Column: St. Genevieve and its 17 senior leaders enter football playoffs 9-0

Peering inside the fence at Panorama City St. Genevieve, it looks as if the entire student body of 523 is cheering, giggling and having fun as football players coach female students in a powder puff flag football game on the school’s 50-yard turf field that has no goal posts.

St. Genevieve is one of the most affordable Catholic schools in the San Fernando Valley, with a yearly tuition of $11,975. The student body is 63% Latino and 15% Filipino. Its principal, Dan Horn, was one of the first to adopt character education as a teaching component 10 years ago. He once sent 13 buses of students to the Hollywood Bowl to watch the musical “Hairspray” to teach students about good manners.

So it comes as no surprise that one reason why the school’s football team is 9-0 and won the Camino Real League title is loyalty. Each of the team’s 17 seniors has been at St. Genevieve since they were freshmen. That’s extraordinary in this era of transfers, COVID-19 and family reasons to switch schools. It’s a hint how rare this team might be under seventh-year coach Billy Parra.

“They genuinely love each other and I love what I’m doing now compared to my career,” he said.

Parra is a former Granada Hills Kennedy head coach who also served as an assistant at Encino Crespi, Pierce College and Los Angeles Valley College.

“This is the second part of my career,” he said. “This isn’t how I felt the first part. It was about putting 55 points on people. It was about having the best receiving corps. It was about throwing the football. We run the football here, which is a big change for what my philosophy was. I had to realize running the football has been almost extinct with the spread offenses and seven on seven. We’ve gone back to the West Coast offense.”

Most importantly, he embraced the opportunity to learn about each of his students. Many come from lower socioeconomic environments.

“It has to do with spending time with kids and doing retreats,” he said. “Really doing things that have nothing to do with X’s and O’s. We have some great football players. Do we have 17 D1 senior football players? No, but all of them bought in and are leading our team. They tell the young people in the locker room, ‘We don’t do things like that.’ When it says 4 o’clock meeting, we have a 4 o’clock meeting. There’s no doubt the leadership of these seniors is why we are successful.”

It helped Parra that many of the seniors played youth football with his son, William, a junior, and his nephew, Billy, a senior. Their parents decided to give Parra a chance to coach their sons during changing sports times.

“I think if you tell a kid he’s second-string, the kid will leave the school,” Parra said. “If you scold a young man, he’ll leave a school. If they don’t get their way, it seems like today’s kid likes to leave. Playing time is everything. That’s where we are losing something in society. Kids feel at times, ‘If I don’t get what I want, then I’m out of here.’”

Fortunately for the Valiants, players have stuck together through good and bad times. Running back Camdan McWright is averaging more than 13 yards per carry and also has 72 tackles on defense. Billy Parra has 69 tackles. Riley Morris has 12 sacks. Newcomer Xavier Wright, the son of Parra’s childhood friend, transfer student Russell White, has 72 tackles as a junior linebacker.

This is a once-in-a-decade team that will be trying to win a championship in the first year of the Southern Section’s new playoff format that places teams in divisions based on this season’s performance instead of past seasons’ records. Under the old format, St. Genevieve would have been in Division 11. Now the Valiants are seeded No. 13 in Division 5 and open on the road against Chino Hills on Friday night.

“This is the best thing that could happen for me and the school to show if you truly buy into a program and you know wins and losses take care of themselves but you want to be in a program that gives you an opportunity and teaches you hard-nosed football that has community coaches with community kids,” Parra said. “… We may not have all the bells and whistles. We don’t even have goal posts on a 50-yard field, but we work extremely hard on building young men.”