Ed Lloyd, Casa's guru

PETALUMA

If it's free, many times that's just about what it's worth. But every once in a while free becomes priceless, so much so that the cost to purchase would be incalculable, like asking Ed Lloyd to open up his mind and let football spill out. Let it out, Trent Herzog asked him last February. You wouldn't be paid but, please, let it out. All of it. Anything. Anytime. No worries. We are your sponge.

"I thought we were going to be a very good football team this season," said Casa Grande's football coach, "and I told Ed back then we wanted to take it to the next level. We had won the SCL before, gone deep into the playoffs but now we wanted to shoot for NCS. And I felt we needed an offensive identity."

Lloyd was at the head of the list of candidates. Actually it was a very short list. There was only one name on it.

"All Coach Trent told me," said Casa quarterback Nick Sherry, "was that I was going to be working with the best coach in the area."

Pay attention, Sherry was told, to one of only three football coaches in the Empire to be named Cal-Hi's Small School Coach of the Year in California. Listen to the guy that elevated Cardinal Newman to the football power and target it is. Take copious notes from a football mind that communicates quickly, effectively and directly, no fluff given and no excuses accepted.

"Laid-back intolerance" was how Lloyd once described himself.

So Lloyd, Sherry and the offense started 10 months ago, going in so many directions that Sherry's head would hurt if it wasn't stimulated so much. As a sample, for three months this summer, Sherry and 14 other Gauchos participated in a Lloyd exercise called "Outside The Paradigm." It might have been titled, "You Ain't Seen Anything Like This Before, Dude."

The 15 Gauchos were given two psychology books to read: "Talent Code" and "Mind-Set." With Lloyd there at the end of each book, to discuss with each player the content and the message. Each player also was told to write down three questions each morning, then to answer them each night.

"There could not be negative questions, like &‘What shouldn't I do?'" Sherry said. "They had to be positive in nature. Like: &‘What great thing can I do today?' Every week to 10 days Coach Lloyd would review our morning papers. We were also told to keep notebooks with us at all times and to write things down as they came into our mind, for future study and discussion. It was something Coach Lloyd suggested we do for the rest of our lives."

At the end of the three-month period, each player received a T-shirt which read: "Outside The Paradigm."

And that was just for starters. There was the field, football's learning laboratory, one that Lloyd had worked for 28 years as a head coach and now, even at the age of 68, it always had seemed to him as a fresh, new experience.

"In 1950 I was 8 years ago," Lloyd said. "I listened with my dad to the USC-Stanford game on the radio. From the very first play I understood what was going on. I could see the defenses, the offenses, everything. That's when I knew I was going to be a football coach."

Now, 60 years later, Sherry was next to a guy who had worked his brain pain through six decades of football, who still runs quarterback camps, who won 11 league titles in Sonoma County, who had gone through many changes in his life with football being the one unfailing constant. A love that never waned, not just for football, but also for the human being that is a the football player.

"I was an undisciplined kid when I was at Casa," Herzog said. "I was an average student but I had a passion for football. &‘How do we motivate Trent?' that was what my parents asked. I was put into contact with Coach Lloyd. Over an 18-month period in my junior and senior years at Casa, I saw Coach Lloyd a couple times a month. I didn't like math, for example, but Coach Lloyd told me math was like an opponent that needed to be figured out. I wouldn't be where I am today without Coach Lloyd."

Herzog had been an assistant under Lloyd at Analy in the mid-90s. He wanted his mentor to work with Sherry.

"There are two things I look for in a quarterback," Lloyd said. "First, his ability to release the football. Second, his ability to learn."

With a 4.0 GPA at Casa and a smooth throwing motion, Sherry possessed both qualities. It was time to go to work. Don't throw sidearm or three-quarters, Lloyd said. Throw right over the top.

"If you're anything less than over-the-top, the ball will sail on you coming out of your hand," Sherry said. "That's because the follow-through is incomplete (because of the release point). But throwing over-the-top means you can complete your motion. And since I'm 6-foot-5, that gives me another advantage over defenders."