A Sad Saga at Saugus High : It’s Not Canyon, Not Hart and Not Winning Much, Either

The night could hardly have gotten worse for the Saugus High football team. One minute, Burroughs was running and passing wild, apparently scoring at will. The next, senior Saugus guard Barry Crom was having his helmet, with head inside, taped to an emergency back board.

Teammate Roy Houlette did not know that Crom would be treated and later released last Friday night. As he stared across the field at the ambulance on the Burroughs sideline, all he could think about was being shutout by 21 points and not being able to do anything about it.

“We’re a young team,” said Houlette, his hand touching the cast on his right leg. Two days before in practice Houlette dislocated his knee. “I think that in a couple of years we will have a winning program.”

Saugus football players are not losers. They’re just not winners. And when you live in the Santa Clarita Valley and you want to play high school football, you play for one of three teams, in this order: Canyon, Hart or Saugus.

Saugus doesn’t have a Jim Bonds-type quarterback who college scouts say is among the best high school quarterbacks in the Free World, nor does it have a streak as long as the Antelope Valley Freeway. Hart has Bonds and Canyon has quarterback Ken Sollom and a 41-game winning streak.

What does Saugus have?

On paper, not much. Saugus has lost its first three games.

In the papers, Canyon and Hart have been the two most talked-about teams this season. Most of the talk about Saugus, on the other hand, is done by its players.

“To me, that’s a bunch of bull,” said Saugus slot back LaMark Allen, who in two games caught 11 passes for 120 yards. “I mean, we don’t play a different sport. I mean, I know we can’t do anything about it because those two teams are really good. I guess what we’re trying to do now is put ourselves over the top.”

The Centurions are going about it in odd fashion. Saugus lost its first three games, and the Centurions aren’t likely to win tonight when they play Hart at 7:30 at College of the Canyons. Hart, at 2-1, is ranked No. 8 in the state by Cal-Hi Sports. And Hart has Bonds, who Stanford recruiter Dave Baldwin called the Next Coming of John Elway.

As Crom lay in the ambulance on Friday, play resumed. On a 26-yard trap play with 8:21 left in the half, Burroughs running back Doug Dragomer scored, adding insult to injury. On the way out of the stadium, the ambulance passed under the scoreboard. Burroughs led, 29-0. Saugus eventually lost, 43-6.

“In terms of being helpless, that was the worst experience I’ve ever had,” said first-year Saugus Coach Dave Gross, who, like his Canyon counterpart, Harry Welch, knows something about winning titles. A coach for 15 years, Gross won three Southern Section championships at Imperial Valley.

As Saugus prepared to take the field for the second half against Burroughs, Centurion cheerleaders ran onto the field with a banner, the colorful kind teams bust through en masse. The banner didn’t burst. Instead, three players got tangled before one crumpled the sign and threw it aside.

“No matter whether we’re losing or not, we always support them,” said Lynn Parks, a cheery Saugus cheerleader of four years, after she retrieved the banner from two playful young boys. “If we don’t support them, they might want to lose more.”

Losing isn’t Gross’ main concern.

“After the Burroughs game,” said Gross on Wednesday as he sat in his office on the Saugus campus, “I told the kids that the best thing about that game is that it is history.”

It’s the losing attitude that has Gross’ mind working overtime.

Gross, 36, won three league titles at Imperial Valley and two at Rosamond. Before Gross arrived, Rosamond was 1-9. In two years, he led the program to two Desert-Inyo League championships.

Last season, Saugus finished fifth in the six-team Golden League with a league record of 1-4. The Centurions were 1-7-2 overall.

“One of the things that I wanted to do as a coach was come into a program and turn it around,” Gross said. “We haven’t done it yet, and it might take longer than I’d like it to take, but it’s going to happen. But it’s just a matter of when the kids will accept it.

“We’re dealing with attitudes, we’re dealing with changing the way people think,” Gross said. “And that’s hard because our kids lose, they have had a bad experience about winning. They have friends at Canyon and Hart, they have to listen to all the negative things some people on campus say. So, we have to deal with attitudes as well as our approach to the game.”

Saugus quarterback Jared Snyder agreed.

“It’s hard when you’re surrounded by Hart and Canyon,” said Snyder, a junior who has completed 45 passes for 377 yards and 2 touchdowns. “I mean, we have LaMark out there who is as good as anybody at Canyon or as good as anybody at Hart. He doesn’t get any recognition. We’re not as bad as everyone says we are.

“We’re always hearing ‘Oh, they’re the other Santa Clarita Valley team. They’re next to Canyon and Hart, right?’ We never hear ‘Saugus, yeah, I have heard of those guys. They have got a couple good athletes.’

“We want to be part of it, too. It’s pretty hard when nobody pays any attention to you.”

Saugus last won the Golden League title in 1981. Since then, when talking about the Golden League, only two things come to mind: Canyon and its streak.

“They got the streak going and we’re starting from scratch,” said Snyder, who is one of 10 juniors starting for the Saugus offense. “It’s different for me and guys like LaMark because we’re juniors. We get to come back next season.”

Almost everybody on the Saugus team will. Only five seniors start. Only three have varsity playing experience.

“Next year, LaMark and I will be the hookup of the Santa Clarita Valley,” Snyder said. “I just need a year to mature. Next year, I think I can be just as good as Sollom and Bonds.

“We lost these last three games. But I don’t think our attitude has changed. We still have a positive attitude. Something good has come out of all this. I’m sure some of the guys are still thinking about last year, but that’s behind us.”

Tonight, Hart is in front of Saugus.

Said Gross: “If we make something big happen this week--I mean we’re not going to go out there and blow Hart away--but if we can get something positive out of it, it’s going to do a lot for us.

“I really believe there are good things that are going to happen here. We’ve got some good young kids coming up. And once it gets turned around, we’re going to get some great kids in here just like they did at Hart, just like they did at Canyon.”