gilbert High School’s staff followed by a head coaching stop at Eloy Santa Cruz, where the departed coach, Lonnie Foster, had just taken the job at Chandler.
Years later, while Ewan was at Glendale Mountain Ridge, and the timing seemed to align perfectly.
“I put in for the Chandler job, and it worked out,” he said. “This was 2001, I was selected but by that time, things had changed a little bit. Hamilton had already opened; it was open a couple years under John Wrenn. I got the opportunity at Chandler, but it wasn’t the only high school there then. They hadn’t been very successful for the last couple years after Jerry’s car accident after that first year. That’s usually when jobs open up, when things aren’t going right. People were looking to make a little bit of a change.”
It was also the perfect time to move, with Hamilton opening to wide district support that would filter down to the older school as well.
“Hamilton was starting to get things rolling, and so the district made a commitment to trying to clean Chandler up,” Ewan said. “Dr. Camile Casteel, the superintendent, the board, the district and the parents put money to the district and the facilities and things. The district reached that point where if you’re going to put money into the district and facilities and things, they put district money into Chandler and upgraded it and are trying to keep competitive with the other Chandler high schools, or it would slip. There was that district commitment, starting with Dr. Casteel. I came to the Chandler district at a really good time.
“That was the part of the Valley that was growing. The unfortunate thing is Chandler’s attendance area was still just 10 square miles. All of the new growth really didn’t do a whole lot to benefit Chandler High. It did wonders for Hamilton and then Basha and Perry, but it really didn’t do much to improve the situation and bring a lot of numbers into Chandler High. That’s why when the district made the agreement to upgrade the campus and the facilities, the new academic building, redoing the stadium, the new locker room facility, the new pool. Once the district did that, that kind of balanced out some of the growth that the numbers at Chandler High stayed up with some of the other Chandler schools.”
When he arrived on campus, Ewan took little time trying to establish a culture and change the program from its old ways. No longer was Chandler going to be a program devoid of talent, and he was going to make the most of his resources to ensure that.
“Jim Ewan started changing that,” Shapiro said. “He believed in having athletes do more than one sport. He would go to other games and support other coaches, and I think that was important.”
The top-level talent poured in, notably from a track program that matched the girl’s track program in being one of the best not just in the state, but in the country. Each of the several students that would go on to athletic success in the collegiate ranks and beyond into the NFL — Dion Jordan, Cameron Jordan, Brett Hundley and Paul Perkins, to name a few — participated in multiple sports during their time at Chandler High School.
“You develop quality young men, but the academic piece has to be there and the support for that, and then the athletic aspect of it,” Ewan said. “We really tried to emphasize and encourage our kids to be involved in more than one sport.”
Ewan also recognized the area he was working in. Chandler High School was far from a low-income area, though the level of diversity at the school was in stark contrast to the primarily affluent, mostly Caucasian student population of nearby Hamilton High. So Ewan set out to develop a support system for these students, creating a mentorship program with the school faculty to provide another voice on campus for the football program to reach out to. By the time Ewan’s time at Chandler was over, each varsity player had his own mentor.
“It was another adult on campus that a player could go to for help on assignments or just advice,” Ewan said. “A lot of times, as their coach, you’re the last guy in the world that they want to come talk to if they’re having something go wrong in their life.
“The sad thing is, as coaches, we probably can do a lot more to help them than some of their other teachers or their parents, but they don’t want you to be aware that things aren’t going perfect. That gave us another avenue to have another adult on campus that is a teacher, knows how a school system works and how important grades are and maintaining those grades. That gave us another adult on campus that was a contact for our players. It was that kind of environment that we had at Chandler that Chandler has, where you’ve got teachers who are genuinely concerned about the welfare of those student-athletes.”
While the talent was there, it took a little while to turn that into meaningful wins. Part of this was due to scheduling. His teams made the playoffs just once from his first season in 2001 up until 2005, an 8–3 2004 campaign that ended in a first-round loss to Mountain View.
“We also protected our schedule,” Shapiro said. “We built a very weak schedule those first couple years of the Jim Ewan era. We couldn’t qualify for state playoffs because of the weak schedule, but we were 7–3 and I think 8–2. When you win, people start to buy in to everything and then people want to be there for the success.”
The move paid off, as from that point on, they developed into one of the most consistent playoff contenders in the state, posting an 11–2 mark in 2006 before losing to Mountain View again in the second round. They made the playoffs each of Ewan’s final five seasons, making it as far as the state semifinals in 2009.
He also engineered a previously unheard of recruiting power, sending more kids to Division I programs than just about every team in the state.
It all kind of meshes and works together,” Ewan said. “You know, in my position, I worked at Mesa Community College for 10 years so you have all those contacts. You have all the assistant coaches, head coaches, coordinators that you developed. I coached at the college level at New Mexico-Highlands for four years. Our coaches or almost all of our coaches at Chandler played in college.
“It sounds so cliché, but the networking we were able to establish and the reputation we’d develop when colleges would come through, we weren’t going to mislead them. If a kid doesn’t have a good work ethic, we told them. We show them their transcripts. We have all the information they needed, all the contacts and everything they needed and we did all we can to make it a one-stop place for colleges to come through. We give them the information on other kids in our league and the quality kids in the east valley. We just kind of became a hub for colleges to come through, and most of it had to do with the contacts that we all had. It was a situation where I had been at the collegiate and especially the junior college level. You establish those relationships with coaches. It always comes back to being a people business, so that became a huge selling point in getting [kids], especially with open enrollment. We had the reputation where, most years we’d have between 90 and 100 colleges physically come on campus to look at kids.”
The most iconic recruit of Ewan’s tenure was Brett Hundley, a four-star, do-it-all quarterback who would go on to star at UCLA and eventually be drafted by the Green Bay Packers.
“Junior was — we nicknamed [Brett] Junior because of his dad, Brett [Hundley] Sr.,” Ewan said. “His dad was one of our volunteer coaches, so to keep them straight we called them Junior and Senior. But Junior, he was just as close to a perfect young as there might be. I’m sure he has some flaws, but as a football coach, he always took care of school. He was an A student, took care of school all the time. Always just a quality young man. Worked unbelievably hard in the weight room and in practice.
“He was one of those kids, and I’m an old-school [coach] where it means I yell at people and get on people and do things the way I want them done. He very seldom would do anything to open the door where you could bark at him or get on him, so just so that everyone else could see that anybody was capable of being yelled at by the old guy or by me, I would tell him periodically, ‘Hey, listen, I’m going to get on you today’ and I would just create some reason to bark at him and get on him. He would let that roll of his back, because he understood. The maturity he brought, the work ethic and the maturity he brought coupled with him being just an unbelievable athlete and has the mental aspect of the game as well. He was as talented and as fun of a kid to coach in just about 45 years now. He was a fun one, and a good kid who stays in contact. I know his family and his folks, so he’s a good kid.”
Even with Hundley as the expected savior, Chandler was unable to crack the top tier of high school programs in the state.
“We fully expected that by his senior year, we would win a state championship,” Ewan said. “We got eliminated in the semifinals his senior year, and he took it personally, because I know it was one of his goals to lead us there. We fully expected to get there and we thought we’d make it happen and it didn’t work out quite that way.”
It would, however, provide the model for a program that would soon reach that pinnacle.
