Ron DeMonner molded the minds of young football players around the Bay Area for five decades up until this past month when cancer spread to his brain. On Tuesday morning, DeMonner died at age 79 while near family in Corvallis, Oregon.
DeMonner, survived by his wife, Karen, and their three sons, was just last month planning his return to the sideline at Cupertino High, his final stop on a long and impactful coaching tour that began in 1970 at Archbishop Mitty, where he was long ago inducted into the school’s athletic Hall of Fame.
At Mitty, DeMonner coached Dave Brown, inspiring the leadership style Brown used to helm the program for the next two-and-a-half decades while DeMonner hopped around from San Jose State, to Santa Clara University, to the XFL, and back to the high-school ranks.
“I always thought Ron was a football guy. That was his life,” Brown said. “I always thought he would be at that higher level, but who he was and what he spoke to was so key for young men. For high school kids, he had more to say and more to give than a pro team.”
All the while, DeMonner’s words remained at the front of Mitty’s playbook: Accept the challenge, meet it head-on, carry it to a final outcome with 100 percent effort, and know that you — not fate — are in control of your own destiny. Brown said he kept the message intact until he retired in 2006.
DeMonner’s defenses were superb. He maximized efficient commutation with a color-coded system he adopted at Santa Clara and by teaching his coaches in the same way as his players. DeMonner was always teaching.
By 2014, DeMonner had joined Chris Oswald’s staff at Cupertino. The old-school coach would game-plan on his typewriter, Oswald said, forever eschewing the computer as unnecessary technology. On Saturdays, they would buy donuts for the team and review game film. On Sundays, they’d do it over again, by themselves.
“We’re very lucky at Cupertino that we have a football class so he could get on the chalkboard or dry-erase board with the kids and just teach,” Oswald said. “He loved teaching football; it was everything he wanted to do. He didn’t care much about anything else, to be honest, except his family. You know, it was family and football.”
DeMonner stepped away because of the COVID-19 pandemic but planned to return next season, Oswald said. A few months ago, he said he got a call from DeMonner, who hadn’t yet left his longtime Santa Clara residence for Oregon, requesting stacks of material.
“He wanted to be in the game. He wanted to be in the fight,” Oswald said. “He had never given up hope of coaching.”
Before arriving at Cupertino, DeMonner spent time at Saratoga High, Fremont-Sunnyvale and Archbishop Mitty, after playing wide receiver and outside linebacker at San Jose State.
DeMonner left Mitty after the 1976 season to join the coaching staff at San Jose State, which he left two years later for Santa Clara, which he left to return to San Jose State, which he left for Fremont-Sunnyvale, a public school not known for athletics where he found a home for two significant stints, starting in 1995 and ending in 2013. It was there that in 2012 his offense set a Central Coast Section scoring record in a 90-56 win.
In between, he coached for an XFL squad, the San Francisco Demons, and Arena Football League team, the San Jose Sabercats.
“He knew so many people and was always looking for that challenge of, ‘Hey, somebody needs my help,’” said Jason Townsend, who arrived at Fremont-Sunnyvale shortly after DeMonner in 1995 as a basketball coach and eventual athletic director. “He had a real joy to coaching and he was always looking for new experiences.”
Even after leaving Fremont, Townsend said DeMonner would attend his team’s basketball games and chime in from behind the bench.
DeMonner, who was known for his well-worn baseball cap adorned always with a feather, eventually received a playful gift from one of his first disciples. Brown had a new hat for him that included the logos of all DeMonner’s previous stops.
Eventually, DeMonner ended up on Oswald’s staff at Cupertino, where he ran the defense but worked most closely with the linebackers.
Just last month, Oswald was one of the last people DeMonner called before his condition began to deteriorate. DeMonner had been cleared from his initial cancer diagnosis only for doctors to soon discover it had spread to his brain, Oswald said.
“You might see me come in on a helicopter,” DeMonner told coach Chris Oswald, who recalled their last phone conversation minutes ahead of Cupertino’s first scrimmage this spring.
DeMonner instilled in Cupertino’s linebackers the same philosophy as the thousands of other players to come through his programs. He taught them, then trusted them to make decisions on the field.
“It was almost like the defense was like an offense,” Brown said. “You would make your base call, then if an offense came up in something different, there were check-twos. Every pro team in America does these things, but at the high-school level, those things are a little more difficult to run.”
DeMonner had other colorful names for his defenses.
As a linebackers coach at Santa Clara University, DeMonner’s men were called beefsteaks — like the tomatoes. The Broncos defense? The Killer Tomatoes, an apparent reference to the 1979 film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
That earned the attention of Sports Illustrated.
“Killer Tomatoes are what we want these guys to be,” DeMonner told the magazine in a 1984 issue. “They catch you, eat you, burp twice and keep going. That’s it. You’re gone.”