Girls’ basketball: City Section looking into Banning’s forfeit of playoff game

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Commissioner Barbara Fiege said the City Section office is looking into Thursday’s Chatsworth-Banning girls’ basketball playoff contest, where Banning Coach Nicole Perkins pulled her team off the floor in the second quarter and forfeited the game.

‘An issue needs to be resolved whenever a coach decides to take a team off the floor,’ Fiege said Friday. ‘We are still taking statements. Once we sort things out, we’ll see what needs to be done.’

Chatsworth (22-5), the top-seeded team in the Championship Division, led the visiting Pilots (10-14), 31-9, in Thursday’s first-round game when Perkins told her team to leave the floor with 5:20 left in the second quarter. There were a couple of incidents that led up to Perkin’s decision.

Chatsworth Coach Michelle Chevalier said Friday the referees had two Banning fans removed because of abusive remarks. Once play resumed, a Banning player was called for a charge. Another fan became verbally abusive and that fan was removed.

‘Then the coach called her team over and said ‘we’re out of here,’ ‘ Chevalier said.

Perkins said Friday even though she didn’t think the game was being called fairly ‘we were going to continue to play.’ But when the referees had the second Banning fan removed -- a player’s grandfather, she said -- Perkins said an official threatened to clear out the section where the remaining Banning fans were sitting.

‘When the fans started booing he told them ‘it is personal,’ ‘ Perkins said. ‘When he stopped the game a third time, I said that’s it. When he said it’s personal, I knew we weren’t going to get any calls.’

Perkins said she pulled her team from the game because she felt an already a bad situation could get worse. She also said as she was trying to get her team on its bus, several Chatsworth fans became verbally abusive.

Perkins said there was no history of bad blood between the teams, and she had never coached games officiated by Thursday’s referees.

But she said she would do the same thing again.

‘People said we were scared of getting beat. It had nothing to do with that,’ Perkins said. ‘It could have gotten ugly. And as we were walking out, we had water bottles being thrown at us. There were no police, just their athletic director.’

-- Mike Terry