Memorial set for former LAHS football coach

Friends and family members are invited to celebrate the life of former Los Altos High School football coach Thomas Burt on Saturday, Jan. 13. Burt, who died in October, led the athletic department during the school’s early years, transforming the football team into a dominant force that won one championship after another throughout the 1960s.

Burt served as a teacher, coach and athletic director at Los Altos High School for 25 years starting in 1956, shortly after the school first opened its doors. From 1961 to 1970, Burt led the football team to six Santa Clara Valley championships, putting Los Altos High at the top of the 10-school league year over year. Burt received several awards including the Central Cost Section (CCS) and Northern California Coach of the Year, and the school’s field has since been named after him.

Burt’s successful coaching philosophy centered around teamwork and turning the team into an “integrated unit” that helped catapult teams to victory, said his son Pat Burt, the former Palo Alto City Council member. Pat, a ball boy at the time, recalled how each player knew his role on the team and how to collaborate, allowing the group to excel beyond any individual’s ability to play.

“They would dominate against teams with superior talent, and they did this for many years,” Burt recalled.

Tom Burt was part of a dream team of athletic staff at Los Altos High School, joined by track and field coach Leo Long, swimming and water polo coach Nort Thornton, and the physical education director Dushan “Dude” Angius, who recruited them to create what became the preeminent athletic program in the region at the time. Many of the records set at the high school 30 to 40 years ago still haven’t been surpassed, Pat Burt said.

The story goes that Angius’ first hire was Tom Burt, who had previously been head football coach at Gilroy High School. The school hadn’t had a winning season in three decades, but he had turned them into champions.

Burt’s coaching style was very much one of tough love, teaching his players toughness on the field and striving for perfection on plays deep into the game. Pat Burt recalled how at the end of practice each squad would have to do a series of downs — four straight plays — perfectly before they could hit the showers. Players who failed to sprint all 20 yards at the end of a play, for example, would have to start all over again. At first, the only thing that would save the players was the sun going down, but eventually they would be able to execute plays flawlessly, which was an integral strategy for winning games against the best teams in the league.

“Within weeks they would be able to do it,” Pat Burt said. “And this was not only to show that 11 players could actually be perfect all the time as a unit, but they could do it at the very end of practice, when they were the most dog tired.”

Brad Lyman, who played on the team from 1965 through 1967, told the Voice that LAHS dominated the Santa Clara Valley teams. There were no play-offs or CCS or anything like that — they didn’t even play against Palo Alto High School or St. Francis. But the school was absolutely the big fish in a small pond, and went undefeated through 1965 and 1966 under the royal blue and gold banner of the Los Altos Knights.

“We were a juggernaut,” Lyman said. “We didn’t win games by a point or two or a touchdown, we won by multiple touchdowns.”

The school’s athletic dominance started to fade in the 1970s, and Tom Burt retired from teaching in the 1980s. He later went on to help coach at De Anza College with his former assistant coach, Bob Baird, leading the school to win a conference championship, and in 1990 went overseas to coach an Italian team in Bologna.

Many of the students who played under Tom Burt went on to be very successful, and attribute a lot of what they learned about teamwork and execution to their experience playing at Los Altos High, Pat Burt said. They may not remember him for being soft or sweet, but they often call it the most important experience they had.

“He was so proud,” Burt said. “Many of them became judges, prominent architects, lawyers … also just guys who throughout life said, ‘Boy, that was a valuable experience for me.'”

Lyman, who went on to be a wide receiver at University of California at Los Angeles, where he also ran track, acknowledged that the practices weren’t a walk in the park — chinstraps were always on tight, helmets stayed on regardless of the temperature and water breaks were few and far between. But he said he fondly looks back on his years on the football team, which had students working hard to improve and push themselves. Winning in such a convincing fashion always had them coming back to practice on Monday.

“As the years go by, and now it’s 50 years later and Tom’s service is coming up on the 13th, you realize the values that were instilled by Tom and his staff during those years,” Lyman said. “But you don’t realize it at the time.”

Tom Burt was born in 1923 in Los Angeles and was raised in West Hollywood. He later graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara. He was preceded in death by Katy Molloy, his wife of more than 50 years, in 1999. Burt died on Oct. 16 of stroke complications, and is survived by his children Michael, Pat, Maureen, Sheila and Kevin; and seven grandchildren.

The family is hosting an event celebrating his life on Saturday, Jan. 13, at 11:30 a.m. at the Lucie Stern Community Center, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto.