Tucson coach recounts building of football program in book
- Legendary coach Jeff Scurran recounts building of Pima Community College football program.
- The 389-page story is available at Amazon.
- Scurran spends the last 100 pages of the book recounting game against Kilgore %28Tex.%29 College.
"If we play these guys ten times, we lose nine. Nine out of ten games…losers for sure. I guess that makes us the underdog. But we don't play them ten times. We only play them once. A single game played only one time…for everything."
This is how legendary Tucson-area football coach Jeff Scurran starts his book, One Game One Time.
The 1969 University of Florida grad, who got his degree in journalism but made his name as a coach, recounts his time at Pima Community College, a program he started from scratch to open the 21st century with the focus on upsetting second-ranked Kilgore College from Texas in the Pilgrim's Pride Bowl in his final game in 2004.
The book, which can be purchased on Amazon, is not non-fiction, but it is based on a true story. It is broken into four quarters, speeding up to the climatic ending of the nationally-televised game itself and all of the twists and turns that occur from his vantage point.
Most of Scurran's acclaim has come from coaching high school football, rebuilding programs at Oro Valley Canyon del Oro, Tucson Sabino, Tucson Santa Rita and now in his current position at Tucson Catalina Foothills. But this one game has held special meaning to Scurran, the classic underdog battling great odds not only against national junior college powerhouses but inside its own building.
Scurran doesn't calls himself a journalist, not a novelist, a story teller, not a writer.
He keeps the coach nameless, because he said, "I want to put the reader in the coach's chair."
His hope is that people can see that "a good coach teaches success in life through sports," and that "the group is more important than the individual," in his 389-page story.
Scurran admits to taking "journalist license," because he wasn't privy to some of the meetings that take place in the book. The only real names he puts in the book belong to former University of Arizona coach Larry Smith, Jeff Green (one of Scurran's former assistants) and former Tucson sports equipment dealer and long-time supporter Woody Cohen, who are all deceased. Scurran said he got permission from their families' to use their names in the book.
Otherwise, this is a fast-paced look at building a junior-college football program, the pratfalls, with an amazing back story of the chancellor, who comes in two years after Scurran established the program and is not a fan of intercollegiate sports. Scurran, actually, goes out of his way not to paint the antagonist without trashing him.
It's an incredibly told story that could be turned into a movie (Scurran, by the way, has interest for that), who he waited on pins and needles for reluctant approval from the chancellor to go on the bowl trip, only after Scurran had raised $50,000 for traveling expenses.
The last 100 pages details the game itself, coming out before a packed crowd in Texas, being a 40-point underdog, expected fodder for the Kilgore giant on its way to the junior college national championship.
Scurran spends 30 pages detailing the game's frantic final minute, how his team took the lead, thoughts running through his mind, the look of shock from the opposing coach, the sticky-sports-drink celebration bath his players give Scurran after their 10-7 victory.
The game itself would make for great fiction. But it actually happened. And it is told without cliché and with great emotion in Scurran's unique voice.