San Fernando Is Lucky but Good Enough : Tigers Pounce in the Third quarter for a 15-6 victory at Crenshaw

His team has had trouble scoring lately, so San Fernando Coach Tom Hernandez wasn’t going to dispute whether the Tigers were lucky for the whole game, as the opposing coach suggested, or for just the key play in a15-6 victory at Crenshaw High Friday afternoon.

San Fernando, coming off a 9-3 loss to San Pedro last week, had shown just as few signs of life on offense this time around, trailing at halftime, 6-3. Quarterback Dwayne Calloway had 24 yards passing, and the leading rusher, Ron McMillan had 11 yards in three carries.

Moreover, the Tigers’ biggest offense threat, senior tailback David Richards, has been moved from tailback to wide receiver for the first time and had been kept quiet by Crenshaw’s double-teaming.

But in the third quarter, Richards more than made up for it.

San Fernando, the eighth-ranked team in the city, got a five-yard scoring run from sophomore Charles Thomas with 6:46 remaining in the third quarter to go ahead for the first time, 9-6, and came back on the first play of the next posession to have Calloway hit the double-covered Richards along the sideline for a 75-yard touchdown and the final 15-6 edge.

“When you get a big play like that, you’ve got to be a little lucky,” Hernandez said. “Dwayne put the ball right in there between two guys. He misses by a couple of inches and that’s an Incomplete pass.”

Crenshaw Coach David Frierson, having seen his team miss several scoring opportunities in dropping to 0-2 after starting the season as The Times’ No. 8 team, said that San Fernando got plenty of other breaks before that play.

“They got lucky today,” he said when asked the key to the game. “I just think that things went their way on a couple of plays and they were able to pop them for touchdowns. We held them o the goal line all game. They were just able to take advantage of out mistakes. We don’t make those mistakes and they don’t win.”

Hernandez didn’t care one way or the other how the Tigers (2-1) got the win, not the way the offense has been struggling, and not with top-ranked Carson coming up next week. As he said, “it doesn’t look like we’ll be putting a whole lot of points on the board real soon.”

The Crenshaw defensive line, with three players Weighing 305 pounds or more, did a good job of bottling up San Fernando’s running game; Jimi Corona finished with only 24 yards in 5 carries to lead the Tigers. This was most apparent early in the second quarter when the Tigers got the ball on the Crenshaw 32 after a punt but had to settle for Alfonso Ontiveros’ 27-yard field goal for their first score, making it 6-3.

Crenshaw, which got its only score of the game on a four-yard pass from quarterback Steven Stepter to wide receiver Calvin Abbott, had 66 yards in 16 carries from senior Anthony Washington but never got going offensively either. The Cougars alternated Stepter (3 of 10 for 39 yards, 1 interception and the touchdown) with Jeff Sullivan (1 of 8 for 4 yards and 1 interception) for most of the game.

“We dropped three touchdowns passes, and you just can’t do That,” Frierson said. “We had the game under control otherwise.”