Football’s Out There, If You Know Where to Look

There’s no football in San Diego this weekend? Who says?

Oh, the real Chargers are on strike and the ersatz Chargers need an extra week to learn which way the helmet faces? And San Diego State is playing at Oregon?

Fine.

Mind you, I don’t have an insatiable thirst for football. The weather is nice, and, should I want to venture into the outdoors, I have golf clubs and a fishing pole and a boccie ball set.

However, there’s something about being told I can’t possibly go to a football game. It rubs me the wrong way. It challenges me. You know how it is when you don’t really need or want something unless someone says you cannot have it?

I had to see a football game.

And so I would go to a high school game, preferably an afternoon game. Why waste sunshine? I knew Jerry Coleman would approve.

Lo and behold, I found exactly the game I wanted to see. Francis Parker was playing at La Jolla Country Day at 3 p.m. This would be a wonderful way to spend a late afternoon in early autumn.

And this would also be nostalgic.

Back in my boyhood, perhaps the third or fourth grade, I lived for a short period of time in a hamlet called Centreville, Mich. The total population was about 800, and there were not enough hardy lads in the kindergarten-through-12th-grade school to field an 11-man football team.

Thus, Centreville played eight-man football. It didn’t seem a truncated version to me then, but I did not know much better and the players all looked like 250-pounders.

As you have probably concluded, Parker and Country Day play eight-man football. Their combined enrollments are less than 500, and that includes boys and girls.

Alas, this would be a time to see what football was like as I first saw it . . . and as I’ll probably see it again when the new Chargers start playing in the stadium.

When I arrived at La Jolla Country Day, some of Francis Parker’s players were stretching. Wait a minute, those weren’t some of Parker’s . . . those were all of them.

Parker had only 19 players, but it had Country Day outnumbered. Country Day had 15. Obviously, this would not be two-platoon football.

As the opening kickoff drew near, the atmosphere was more that of a family picnic than a football game. These schools are probably the most intense rivals in the Coastal League, but the fans and students did not seem to feel a need to work themselves into any sort of a frenzy.

One of the Parker fans was selling brown and gold Parker visors, which might have been hotter items on the home side of the field. After all, Country Day’s fans were looking directly into the sun.

At 2:45, a drummer and guitar player were warming up on Country Day’s side and two cheerleaders were talking toward the one fan who had taken a seat.

There were 17 people in the stands for the opening kickoff, 12 on Parker’s side and 5 on Country Day’s. This would be a late-arriving crowd, presuming a crowd materialized. It would grow to maybe 60 or 70 during the game. No one counted because no one cared.

Parker and Country Day have been the biggest among the littles for a few years hereabouts, but things did not look particularly good for the home side Friday. Parker was 2-0 and Country Day was 0-2. Scores against a common opponent, Chadwick in the Los Angeles area, gave cause for deeper concern. Parker beat Chadwick, 36-29, and Country Day lost, 49-13.

“We’ve had some good games with these guys,” said Rick Woods, Country Day’s coach, “but I think we’re in for a long day.”

As it turned out, Woods was wrong. Literally, it was a short afternoon. The game was stopped with 11:15 to play when Robert Garrison’s one-yard run gave Parker a 48-0 lead. A 45-point lead is a technical knockout in eight-man football. I will concede to Woods that it was, figuratively, a long day for his guys.

On this occasion, Parker had all the guns.

The top gunner was a junior quarterback named Will Beamer, who may be Public Enemy No. 1 in the Imperial Valley. Beamer led Parker to a victory over Borrego Springs for last fall’s San Diego Section 1-A football championship and pitched Parker to a win over Imperial for last spring’s 1-A baseball championship. He threw three touchdown passes Friday afternoon.

And Parker is known as a running team, crunching people up front with guys like Pietro LaGreca, Doug McDaniel and Bill Carroll. These three interior linemen, which happen to be all the interior linemen an eight-man team fields, average 222 pounds. Ouch.

“We like to think we set up the run with the pass,” Parker Coach Dan Kuiper said. “At least that’s what we’d like to think.”

Everything worked Friday. Parker got the passing touchdowns from Beamer--two to Marc Sherman and the other to Trevor Rodger--the running touchdowns from Scott Drapeau, Ronald Quini and Garrison and a punt return for a touchdown from Sherman.

That was it, 48-zip.

OK, so it wasn’t very dramatic, maybe not even particularly pretty.

However, this was an afternoon which had its own kind of charm. There were no strikers and no strikebreakers. There were no scholarship athletes flunking drugs tests or taking money under the table from agents.

These were just a bunch of kids playing a game. Parker did not exult in victory, and Country Day did not pout in defeat. They all shook hands and went home for the weekend.

It was nice.