TEMECULA -- Bud Kane announced to his football team on Saturday night that he would not return to coach football at Temecula Valley High next season.

"There is no biggest single factor," Kane said Monday. "There's a lot of factors. It's been a great time and I knew it was going to come to an end sometime."

Kane came to Temecula Valley when the school opened in 1985, and has been there ever since. He has compiled a record of 174-84-1, including a pair of CIF titles in 1990 and '91.

His legacy will be the work he did in establishing high school football in a region that had two large public high schools when he accepted the job -- Elsinore and Hemet -- and now has 13, including newly opened Tahquitz and Heritage. A 14th school, Murrieta Mesa, is slated to open in 2009.

Word of Kane's decision spread quickly through the county and beyond.

"The first thing that comes to mind is just the fun that we had," said Mike Maxwell, the starting quarterback for Temecula Valley in 1988-89, and currently the offensive coordinator at Santa Margarita in Orange County. "We always had a good time. He created a lot of great traditions and it's sad to seem him go. I just hope those traditions carry on."

Some of those traditions will carry on, and not just at Temecula Valley. Great Oak assistant coach John Carnesecca, part of a cadre of assistant coaches who worked for years with Kane at Temecula Valley, said that one particular tradition, Wednesday night practices, have been adopted by a number of other schools across the Valley.

"He was great at saying, 'This is what we do. This is how we do it.' And those traditions poured into all these other programs," Carnesecca said.

Kane played his high school football at Riverside Ramona before moving on to Riverside City College and Northern Arizona, where he was the starting quarterback in 1972. He came back to the area after college and worked his way up the coaching ladder until taking over as the head coach Elsinore in the early 1980s.

After three seasons as the head coach at Elsinore, one of those men who would be part of Kane's tightly knit coaching fraternity, Stan Ford, committed to becoming the first athletic director at Temecula Valley. At the time, the school was nothing more than a patch of graded dirt at the corner of Margarita and Pauba Roads.

"My plan was not to leave Elsinore," Kane said.

Ford, who had also come from Elsinore, had other ideas.

"Anybody who has ever dealt with Stan knows that the man can sell," Kane said. "You'll walk away shaking your head going, 'How did I say yes to that?'"

The way Kane recalled it, Ford's pitch wasn't exactly the hard sell: "Well, you don't want to go to Temecula so never mind."

"What do you mean?"

"No, you don't want to leave so you better not … No, never mind. You just better not drive back into the hills of Temecula and look at the site. Because you don't want to do that."

So on his way surfing one day, Kane stopped by the site of the proposed school.

"I parked right about where the press box (now) sits," Kane said. "It's hard to picture what it was like. But I know that I sat up there and all this was was a graded lot, and there was that stadium bowl. It was cool. And I bit."

These days, more than the landscape around the school has changed. Ford stepped down as the athletic director at the end of the last school year, and was replaced by Steve Rapaport. Carnesecca took a job at Great Oak a couple of years ago and a few of Kane's other trusted assistants, Neil Skarin and Dennis Harrah, are also planning to leave.

"One of the great things about my job has been coming to work with my best friends every day," Kane said. "We've been doing this together our way for a long time, and it's been fun."

This week Kane, between reminisces, has one thing on his mind: preparing his team for its final regular-season game against Chaparral.

"Pound the Pumas," Kane shouted to passing players, as he conducted his football P.E. class Monday.

The Golden Bears are 5-4 overall this season, and 1-3 in the Southwestern League. Saturday night's 49-7 loss to Vista Murrieta effectively ended their playoff hopes.

"It's going to be weird," said junior varsity football player Ty Jaglowski, as he prepared for P.E. class. "This will be his last week of practice."

Kane said he intends to stay on as the school's softball coach, and he'll continue to teach, too.

Still, Carnesecca, and many others in the community, are echoing Jaglowski's comments.

"You can't separate Temecula football and Bud," he said.

Staff writer Tom Sheridan can be reached at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2649 or tsheridan@californian.com.