I don't know if I'll be the only guy under 60 at the Roger McGuinn concert Wednesday night, but I do know this about prep football:
CARNY TIME AT SCOTTS VALLEY: Friday night was my first visit to Scotts Valley High – an occasion so momentous the school made it homecoming.
All went well for the Falcons as floats rolled around the track at halftime, kings and queens were crowned and Scotts Valley reduced the Loggers of Eureka to sawdust, 46-0.
“It was kind of crazy for a little hokey-a--) field,” Scotts Valley coach/athletic director Louie Walters told me after the game.
Now that you bring it up, how ABOUT that Scotts Valley stadium? The way the home side is landscaped it looks like someone ran out of money mid-construction and so they just plopped some soccer or baseball bleachers on top of the berm. Then there's this cargo container that serves as a press box of sorts. It's divided into three sections, with no electricity in two of the areas – a bit of a problem when the sun goes down. There's also no permanent lights at the stadium, though temporary ones were brought in for this game.
The Falcons didn't practice Monday and so I had the chance to ask Walters about all this.
“A bond was passed in 1995 to build the school,” he said. “But by 1998 construction costs had doubled and they decided to cut the performing arts building, the swimming pool and (cut back on) the football stadium. There were supposed to 2,500 seats on the home side and 1,500 on the visitors.”
The visitors’ side at Scotts Valley on Friday night seated nowhere near 1,500, with those who traveled down from Eureka squinting into the quickly sinking sun from a few modest sets of bleachers. Neither were there 2,500 seats on the home side -- a plan so ambitious it would have Scotts Valley's stadium looking more like Westmont or Valley Christian than the glorified Pop Warner venue it is now.
The Santa Cruz County school opened in 1999 with freshmen only, but has been at four grades for years, though the stadium has not been completed. The good news is Walters said completion could happen by next football season with work to proceed in three phases – installation of an all-weather track, installation of permanent bleachers and (the most iffy of the three) installation of permanent lights.
The lights are the lowest priority now, Walters said, because though $600,000 was raised to install them, a neighbor’s lawsuit has stalled that effort. Scotts Valley could ask Mitty and Serra of the WCAL about the obstacles of trying to play night games in a residential area.
At least Walters’ hasn’t lost his sense of humor about it all.
“That was a circus out there Friday night, wasn’t it?” he said. “But our kids don’t know the difference. They didn’t care
THE BELLS ARE ALL THAT: Yeah, Bellarmine was the pick of most experts to win the WCAL. It has a ton of returnees, including stars like quarterback Troy Martig and two-way speedster Kyle Macauley. It has the clever Mike Janda calling plays for its patented double-wing offense.
But, the nagging doubts still lingered right up until game time. The Bells opened against two-time defending WCAL co-champ Serra, the 2013 CCS Open champ. The Padres had beaten Bellarmine three consecutive times, including last season with a piece of the league title on the line. Bellarmine took a 14-0 lead in that one, only to watch Serra roar back with 28 straight points to steal the title away.
So would the Bells live up to the hype this season, or disappoint? The answer, emphatically, is the former as they responded when they had to in a 36-28 win over the Padres. Serra led led briefly in the second half after the sensational Kelepi Lataimua’s 52-yard TD run. But this time around the Bells did not implode, thanks to their pounding double-wing and the poised Martig whose 52-yard TD pass early fourth-quarter TD pass to Macauley made it 36-20. That didn't clinch the game but it put the Bells well on the road to victory.
For the Bells, the 52-yarder was the key.
“We tell our guys that when we pass we want to make it count,” Janda told Prep2Prep's Ryan Silapan after the game. “We don’t pass a lot but when we do we want to make it count.”
The Bells did, and now the doubters are disappearing.
MOVE OVER PRINCE, IT'S PURPLE REIGN: Nobody has been commissioned to build a statue of Kevin Fordon yet and Riordan alumni are not booking motels for the state title game, but Saturday’s 37-21 Riordan victory against Mitty was mightily encouraging for long-suffering Riordan fans. Both teams entered the league opener unbeaten, but only Riordan seemed to have question marks attached to their purple and gold togs heading in.
Daniel Norman was the hero for Riordan, returning a Monarch fumble 87 yards for a touchdown just when it appeared Mitty might go up by two scores.
“It was a hard-fought victory,” Fordon said by phone Monday night. “It definitely made the administration and faculty happy; this is the most wins our team has had in a few years.”
Riordan won despite committing 15 penalties for more than 140 yards.
The new Riordan coach said he’s gotten emails from 1977 and 1962 Riordan graduates (they email?) saying “it’s nice to see the team back on top and we love what you’re doing.”
The big tests keep coming for Riordan, though. It hosts Serra at 1 p.m. Saturday at City College of San Francisco. The Crusaders have not beaten the Padres since scoring back-to-back wins against Serra in 2006 and '07. .
“Oh, man I’m really nervous watching film of Serra,” Fordon said. “They’ve lost to the top two teams in Northern California in De La Salle and the Bells. “I have the utmost respect for coach (Patrick) Walsh who I played for at De La Salle and I know he’ll have his guys ready to play Saturday and we better be ready or we’re not going to come out with a win.”
WATSONVILLE’S OK: Last weekend I spent much of my time in my old home and workplace, Watsonville. However, since I was busy getting the Scotts Valley Experience on Friday night I did not see Watsonville's 20-13 loss to Gilroy.
While a seven-point loss to the Mustangs is tough for the 2-3 Catz, let me put it in perspective. In the early 1980s there was a Watsonville coach on the hot the seat with a game against visiting Gilroy looming. The Mustangs were a power then, coached at that time by fly offense guru Mark Speckman. Not only that, but Watsonville High was honoring members of its seven consecutive championship teams from the 1950s coached by the late Emmett Geiser.
Well, the game went south in a hurry. The beleaguered coach had his team attempt an array of trick plays, all of which seemed to fail. Gilroy kept scoring and scoring. Then late in the game a Watsonville punt returner had a ball bounce squarely off his helmet and bound directly to the Mustangs. It was tough to watch, and apparently to play in ... because late in the fourth quarter a big Watsonville lineman picked up his second unsportsmanlike conduct penalty (some thought on purpose) and got ejected. Members of the Watsonville's Magnificent Seven championship teams started filing out early.
Toggling back to 2015, coach Ron Myers’ team battled admirably against Gilroy, managing sustained drives of 11 and 15 plays to forge a 13-13 tie, but Gilroy got the Catz with a late 63-yard pass from Jon Jon Castro to Tyler Wiggins to win it.
“It was a great high school game,” Myers said. “We’re competing and getting better and better.”
Olivarez and linebacker Fabian Parra played well for Watsonville, said Myers who, incidentally was the coach in the early 1980s who REPLACED that poor coach who had been on the hot seat. Coaching, it's a tough racket.
MILLS IS NOW A WINNING TEAM: An opening 54-14 loss to San Jose wasn’t a good sign for coach Mike Krieger’s Mills team but, don’t look now, the academically-focused Millbrae school now has a better record (3-2) in football than mighty Serra (2-2) following a 39-26 victory Friday against Mission San Jose.
The 2015 Vikings are not to be confused with the 1972 Mills team which came within a recovered onside kick of upsetting WCAL co-champ Riordan. But 3-2 is 3-2, even if the wins are just against MSJ, Gunn (34-7) and Galileo (34-12).
Krieger and the Vikings do know how to pound the rock. Mills rushed for 252 yards and five scores against MSJ, with David Tongilava finding the end zone three times. The Vikings have a bye this week before playing at San Mateo on Oct. 16.
John Murphy is the Web Content Manager of Prep2Prep. Reach him at jmurphy@prep2prep.com and follow him on Twitter @PrepCat
