Bell Wins City Title Amid Controversy : Soccer: For the second year in a row, a semifinal loser is reinstated and claims the championship.

What City Section Commissioner Hal Harkness hoped would be an isolated incident cropped up again this year, tarnishing the City Section championship soccer match.

Bell High, acting on a tip from an undisclosed source, filed a complaint claiming Monroe had used ineligible players in a semifinal win last Tuesday.

When Monroe was subsequently disqualified from Saturday’s championship match at Birmingham High, Bell stepped in to defeat Kennedy, 1-0, and win its first City title.

So for the second year in a row, the City soccer championship will carry an asterisk in the record books.

Last year, Palisades defeated San Pedro in the semifinals but was forced to forfeit after it was discovered a Dolphin player participated in an outside league. San Pedro was reinstated and beat Belmont for the title.

Monroe players Oscar Rios and William Leal allegedly played on a club team during the high school season, a violation of an interscholastic rule that states that a player, between Nov. 15 and Feb. 15, may play for either a club team or a high school team but not for both.

“It’s my duty to uphold the rules, but I don’t agree with it,” Harkness said. “It’s an administrative nightmare.”

Bell Coach William Albano expressed similar sentiments. He said he was not interested in pursuing the incident but that he was given no choice after his school’s assistant principal filed a complaint with the City Section’s Interscholastic Athletics Council.

“For the past 19 years I’ve been against this rule,” Albano said. “It’s hard for a coach to know where his players are on Sunday (when club teams play).

“It’s a lousy rule and I don’t like it. But we have to abide by it.”

Kennedy (14-3-1) wore blue sweatbands in tribute to Monroe, but Bell wasn’t impressed.

Bell (11-1-2) scored the only goal it needed with five minutes remaining in the first half. Kennedy goalkeeper Salvador Reyes appeared to have blocked Jorge Miranda’s head shot off an Arnold Toscano cross pass, but the ball slipped from Reyes’ hands into the upper-left corner of the net.

Kennedy had two corner kicks in the closing minutes but could not convert. Five of the Golden Cougars’ eight shots on goal were off target.

Bell, the Southeastern Conference champion, totaled 10 shots.

“(Bell) earned it. They beat us, 1-0,” Kennedy Coach Fred Singer said. “They’re the City champs. Whether it’s a different game with Monroe or not doesn’t make any difference.”

Monroe would offer a different opinion. Thirteen Viking players, waving their red game jerseys while watching from behind the Kennedy bench, stood by a banner that read, “Monroe beat Bell, 2-1,” symbolic of their overtime victory at Bell on Tuesday.

One Monroe player chanted, “We are the champions,” after the final whistle.