Stanford assistant volleyball coach Al Roderigues, battling cancer, inspires players
- February 23, 2010
By Mark Emmons
Mercury News Staff Writer
Nobody can remember who initially said it, or even when. But everyone agrees it was Al Roderigues who made the catchy phrase a team mantra.
Worst to first.
Today, three years after a 3-25 season, the Stanford men's volleyball team is ranked No. 2 in the country. The improbable journey that Roderigues predicted could become a reality later this spring at the NCAA championships.
But Roderigues, the upbeat assistant coach and Northern California volleyball institution, is with the team only in spirit. In the final stages of terminal stomach cancer, he no longer attends matches.
"In the back of our minds, we want to do it for 'Big Al,' " said Evan Romero, a senior hitter. "We feel like we've made a promise. He's fighting, and we're fighting for him as well. It's the least we can do."
Roderigues, 67, who was given only two months to live when he was diagnosed in the fall of 2008, is too ill to be interviewed. But others are eager to describe the infectious enthusiasm that made him popular during four-plus decades as a Union City schoolteacher and coach.
Roderigues' final lessons might be benefiting the Stanford men, but he has had a profound impact on countless young lives, regardless of gender.
"It really breaks my heart that he's going through this," said Kerri Walsh, a Stanford graduate and two-time Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist. "I just hope he realizes how many people he has touched and care for him."
Even now — after all the hospital stays, procedures and ravages of chemotherapy — Roderigues manages to make people feel better when they come to his Fremont home.
"The last time we visited he had a feeding tube, and it obviously wasn't a very proud moment," said senior hitter Ed Howell. "But he was cracking jokes about it and asking us if we wanted some. His whole attitude about this is just amazing."
The team's five seniors first witnessed that positive outlook as shellshocked freshmen frustrated by the relentless losing. They traveled to road games in a van driven by Roderigues, who has been with the program 19 seasons, and listened as he preached that better days were ahead.
"He always was saying: 'We're going to go worst to first,' " Romero said. "Eventually we believed him."
And not just about volleyball. The players were entranced by a guy who seemed to have done a little of everything in his life, including becoming a minister. (Roderigues conducted the marriage service of Stanford volleyball coach John Kosty.)
"He taught us the ways of life on those trips, whether it was school, girls, everything," Romero added. "He just has this way of reaching people."
Roderigues, who played baseball at San Jose City College and Cal State Hayward, was a schoolteacher for 38 years in Union City. He started coaching the girls volleyball team at James Logan High in 1978, even though he knew nothing about the sport.
But he learned. His teams won 12 Mission Valley Athletic League titles and four North Coast Section championships in 13 years.
Roderigues' approach, increasingly uncommon in the competitive world of youth sports, was to make it fun. When he began working at Stanford summer camps in the 1980s, then-Cardinal coach Don Shaw was so impressed by how kids gravitated to him that he told Roderigues he had a lifetime contract.
The youngest and least experienced girls became known as Al's Angels. Kosty believes maybe a half-dozen U.S. national team players started off as angels.
Walsh wasn't one. But although she became the world's best beach volleyball player, she once was a tentative and unsure 11-year-old at the camp.
"Al really took me under his wing," she said. "It's hard to explain, but he has this way of smiling with his eyes. Kids could just sense that he was a good man. He has this nonthreatening and welcoming demeanor. He always wanted you to feel good about yourself."
Although he retired from teaching in 2004, Roderigues continued in his volunteer assistant role with the Stanford men and with the women's team at his alma mater, now called Cal State East Bay.
A couple years ago, he arranged for four Stanford players to spend a day at Logan teaching a class.
"So we're walking onto the campus, and we see this sign for the Alfonso Roderigues Jr. Gymnasium," Howell recalled. "We're like, 'Wait, is that your gym?' He had never mentioned it. That's the type of person he is."
Kosty said "it's a blessing" that Roderigues has far outlasted his original prognosis. But Roderigues, who is engaged and has a daughter from a previous marriage, recently was taken off his chemotherapy treatment because it was making him so sick.
The players, meanwhile, wonder if the "worst-to-first" quest has been helping to keep Roderigues alive — the NCAA title will be decided in early May on the Stanford campus. They have found something uplifting in his fight. It's as if Roderigues still is teaching them. Even when an outcome is inevitable, this is how you confront your fate — battling with head held high.
"He's basically showing us how a real man deals with adversity," Howell said.
In mid-January, Roderigues attended his only match of the season. That night, after Stanford defeated Hawaii, the players looked around for their spiritual leader. Kosty just pointed into the Maples Pavilion upper concourse, where Roderigues was watching from his wheelchair.
They rushed up the stands to take turns giving him a hug.
Roderigues, they said, was beaming.