Vaqueros Prepared for Game but Not for Loss

When you want something so much you can taste it, you might want to swallow until the feeling passes.

So it was for Rancho Alamitos as game time for the Division VII Southern Section football championship drew near.

Heart rates increased. Breathing was labored as players thought about how Manhattan Beach Mira Costa was going to be brought down Saturday night at El Camino College. Class became meaningless. The teachers’ words fell on deaf ears.

“I had trouble sleeping all week, just thinking about this game,” said senior tackle and tri-captain Jeremiah Ross. “We wanted it so much, we wanted it so bad.”

But for the most part, badly was how the Vaqueros played. Its mediocre effort translated into a 29-17 loss to Mira Costa, in front of a heavily partisan Mustang crowd of about 6,000.

Rancho Alamitos insisted it didn’t give up.

“The Ranch doesn’t give up,” Ross said. “The Ranch will never give up.”

But even Ross, who paced the sideline during the game, shouting an occasional, ‘This is my senior year,” to anyone within earshot, wondered who kidnaped the team that got the Vaqueros here.

“I don’t know.” Pause. “It’s hard to say.” Pause. “We didn’t give up.” Pause. “We just didn’t execute,” he said.

Ross said he played his heart out and that he tried to get his teammates to follow suit, but that mistakes led to the Vaqueros’ eventual demise.

“We wanted it, you can’t say we didn’t want it,” he said. “But we made a lot of mental mistakes.”

Certainly there was no mistaking what was going on along the Rancho Alamitos sideline, where slammed helmets, airborne water bottles and pointed fingers outnumbered a pat on the shoulder or an encouraging word.

“We didn’t come out prepared,” said linebacker Adam Maldonado, another senior captain. “Their defense was incredible. They deserve to win the championship.”

Said Ross dejectedly: “We went out there as a team and we lost as a team.”

It’s just that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to end.

Ross was so sure the Vaqueros were destined to win the section title that he called Leon Vicker, a former Rancho Alamitos player who was an All-American this year at Stanford.

“I told him we’d win it for him, that we’d win it for the teams in the past that haven’t won,” Ross said. “I was so sure we could do it.”

As the awards ceremony was going on, a group of Vaqueros boosters stood on the field and shook their heads in disbelief.

“We got manhandled,” one of them said. “We haven’t seen a team like that all year.”

And Rancho Alamitos played like it.