The High Schools : Rio Mesa’s Reardon Considers Retiring

John Reardon, head football coach at Rio Mesa since 1965, may have coached his last season.

Reardon, 54, the dean of Ventura County football coaches, broached the subject of his retirement with Rio Mesa Principal Vincent Deveney during the season but said that he has yet to decide.

“I like to coach, but coaches by instinct are competitive people,” he said. “We haven’t been lining up equally talent-wise.”

Reardon’s teams, known for their physical brand of play, won 9 Frontier League championships from 1971 to 1983 and a Channel League title in 1985. The Spartans won the 1971 Southern Section 1-A Division championship.

Rio Mesa, however, has not reached the playoffs since 1985, going 11-18-1 in that span. The Spartans were 4-6 this season, although they won their final 3 games.

Channel Islands Coach Joel Gershon was impressed with Palmdale after the Falcons eliminated his team, 28-14, in the first round of the Southern Section Division II playoffs. He said Palmdale was the best team he had seen this season, despite the fact it was without LaShante Parker, the Falcons’ leading rusher who was academically ineligible for the game.

Gershon, however, was not as impressed with the Southern Section. He wondered why Channel Islands, the Marmonte League co-champion, drew Palmdale in the first round. The Falcons placed third in the Golden League, but were ranked higher than Channel Islands in the Southern Section rankings. Palmdale was fifth, Channel Islands seventh.

“You wonder sometimes about the so-called pairings,” Gershon said. “It doesn’t seem like someone is using all their brain cells.”

Broadway Bill: Pat Riley did it, and the Lakers repeated as NBA champions. Joe Namath did it, and the Jets became the first American Football League team to win the Super Bowl.

While the stakes aren’t quite as high, Crespi Coach Bill Redell came close to guaranteeing a win over favored Servite tonight at Pierce College. And this after Servite beat Crespi, 35-20, 7 weeks ago.

“It’s been a season of adversity,” he said. “But I think we have a chance to win it all, I really do.

“I’m not going to predict it--I’m no Namath--but I still think we’ll be there at the end.”

Add Crespi-Servite: Redell said he was hardly horrified to find his staff bickering among itself during game films this week. In fact, he thinks it’s a good omen.

“We were all about ready to kill each other,” he said. “That means we’re up, we’re ready. It will be a different story this time.”

Trivia question: Canyon Coach Harry Welch, who leads the Cowboys into the second round of the Southern Section Division II playoffs against Hawthorne on Friday night, is 18-3 in postseason play.

Which teams have defeated Canyon? Answer below.

Saw it coming: Buena’s resurgence is no surprise to Thousand Oaks Coach Bob Richards, whose first and last losses of the season were to the upstart Bulldogs, who are 9-2. But, he said it had as much to do with the returning players as it did with the arrival of Coach Rick Scott.

Said Richards after a 19-14 loss to Buena on Friday in the first round of the playoffs: “He had 14 starters coming back this year. I knew they’d have a good team. In fact, I asked Mike (Olgy, the former Buena coach) why he left when he had so much talent coming back.”

Olgy is an assistant under Scott this season.

Add Thousand Oaks: The Lancers appeared to control the tempo of the game, especially in the first half, but led only 14-7 at halftime. In the first 2 quarters, Thousand Oaks ran 37 plays to Buena’s 13 and held the ball for 19 minutes to Buena’s 5.

By game’s end, however, the Bulldogs had turned that around, outgaining the Lancers, 277 yards to 258, and, of course, outscoring them.

Secret weapon: Chaminade dropped a bomb on North Torrance in the Eagles’ 35-14 Division VII first-round playoff win. Junior tailback Colin Havert, who had rushed for only 171 yards this season, rushed for 181 yards and 3 touchdowns in 18 carries.

“He ran like crazy,” Chaminade Coach Rich Lawson said of Havert, who missed the first 3 games of the season because of a sprained knee. “He’s our secret weapon.”

It is no secret that Chaminade has been an explosive passing team. Quarterback Greg Baumgartner has passed for 2,069 yards and wide receiver Brady Mitchell has hauled in 60 passes for 965 yards. But against North Torrance, the Eagles rolled up a season-high 233 yards rushing.

“They came out to stop Baumgartner and Mitchell,” Lawson said. “They look at the stats and say, ‘Hey, here’s who we got to stop.’ Well, I say, ‘Hey, go ahead and stop ‘em because I got the SW--secret weapon.’ ”

Compass football: The Eagles (8-3) travel to Santa Maria for a rematch with the top-ranked team in the division. Santa Maria “handled” the Eagles, according to Lawson, 34-6, 7 weeks ago.

“Hey, we get another shot at these guys,” Lawson said.

And another shot at trying to win on a field that runs from the north to the south.

“We’re 8-0 on fields that run east and west,” Lawson said. “And 0-3 on fields that run north and south.”

Center Stage: Burbank’s Randy Stage did a fine job in his first season as coach of the Bulldogs.

Stage, who was hired as an assistant last spring, was thrust into his first head coaching job in June when Dave Carson left to coach at Hart. Despite getting a late start, Stage guided Burbank (7-4) to a second-place finish in the Foothill League before losing to El Dorado, 24-14, in the first round of the Division VII playoffs.

Burbank defeated league-champion Schurr and snapped Hart’s 22-game winning streak in league play. Stage’s team also fielded a tenacious defense that surrendered just 91 yards passing a game.

Trivia answer: Canyon lost to Lompoc, 27-17, in 1982, Welch’s first year. In 1986, after 3 consecutive Southern Section championships, Canyon lost to Muir, 22-14, in the semifinal round. Last year, Canyon lost to Channel Islands, 42-6, in the semifinal round.

Truer words: Village Christian football Coach Mike Plaisance was critical of the Southern Section selection process that left out his team, which was 8-2, but included 2 teams with losing records in the Division IX playoffs. Plaisance felt that by awarding playoff bids to the top 2 teams in each league, regardless of the number of teams in the league, many first-round games would be blowouts.

He was right. Valley Christian defeated California School for the Deaf, 69-6; Carpinteria beat Southern California Christian, 55-8; and Tehachapi drubbed Boron, 52-26.

Staff writers Tim Brown, Vince Kowalick, Steve Elling and Steven Fleischman contributed to this notebook.