Oxy Coach Bill Redell Reflects on a Lifetime of Faith and Football (Part II)

When Bill Redell got up at 3 a.m. a couple of months ago, he awoke his wife Cheryl and told her it was time. After 12 years building one of the best high school football teams in the country, and after a lifetime of football, the coach was finally set to retire.

“I thought I’d get some profound statement from her,” Redell said of his wife. “But she said, ‘What are you going to do with all your Oaks Christian coaching gear?’”

Redell laughs at the memory. Then he clarifies that his decision to retire was years in the making.

“People think it was sudden, but it wasn’t,” Redell says. “I’d been thinking about it for a couple of years. I just woke up that morning and said, ‘I think it’s time to go. It’s time for them to get some fresh blood.’”

Since then, Oaks Christian hired University of Texas El Paso assistant coach Jeff Woodruff to replace Redell.

“The Oaks Christian football program is one of the better programs in the country, so it’s a very appealing job,” says Redell. “There are people who applied for the job from all over the United States.”

Woodruff has a tough act to follow. Redell was 137-14-1 and won seven CIF championships and one state title at Oaks Christian. The Lions won 48 games in a row during one stretch.

Redell expected to spend the next two years in the Oaks Christian Office of Advancement and Development, in part helping the fundraising efforts at the school, which opened in 2000.

Not Ready for Retirement

The one thing Redell admits he didn’t anticipate was preparing for the boredom—and what to do next—after a lifetime of coaching.

“I thought it was the right thing to do, and I still think it was the right thing to do,” he says about resigning as Oaks Christian coach. “Where I made a mistake was—I should have given more thought to what I would do after I retired.

“I was a little taken aback the first month after I retired, because I really didn’t have a lot to do,” he adds with a chuckle. “So from that standpoint, that’s where I made the biggest mistake. I should have thought it through a little bit more.”

Maybe Cheryl’s reaction to the news he woke her up to that morning was a foretelling that only someone who had been his wife for 46 years could have known. Maybe she sensed how much he would miss his working life.

“I just could see within a week or two that he needed a challenge, something to do,” says Cheryl. “He was really bored with this whole retirement thing. So I think it is a good thing, this new opportunity, because he needs a challenge and he still has a lot to give. A lot of fire in the ol’ belly.”

Faith and Football

One aspect of his life that Redell believes will remain constant is the role faith plays in his and Cheryl’s existence.

“I became a Christian in 1962 at a Billy Graham crusade,” Redell said. “And then a month or two after that I met Cheryl at a Christian education conference.”

Before Oaks Christian, Redell coached football at St. Francis High School in La Cañada and Crespi Carmelite High School in Encino. “All three of those schools had a role in developing me and my faith,” he says.

But that won’t make a difference in how he approaches the next phase of his life at his alma mater, , a secular institution that announced May 18 he would head the college’s football program. Redell is replacing Dale Widolff, who was fired earlier this month for allegedly violating National College Athletic Association recruiting rules.

After all, Oaks Christian, Redell points out, has students of other faiths, including Jews and Muslims.

Redell met with Occidental officials Monday morning, and then he and Cheryl took off immediately for Las Vegas to celebrate their 46th wedding anniversary, which also happened to be on Monday.

Full Circle at Oxy

By the end of this week, the coach will be back attacking his newest challenge—one that he savors. Coaching football at Oxy is the only job he would have taken after retiring from Oaks Christian, Redell says. It’s also the only job that returns him to the college for which he was once a star player.

“We’ll have the same offensive coordinator, the same defensive coordinator and the same coaching staff,” says Redell, who will put off a July knee replacement surgery until after the Tigers' football season.

Eric Bergstrom returns as the offensive coordinator and is also the associate head coach at Oxy. Erik Johnson remains defensive coordinator and also coaches defensive backs. Last year the Tigers went 5-4 overall and finished third in the SCIAC, with a 3-3 conference record.

The new Oxy coach says the Tigers offense will actually have some similarities to the potent offense he had with the Lions at the Oaks Christian School. But mostly, he stresses the stability in the coaching staff.

“We’ll have a lot of single backs and we’ll pass the ball a lot,” Redell says. “The most important thing is that we have an outstanding coaching staff still in place.”

Click here to read our previous story about Bill Redell: How One Legendary Football Coach Replaced Another at Oxy.