UNION CITY, CA - Tom Rosenthal, as the visitor wound his way to the sprawling Logan High campus, left a voicemail message that is, well, vintage Rosenthal.
"Hey John, it's Tom Rosenthal. It's 1 o'clock. Hey, I'm way behind on my emails and I'm just getting to yours. And I'm not sure why you're coming here. Hopefully you're not going to waste a trip. I am swamped here, dude. For me right now, this is not a focus for me like it is for you. I don't know how else to say it. I don't have my bio done, I am just up to my ears in work here at James Logan and Mondays are always bad and this has been a typical bad Monday ...
And on Tom went for some five minutes, trying to put the genie back into the bottle of his manic Monday and make perfect a day that could not be perfect.
Rosenthal, 61, on June 27 will work his last day at Logan. It will be the end of a glittering career that includes 37 years served at three high schools, 14 years spent in two stints as the Colt athletic director and a Hall of Fame tenure as one of the state's finest wrestling coaches.
"He's a great guy," longtime Logan teacher and softball coach Teri Johnson said. "When I was a young coach I tried to emulate the excellence he showed with his wrestlers. I said 'I want to be as great as that.' He took such pride working with those boys and to this day they come back to see him. Some of them have kids now - and it just shows what kind of man, father, teacher and A.D. he's been."
Added Logan teacher and former coach Annette Blanford, in her 28th year at the school: "He's very highly organized and has a Type A personality about details. As an A.D., he wants the best program he can have. Everything has to be top notch -- there's no run-of-the-mill anything for Tom."
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Johnson and Blanford praised Rosenthal for his kindness toward girls' sports back in the early 1980s when not all women coaches were enjoying the same. Rosenthal, an East Bay native, made sure the girls got their weight room time in and enjoyed as many afternoon practices as the guys.
"I played softball at USF and I was recruited to come here and coach," Blanford said. "They took me to the so-called softball field and it was all grass. I said 'softball is played on a skinned infield.' So Tom made them re-do it. As a female coach, I always felt very supported."
The Pleasanton resident hasn't just been fair, he set the bar at a dizzying height. During his magnificent run as a wrestling coach at old Marina High of San Leandro, one year at Arroyo and 17 seasons at Logan, his teams went 231-28-6. He won 17 league titles, nine North Coast Section titles at Logan and a third-place finish at state in 1996 (one year after placing fourth).
That 1996 meet was a doozy, with Logan (100 1/2) finishing just two points behind winner Calvary Chapel-Santa Ana (102 1/2) and an eyelash behind Independence (101). The Colts' point total would have won 19 of the previous 23 state meets.
The honors rained down upon the UCLA grad then, including being named the 1994 NCS Coach of the Year and 2001 California Coaches Association Coach of the Year. He's also a member of the California Wrestling Association Hall of Fame and the Chabot College HOF.
As an athletic director, Rosenthal has been just as effective. Yes, Logan has 4,100 students and a campus with athletic venues to die for; even so, Logan winning 13 of the last 15 Mission Valley Athletic League All-Sports Trophies since Rosenthal began his second stint as nothing short of amazing.
DILIGENCE
Superior organization and attention to detail are Rosenthal hallmarks. On this particular Monday he was dressed in a black and red Logan wrestling hoodie and gray shorts. His balding dome bobbed up and down as the 5-foot-6, 159-pound ball of energy moved briskly about his pristine office.
Rosenthal's penchant for order is a running joke among his peers.
"When he was in the P.E. office before he became the A.D., we noticed that everything on his desk had to be in a specific place," veteran baseball coach John Goulding said. "Even the pencils in his drawer were all sharpened and facing the same direction. It's that Type A personality, where nothing can be out of place."
Want more? As a child, he stuttered -- badly enough he was teased by other children, underwent speech therapy and still showed signs of the affliction as a young teacher/coach at Logan.
"I got depressed that kids were making fun of me," Rosenthal said of his youth. "I overcame it as I grew more confident. It takes a certain perseverance to get through something like that and that's a part of my personality."
Offered Rosenthal's daughter Tara, 30: "He still kind of has it. His mind is running a million times faster than his mouth, but I don't notice it that much anymore."
MR. DEDICATION
Tara Rosenthal is one of two grown children of Tom and his wife Beverly -- the other being 27-year-old Joseph, a sports physical therapist who lives in Pleasanton. Beverly is a San Jose High grad Tom met at a wedding who worked at IBM in San Jose for many years; she has been integral to Tom's success, putting up with his uber-dedication and idiosyncratic ways for all these years.
"When I was growing up he was so dedicated and worked so hard," Tara said. "Now that he's a month away from retirement he's still the hardest working person I know."
Tara knows and smiles at all the quirks -- her dad's habit of leaving voice mails that seem to trail into infinity, for instance.
"He's incapable of leaving a short voice mail," she said.
Benefiting from such thoroughness were the wrestlers, such as Eli Bagaoisan, the current Logan coach. When Tara was young, Bagaoisan was one of the many Colt wrestlers her dad would bring home and sometimes let stay overnight if they were having difficulties.
"He lived in Dublin then and we'd go over there and they'd feed us," Bagaoisan said. "I became like part of the family and Tara and Joey were just little kids who were like my brother and sister. Any issue I needed to talk about I could talk to Tom. My parents are from the Philippines and initially they didn't speak much of the (English) language, so sometimes it was easier just to talk to him."
HE FOUGHT THE LAWN -- THE LAWN WON
Rosenthal was known for his elaborate household projects and often wrestlers such as Bagaoisan would help. One such endeavor was a re-sodding of the family lawn which turned into a hopeless quagmire when a storm hit the Bay Area.
"The sod was delivered and Tom didn't want to leave it laying out front so we worked overnight -- 24 hours in the rain -- on it," Bagaoisan said. "It was not fun. It was crazy stuff."
Goulding knows that story well. He's told it a few dozen times.
"Tom brought in lights and everything, but the rain washed away all the dirt," he said. "After the thing was over they had T-shirts made that said 'I fought the lawn and the lawn won."
FOCUS
And yet, that same attention to detail peers chuckle about, also made Rosenthal an otherworldly wrestling coach and top-notch athletic director. In 1990 as he was ending his initial five-year stint as Logan A.D. to concentrate on wrestling, CalHiSports ranked the Colts as one of the Top 10 athletic departments in the state.
Rosenthal further proved his organizational ability by hosting flawless NCS wrestling championships at Logan in 1987, '95, and '96.
"He's a terrific A.D.," NCS commissioner Gil Lemmon said. "He's detailed in everything he does. Everything is planned out and put on for the benefit of the student and he always puts on a great event. With Tom, every i is dotted and every t is crossed in an over the top way."
But it wasn't just obsession that drove Rosenthal, a former three-sport star at Marina High, athlete of the year at Chabot College and honor student at UCLA. The man genuinely cared about his charges, as illustrated by his hoarse voice after every dual meet and the reverence his athletes still hold for him.
"Tom wasn't afraid to show his feelings," Bagaoisan said. "When he coached he'd get so excited for his kids. That's what made him so different from most coaches, and that's why I love him."
John Murphy is Web Content Manager of Prep2Prep. He can be reached at jmurphy@Prep2Prep.com.
