No one did more with less than Amphi legend Vern Friedli

After Vern Friedli retired from coaching Amphitheater High School’s football team in 2010, his state record 331 career victories — achieved at Morenci, Casa Grande, San Manuel and Amphi — were immediately challenged.

Lakeside Blue Ridge coach Paul Moro, who won 13 state championships at a small-school classification in the White Mountains, seemed sure to hit 331 and beyond. Sure enough, last October, in his first year at Tempe Marcos de Niza, Moro won game No. 332.

But the biggest challenges to Friedli’s monumental victory total came not from Moro, but from Phoenix-area coaching legends Jesse Parker of Mesa Mountain View and Karl Kiefer of Tempe McClintock.

Kiefer retired with 302; Parker with 309.

Incredibly, Parker died Friday in Phoenix at 77, about 12 hours after Friedli, 80, died in Tucson.

The rivalry between Friedli and the two Phoenix-area coaching giants was civil, but that was about it. Friedli once told me that coaching one of those Phoenix “super schools” was like putting the football teams at Amphi and Canyon del Oro together.

Friedli did more with less, no doubt.

During Friedli’s prime years at Amphi, he became part of a no-love-lost rivalry with Jeff Scurran’s powerful Sabino program; Scurran won three state titles. For about 10 years, beginning in the late ’80s, the Sabino-Amphi game was a “can’t miss” occasion.

“I really didn’t get to know Vern,” Scurran, 70, said Saturday as he prepared to open Catalina Foothills’ training camp in Flagstaff. “Our longest conversations were those small-talk sessions we’d have on the field just before kickoff.

“But I was always respectful of his career and the young men’s lives he impacted. I know he was a good man.”