Trade secret- Appreciate all those little guys

CHICAGO -- If the four NFL teams left in the playoffs have an intersection, that place is in the heart of this city's tough South Side and goes by the name Frank Lenti.

For 19 seasons, Mount Carmel High's plain-speaking sage has been loading up on state titles and turning out young men who are respectful, but not shy about smacking opponents in the mouth, either.

Lenti has sent them to the Ivy League, Big Ten and Pac-10, to UCLA, West Point and most points in between. An even dozen made it to the NFL, which is why it's more coincidence than accident that he has ties to all four finalists in Sunday's demolition derbies.

Lenti coached Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb (Class of '94); Tampa Bay defender Simeon Rice ('92); Tennessee receiver Darrell Hill ('97); and not only did he nudge Oakland coach Bill Callahan down the same career path -- they're second cousins.

What they all have in common is a toughness you don't want to test.

"No predictions, none," Lenti said, anticipating the first question in an interview earlier this week. "Not even word one."

Why? Just down the hall from the Caravan football office where Lenti sits, his brother and assistant coach, David, is working on the school's campaign to raise $15 million for new athletic facilities.

"And the last thing I need," and here Lenti paused, "is to make one of those guys mad.

"Last year, Donovan and the Eagles came here for the playoffs and all I told the paper was I hoped he had a great game and the Bears won. Well, Don played great and the Eagles won, but boy, was his mom steamed afterward."

Not for long, though. It's impossible to spend much time with Lenti and go away mad.

"Frank has a very unique passion for the game," Callahan said. "He's my idol."

Rice added: "I can talk about Frank all day. He helps grow boys into men."

Lenti does that by winning, anytime and all the time -- nine state titles, twice runners-up -- and slipping his life lessons into the margins. His success on and off the field seems even more impressive when you see where the Caravan program is parked.

Mount Carmel is a Catholic high school that chose to stick it out in an inner-city neighborhood time tends to forget.

When Lenti and Callahan grew up nearby in the 1960s, the South Side was a gritty factory town all its own, subdivided by race and religion. There was hard work in the slaughterhouses and steel mills during the week, where most of the mixing took place, and the play was even harder on the weekends.

Football was king back then and remained that way through the "white flight" of the next two decades. As late as the early 1980s, Chicago's Catholic League, which made its reputation as a feeder system for universities like Notre Dame and Michigan, remained one of the most reliable sources of prep talent in the country.

But by then, too many jobs had been shipped overseas, and encroaching poverty drove the costs of running a private school in the inner-city through the roof. Several schools had closed by the time Lenti got the Mount Carmel job in 1984, and basketball began providing stiffer competition for the premier athletes.

The funny thing is Lenti has precious few trade secrets and even less interest in who gets the credit for all the success.

He admits he couldn't talk Hill into playing football until he was a junior. He couldn't persuade Rice to give up the dream of being a running back until his senior year. He believes anybody who wants to learn offense should begin as a line coach.

"That was probably the best piece of advice I gave Callahan," he said, and it's also why Lenti continues to coach his own offensive line today.

He also makes sure he always has a few little guys on the team. He was a little guy when he showed up at Caravan tryouts and was sent home without getting a chance. He never forgot the sting. He learned a lesson about quitting once and never forgot it.

"My dad drove a cement mixer for 40 years. I got accepted at Loyola University for pre-dental, but after a while there, I told him it's not really what I wanted to do. I said maybe I'd quit school and work construction, and my dad said very calmly, 'You've been coaching kids in grammar school and high school, why not think about coaching?'

"And then," Lenti recalled, "he also told me, very calmly, that if I quit college, he'd kill me. The rest, as they say, is history."

Lenti turned down offers, in consecutive years, to join Lou Holtz's staff at Notre Dame. That was a decade ago.

"I never say never, but I've already got the job I wanted," he said.

All those little guys and big ones move on, but they never fail to come back. They understand it is the guys like Lenti, the ones who stay anchored to one spot and show up every day for work, that make special places like Mount Carmel the intersections they turn out to be.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press.