Carson Favored in Annual Showdown With Banning

One team is the defending City 4-A champion and has a 3-1 record, but its coach is worried about the offense. The other is an uncustomary 2-2 and still trying to plug some holes at key positions.

Still, there’s no downplaying Carson vs. Banning, a great high school football rivalry. It will be resumed today at 1:30 p.m. with the teams from the South Bay going to East Los Angeles College to continue a dispute that supposedly was settled 10 months ago in the title game.

It’s a different year with different situations and some different players, but why get bogged down with minor details when both teams still figure they have a point to prove.

“I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘revenge,’ but they certainly want to correct what happened last season at the Coliseum,” Carson Coach Gene Vollnogle said of Banning, which went into the championship game favored and lost, 33-20. “They want to prove something. And we want to prove that it was not a fluke, that we can beat them anytime.”

Vollnogle and his long-time counterpart, Chris Ferragamo, agree that Carson is the favorite this time around, but it could be said that Banning is coming off the better performance, a 49-6 win over Granada Hills Kennedy. The Pilots apparently solved their biggest problem of the early season by moving Earl Saunders to tailback and getting a fumble-free game, not to mention 176 yards and a pair of touchdowns.

But the switch left a void at middle linebacker, Saunders’ old position, and that’s one of Ferragamo’s latest concerns. He was alternating senior Todd Ellis and junior Tyrone Rodgers at late-week practices, trying to determine who will start in the Pacific League opener.

“We’ve made so many changes that right now we’re looking to settle down and make sure the guys know where they should be,” Ferragamo said.

Carson, which has lost only to Santa Fe Springs St. Paul, the Southern Section’s sixth-ranked team, has been having similar problems with continuity. The Colts defeated San Fernando, 20-9, in their last game, but they didn’t always live up to their No. 1 ranking in the City in the process.

“At this point we’re struggling on offense,” Vollnogle said. “I think we have the personnel, but we just haven’t been able to play consistent enough. We start to move the ball and we end up with a big penalty or end up fumbling or end up dropping key passes.

“In the beginning of the year, I felt that the offense would carry us until the defense, which is young, would come around. But the exact opposite has come true. The defense has been the ones keeping us in the game, to be truthful.”

In an attempt to shake up the offense, Vollnogle had moved Marc Walters from quarterback to wide receiver and replaced him with Kevin Tate. But that didn’t produce any startling results, and Walters will be back at his original position today.

The stars on offense have turned out to be a couple of junior running backs, Alvin Goree, who has scored six touchdowns in the four games, and Calvin Holmes.