Uni football coach Mark Cunningham honored

Former University football coach Mark Cunningham (center) is joined by (from left) former Uni head coach and current assistant Dick Roche, Portola coach Peter Abe, former University assistant Chris Conlin and former Irvine head coach Terry Henigan.

Former coaches, teaching colleagues and family members turned out in big numbers for a retirement party honoring former University football coach Mark Cunningham, who retired after the school year.

Cunningham coached at University for 32 years. He’s now a volunteer assistant coach at Corona del Mar. He has been a high school coach for 41 years.

Many pictures of Cunningham’s career were on display along with a slide show depicting some of the highlights, which included three league championships and 14 CIF playoff apperances.

In Cunningham’s last year, University wound up 6-4 overall and 2-3 in the Pacific Coast League.

Among those in attendance at the get-together on June 9 in Corona del Mar were University assistant coach Dick Roche, who was the Trojans first head coach in 1970.

“In my 50 plus years of coaching high school football, I worked with two great coaches who were also great people,” Roche said.

“Tom Hamilton at Pasadena High School in the sixties taught me everything you need to know about breaking down opponents game films and coming up with tendencies and Mark taught me something even more important: how to deal with our players as individual people.

“They aren’t just a group of players who have to do a given thing to be successful, but they each are also individuals – they each have all the things that we all go through every day to be successful.

“That gave me a different approach on how to coach kids  over the 32 years I coached with him. I believe that is why his teams played as hard as the did over the years, no matter the talent level – they knew that the coaches cared about them as people.”

Many coaches and athletic directors from the Irvine high school programs were on hand and former long-time Irvine High coach Terry Henigan  drove in from Palm Desert to attend the celebration. Henigan coached many times against Cunningham.

“Number one, and this is not just football, I’ve always been impressed with Mark, kind of a little bit like  Scott Hinman we had at Irvine that was such a good coach of sports in such a good program but all the other things he did on University’s campus and CIF and all that (stodd out),” Henigan said in an interview.

“He was an administrator, he was a great coach. And he had an impact on a lot of different people. I had an impact on football, and that was it, so I was always jealous of that.”

Henigan related that some of his young coaches would sometimes remark after seeing the Trojans in a summer league game that, “‘Uni isn’t going to be very good.’ I didn’t say a word.”

What Henigan saw was steady progress and a consistently competitive program when the season began.

“Mark is the best I’ve ever coached against at getting going, from the very beginning of the off-season it’s kind of a stepping stone. He does things the right way,” Henigan said.

“I don’t know what his record is but what you guys (sportswriters) should start doing is having three things: wins and losses when you’re playing somebody with kids better than you, wins or losses when you’re playing somebody the same as you and wins and losses when you’re playing someone when you were better than them. I know he’s won a lot of games.

“They hired someone I heard, but they won’t replace Mark, all the things he did for Uni.”