Some Have It. . . : . . . Some Don’t : Prep Football a Tough Ticket to Sell for Many Schools

It used to be that one could learn a lot about American culture by taking in a Friday night high school football game.

In communities such as San Clemente and Aliso Viejo, there is still plenty to take in as crowds of 4,000 to 5,000 pack the stands to support the local team. But if you want to capture the flavor and spirit of some Orange County communities on Friday nights, you might be a day late and a dollar short.

Because of a shortage of stadiums in some districts, many teams are forced to play games on Thursday or Saturday nights. And many students and parents who can’t pay $5 ticket prices stay home and leave school spirit to those who can afford it.

Nowhere is the tradition of Friday nights and high school football evaporating more than in the Garden Grove League, where crowds of 200 to 300 are commonplace and crowds of 1,000 are a rarity.

Bolsa Grande, perennially near the bottom of the league in crowd support, drew fewer than 100 spectators for its league game against Rancho Alamitos. Five Bolsa Grande students sat in the upper corner of the bleachers, seemingly trying to get as far removed from the action and their classmates as possible. They watched as their team suffered through a humiliating 61-19 loss. The Matadors didn’t win a league game last year and lost their first two league games by a combined score of 111-37.

“If you knew our team, you’d know why no one comes to these games,” senior Miguel Martinez said.

Senior Antoine Boyd said he’s one of the few Bolsa Grande students who never misses a game.

“I’d rather be here supporting my team than go anywhere else,” Boyd said. “But a lot of kids, they’d rather be at the all-age clubs, partying. About the only time you hear about people coming to the games is for homecoming.”

Only half of the sparse crowd appeared to be students, which means fewer than 50 of the 1,037 Bolsa Grande students bothered to pay the $2 student admission fee to support their team. Adults are charged $5, as are students who buy tickets on game night. At Rancho Alamitos, students with ASB cards pay $2 if they prepay. Adults and students who don’t prepay are charged $5.

“It’s the prices,” Martinez said. “They want you to pay $5 for this.”

Five dollars may not seem like a lot of money, but many students at Rancho Alamitos cited cost as a major reason for not attending games.

“A lot of kids think, it’s their own school event, so why should they have to pay so much to get in,” Rancho Alamitos senior Carie Goetz said. “That’s why a lot of kids’ parents don’t come too.”

The Rancho Alamitos bleachers weren’t exactly overflowing to watch the Bolsa-Rancho matchup. Barely 200 fans showed up to watch the Vaqueros, off to their best start in five years at 6-0.

Booster club president Nancy Vickers, whose son David is a starting fullback and linebacker, said Thursday night games aren’t easy on Rancho Alamitos fans.

“I don’t enjoy Thursday night games,” Vickers said. “I don’t get back from the games until 11 at night and I’ve got to get up at 5 a.m. and go to work the next day. If my child wasn’t into sports, I’d be saying, ‘Where are you going on a school night and how late are you going to be out?’ ”

Thursday night games are simply a way of life in the Garden Grove League. Seven teams must share the Bolsa Grande and Garden Grove stadiums.

But Vickers admits switching Thursday games to Friday would not fill the stands.

“We might get an extra 200 people out here for Friday nights,” she said.

Rancho Alamitos actually had an extra 600 or 700 fans last Friday night for its Parents’ Night game with Pacifica that drew nearly 1,400 fans, giving Rancho Alamitos its biggest regular-season crowd in five years. The Friday night game was the Vaqueros’ first this season.

Vickers, in her sixth year as booster club president, said she has tried a number of gimmicks in an attempt to attract more fans.

“We’ve had noisemakers, confetti, we have a DJ out here who plays the new music for the students and the oldies for the parents,” she said.

Nicole Runge, a Rancho Alamitos cheerleader, said she has been disappointed with the crowds this season.

“I think more people should go,” she said. “Every game should be like the Pacifica game. The crowd involvement isn’t what it should be either. A lot of people just sit there and don’t cheer. They’re too busy socializing.”

But Vickers, who grew up in La Puente, realizes times have changed.

“We had an average team when I went to school, but the stands were packed because it was the thing to do,” she said. “Kids were more involved in school activities of all kinds back then. Now, kids are going to these dance clubs that are open every night.”

Unlike Bolsa Grande and other Garden Grove League teams such as La Quinta and Santiago, Rancho Alamitos’ lack of fan support is not a direct correlation to the team’s success. For most of the 1990s, Rancho Alamitos has put winning teams on the field. In 1992 and 1993, the Vaqueros went to the Southern Section title game and drew crowds of 10,000 and 8,000. In 1991, they drew 4,500 for a season-ending league title game against Garden Grove.

But while the team remained successful, making the playoffs each of the last two years, Rancho Alamitos crowds have dwindled considerably.

“We still draw about as well as anybody in our league, but compared to the rest of the county, we’re way down,” Rancho Alamitos Coach Doug Case said. “When I watch OCN [Orange County News] and they pan around to the stands, I’m amazed at how big the crowds are.”

One of the stadiums he often sees full is San Clemente’s. The Tritons average about 3,000 of their own fans a game--2,500 in their stands and about 500 who are forced to sit on the visitors’ side. But the fans haven’t always flocked to San Clemente games. Before Mark McElroy took over the program five years ago, the Tritons hadn’t won a league game in five years and the community had lost interest in the football program.

“I know the attendance was very sparse,” McElroy said. “People tell me before I got here, you could get here at 7:15 and get a good seat. Now they tell me you have to get here at 5:45.”

The same problem exists at Aliso Niguel, where the 3,000-seat home stands are usually jammed 30 minutes before kickoff. Although Aliso Niguel is only 4 years old, it has built a winning program and attracted a larger and more loyal following than schools decades old.

How have San Clemente and Aliso Niguel managed to do what Rancho Alamitos, Bolsa Grande and a host of other teams would love to do--pack their stands full of fans?

Winning is first and foremost, but it’s not everything. Aliso Niguel and San Clemente also have attracted support through hard work, a committed booster club and plenty of community support.

The man mainly responsible for Aliso Niguel’s success is Steve Burt, booster club president who also acts as a sports information director. Burt, a former vice president of marketing for a Fortune 500 company, runs the booster club and manages the Aliso Niguel football team like a business.

“We had to look at who besides the families of players and cheerleaders would come to watch the game,” he said. “So we decided to get the local businesses involved with advertising in the program, our newsletter, on local television and inside the stadium. That makes them want to know what’s going on.”

Although 90% of Aliso Niguel’s crowds are parents or relatives of students, Burt said he has improved the program’s visibility throughout the community.

McElroy also has sold his program to local businesses. He has gotten restaurants involved by having them sponsor player of the week awards. He speaks regularly at local service clubs and 5,000 pocket schedules have been distributed to golf courses, restaurants and other businesses.

McElroy has gone after the youth and the seniors. At halftime of the Oct. 11 game with Trabuco Hills, San Clemente had its own version of a punt, pass and kick contest for elementary and junior high school kids. McElroy also began a senior citizens’ night where all seniors get in free and the first 50 in the stadium are given free carnations.

“This is a very small way to thank senior citizens for enriching our lives,” McElroy said.

The experiment appears to be working.

“I have senior citizens coming up to me at church saying, ‘Great game, Coach,’ ” McElroy said.

But McElroy understands that he also has a built-in geographical advantage that few schools have.

“We’re a little town of 45,000 people and we’re kind of separated by Camp Pendleton,” he said. “We’re the only high school in town. It sort of has that Midwestern feel to it. . . .

“I must admit that we have a special community. There’s a lot of people who grew up in San Clemente who don’t want to move. There’s a large network of people who know each other. There’s more sense of community.”

Rancho Alamitos Coach Doug Case said he barely knows his community anymore.

“A lot of kids have very little knowledge of football prior to coming to Rancho Alamitos and this country,” said Case, who played at Rancho Alamitos in 1979 and 1980. “We have 33% Hispanic and 33% Asians in our student body. Their heroes are not Emmitt Smith and Joe Montana.

“The student body doesn’t have a common interest anymore. Fifteen years ago, 50% of the student body went to the games. And after the games, we went to the pizza parlor and talked about the game. We all couldn’t wait for the game to come along.”

But these days, when the game comes along, many students at Rancho Alamitos don’t seem to care. Brian Han, a Rancho Alamitos senior, hasn’t attended a game this season.

“I don’t have the time,” he said. “I work a lot and I study.”

Said senior John Hamaya, who played freshman football: “It’s not so much the thing to do. Some of us just don’t have the patience to go and sit at a football game.”

Doo Yun, a junior and a recent immigrant from Korea, said he doesn’t like football.

“I like baseball and hockey, but I don’t know anything about football.”

Some students say the team has almost become too successful for its own good.

“A lot of kids wonder why should they go if it’s going to be an easy win,” Carie Goetz said. “What’s the point in going if you know what’s going to happen?”

Rancho Alamitos principal Tom Robins couldn’t help but notice the smattering of fans for his team’s league opener against Santiago.

“I’m a little disappointed in the crowd,” Robins said as he looked into the nearly empty stands before kickoff.

But when asked where all the fans were, Robins said he wasn’t sure.

“If I knew what caused it, I’d try to change it,” he said. “I can’t really blame the economy anymore because that’s starting to turn around. Maybe it’s TV, maybe people are watching the baseball playoffs or the [presidential] debates.”

Or maybe, there’s nobody to blame.

“In my day, it was, be true to your school,” McElroy said. “It’s not quite the same anymore. There’s too many other things for kids to do.”

Said Case: “I don’t know what else we would have done anyway. I don’t think our lives were that boring back then. Going to football games was something we wanted to do. It was part of growing up, meeting and developing socially. I think it’s a safe place to be. It should be something that parents fully support.”

Even as disappointing as some of his crowds have been, Case has not given up on his community.

“I still think we have good fans and if we have a great year, I think we’ll bring a lot more of them out of the woodwork,” he said.

McElroy said there’s no better feeling than to walk out of the locker room and see a stadium filled with roaring fans.

“I remember before our game with Mater Dei in 1993 seeing a packed house, smelling the burgers and looking at the crowd bustling around, I turned to my assistant coach Bob Burgess and said, ‘It just doesn’t get any better than this.’ He said, ‘Yeah, this is what high school football is all about.’ ”