Benefield: Santa Rosa Junior College's Izzy Derkos a worthy inductee to school's Hall of Fame

Izzy Derkos almost lost his team on the first day of practice.

The defensive coordinator for the Santa Rosa Junior College football team was tapped in 1970 by athletic director Bob Mastin to take over the tennis team on an interim basis, just until they found a permanent coach. So Derkos, a soft-spoken but hard driving physical education instructor and coach, greeted his young squad with his plan to introduce daily two-hour practices, a weightlifting program and conditioning regimen.

In tennis? The team balked. Near mutiny ensued. His top two players dropped out in a huff by day three.

The retired Marine fretted.

“It was gut wrenching,” he said.

He despaired over what Mastin would say.

“Bob’s going to say ‘You did a helluva job, you just got rid of a tennis team. You were supposed to coach them,’?” he said.

But the team, and its coach, stuck together. They were rewarded in spades.

When Derkos, 78, retired from the tennis program in 2004, his teams had compiled an astonishing .758 winning percentage. The Bear Cubs were conference champs for 15 consecutive years between 1988-2003. He coached 62 athletes to All-American status and saw 81 percent of his players move on to four-year colleges.

Not bad for a guy who held his fingers a half-inch apart when asked how much he knew about tennis when he took the job.

“My gratitude is to the players. They believed in me a little bit and pushed themselves and tolerated me as a coach,” he said. “Some weak people would find a way out but I had very strong people, they’d break their butt for the game.”

Derkos, who continues to teach his ever-popular fitness class at the college, will be a first-ballot inductee into the Bear Cub Athletic Trust Hall of Fame at a ceremony and dinner April 2.

Derkos will be joined by swimmer Jennifer Graham-Thiem, football player Tony Keefer, volleyball player Turea Jones, golfer Jason Schmuhl and the 1979 women’s state championship swim and dive team.

“It was a slam dunk, no brainer, whatever you want to call it,” longtime baseball coach Ron Myers said of Derkos’ induction. “He’s very respected in the institution, not just our department.”

For many, Derkos, a 6-foot-3 inch Marine, was the face of the athletic department - in part because he put himself out there beyond the department to which he was so loyal.

“He’s a very quiet, powerful gentleman,” said Caren Franci, who for more than three decades was a physical education instructor and women’s basketball coach.

“He worked sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes out front with negotiations going on, but when you needed to affect something, you certainly needed to go and see what Izzy felt about the situation,” she said. “He was so well respected and had connections clear up into the president’s office.”

Derkos doesn’t call them connections. He calls them relationships. He called me back after our interview to remind me how important relationships are to him, how appreciative he is for colleagues, for a board of trustees and college presidents who supported not only athletic teams, but the physical education department.

You could bounce a quarter off the guy’s biceps but he’s as gentle and thoughtful as they come.

When Derkos got into teaching high school after his stint in the Marines, after his degree from the University of North Dakota, the pay wasn’t good.

“It was Skid Row money,” he said. “John Steinbeck could relate.”

So Derkos tended bar and he officiated games to bring in extra cash. But he never considered giving up teaching and coaching.

“Teaching is a wonderful thing and coaching is teaching,” he said. “Anyone who gets into it has to feel real lucky.”

“There’s no greater feedback,” he said. “I don’t know how you could ever get that working at a computer, coming up with a new product.”

Derkos may not be interested in products, but man did his teams produce.

In 34 years at the helm of the tennis program, Derkos’s teams were 466-116, according to college officials. They were ranked in the top five in Northern California and top 10 in the state for 27 years.

Pretty good for a guy who as a kid used to hide his racket under his jacket for fear of being teased by buddies for playing a sport deemed not macho.

And Derkos doesn’t just focus his energy on elite athletes. Although he retired from coaching in 2004, he continues to teach wildly popular fitness classes that focus on incremental improvement and celebrate personal bests.

On the Friday before Spring Break, Derkos urged his students to keep working out over the break, to keep building on the work they had put in.

“It would be a dirty shame if you didn’t get those workouts in,” he told them as they cooled down.

Vanessa Vera couldn’t make it one lap around the track at the beginning of the semester. Last week Vera posted a personal best and had her arm raised by Derkos as the class gave her a round of applause.

“He is so awesome,” she said. “He’s never judged me or made me feel bad that I wasn’t in the best of shape. Instead, he pushes me to be the best that I can.”

Eloy Delgado of Santa Rosa hadn’t exercised for more than 15 years before he signed up for Derkos’ body conditioning class three semesters ago. Last week he went on an 11-mile hike and a day later led the body conditioning class in cool down stretches.

“He’s great,” he said of his instructor. “He has encouraged me to push myself. He’s a great motivator. He has been a big factor in getting me to that point for sure.”

Bryon Craighead, the college’s athletic trainer for decades, said Derkos’ gifts are not necessarily in athletics or training or conditioning, but people.

“What I enjoy about him is the way he treats people, especially young men and women. His athletes, he respects them,” he said.

“He’s a rare species.”

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”