Mean Streak

Bob Noel has known about The Streak for years. But when it dawned on him earlier this week that Moorpark High hasn’t beaten Carpinteria in football in his lifetime, he could hardly believe it.

Noel is 62 years old.

He was born in 1935, the year Carpinteria beat Moorpark, 25-0, to start a 51-game winning streak against the Musketeers, a record of dominance believed by experts to be unmatched in high school football.

The legacy of defeat has been passed from generation to generation in Moorpark, a tightknit community that because of a quirk of fate finally has a chance to exorcise the demons of seasons past.

The Moorpark-Carpinteria series was discontinued after the 1991 season when Moorpark changed leagues, but by luck of the draw and success in the playoffs, the teams will meet for what could be the last time, at 7:30 tonight in a Southern Section Division X semifinal game in Moorpark.

For Noel, a physical education teacher at Moorpark and the school’s former football coach, revenge would be sweet.

“I’d love to see us kick the snot out of them,” he said. “It would be nice to see our kids do a little payback for all those years we were the whipping post.”

Fran Fredette, Moorpark’s defensive coordinator, can’t help but feel that divine intervention has played a role in matching the Musketeers against their old nemesis, considering Moorpark will move to a new league and to a higher playoff division next season because of increasing enrollment.

“It’s like someone is smiling down on us, saying, ‘Here’s your last chance,’ ” Fredette said. “It couldn’t have worked out any better. The only problem is we have to win the game. It isn’t going to happen by magic.”

Perhaps because he doesn’t want his players distracted, Moorpark Coach Ron Wilford has taken a low-key approach in preparing for the game tonight. Unlike his predecessor, Rob Dearborn, who used to make his players face north toward Carpinteria during practice, Wilford said The Streak isn’t the focal point for a team trying to win its first division championship.

When he addressed his players Monday, Wilford told them, “Hey, there’s a streak. You’re aware of it. That’s the last we’re going to talk about it.”

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Likewise, Coley Candaele, Carpinteria’s first-year coach, isn’t making a big deal about his school’s dominance over the Musketeers.

“Tradition is out the window,” said Candaele, who played quarterback for the Warriors on three consecutive Southern Section championship teams from 1987-89. “We don’t get to play the 50 or so [Moorpark] teams that Carpinteria played in the past. We get to play the 1997 Moorpark team. We’re not thinking about what happened in the past.”

The past, though, has a way of creeping into every conversation concerning the Moorpark-Carpinteria rivalry.

German Sotelo, a senior wide receiver and kicker for Carpinteria, said he and his teammates aren’t dwelling on The Streak, though they are aware there is pressure among alumni and within the community to keep it going.

“My mom told me someone called her and said they were more worried about this game than [if we played in] the championship game,” German said.

Jaime Villa, a senior nose guard for Moorpark, said his older brother, Frank, and his friends have communicated the importance of the game. Frank was on the last Moorpark team to play Carpinteria in 1991, a 28-26 Warrior victory.

“[Breaking The Streak] means a little more to me,” Jaime said. “My brother gives me a little bit of pressure and a lot of his friends are the same way. They say, ‘You better win.’ ”

Dearborn, who was Moorpark’s coach from 1988-95 and is now athletic director, said former Musketeer players from as far away as Tennessee are flying in to hopefully witness the end of The Streak.

Anticipating an overflow crowd, Moorpark has added portable seating for 500 to its 7,000-seat stadium and has arranged for extra security, additional ticket booths and more traffic details. Moorpark police cars have carried signs promoting the game.

“This week has just been crazy,” Dearborn said. “The phone has been ringing off the hook. It’s all anybody is talking about.”

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It was under Dearborn that Moorpark began the transformation from a perennial doormat to a winning program. The Musketeers (11-1) have not had a losing season since 1992 and in 1993 won their first league title since 1942, one of nine seasons between 1928 and 1991 in which they did not play Carpinteria.

Dearborn wanted to continue playing Carpinteria after Moorpark moved from the Tri-Valley League to the Frontier League in 1992, but was rebuffed by Carpinteria administrators who cited financial considerations and Moorpark’s burgeoning enrollment as reasons for ending the series.

Dearborn has another theory.

“The real truth is [Carpinteria] wanted to leave The Streak in place,” he said. “Our [junior varsity] team had not beaten them in about 30 years. When we beat Carp in 1991, the writing was on the wall.

“I don’t blame them. They had nothing to gain to keep playing us, so they stopped.”

Strange as it seems, Moorpark once had the upper hand in the series, which Carpinteria leads, 54-3. The Musketeers won the first two games, in 1928 and 1929, and evened the series at 3-3 with a 13-6 victory in 1934.

In 1928, a winding two-lane blacktop connected Moorpark and Carpinteria, a seaside community 10 miles south of Santa Barbara. Football was just starting up on the high school level and towns with teams were few and far between.

So, although they were 40 miles apart, Moorpark would travel to Carpinteria for the third game of the season. It was primitive football, but it was tough and spirited. Players wore leather helmets with no facemasks, and padding was minimal.

Andy Waters was the captain and star fullback on the 1934 Moorpark team, the last one to beat Carpinteria. He scored the game’s first touchdown on a two-yard run.

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Waters, 80, said he is one of three surviving members of the ’34 team. He will be in Moorpark’s stadium tonight, rooting for his alma mater to match its winning effort of 63 years ago.

“I’d like to see them win,” he said. “Then they’d be going for the CIF championship. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Waters still lives in Moorpark, on the same ranch his parents moved to in 1919. He raises lemons, oranges and avocados with the help of his son, Jim, a former standout lineman at Santa Clara High in Oxnard. Waters’ two grandsons, Andrew and Josh, played football at Moorpark in recent years.

Growing up, Waters remembers, Moorpark was a sleepy farming community with a population of about 800. Today, it is a suburban boom town, with a population close to 30,000.

“It’s a different life now,” Waters said. “I don’t like it. I wish all you people stayed away.”

Of course, it is because of new families that Moorpark has been able to shed its image as a pipsqueak on the football field. The Musketeers lost 46 consecutive games from 1977 through 1982.

When Waters graduated from the high school, there were 20 kids in the senior class. Moorpark’s enrollment is now up to about 1,700, making it considerably larger than Carpinteria’s student body of 774.

Though always a small town, Carpinteria achieved big things in football. The Warrior program took off under Coach Merle Staub in the 1930s and set Southern Section records by winning 11 league titles in a row from 1946 through 1956 and winning 54 consecutive league games from 1947 through 1957.

Carpinteria won section titles in 1975, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1991, and was runner-up in 1979, 1986, and 1995.

“I think a lot of it is just tradition,” said Lou Panizzon, 56, a former Warrior quarterback who coached the team from 1975-89 and is now a vice principal at the school. “We are a small school in a small town and we’ve always gotten a lot of support from the administration and the community.”

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Van Latham personifies the tradition at Carpinteria. Now the athletic director, Latham, 37, played on the football team under Panizzon. Latham’s late father, Bob, was a lineman for Carpinteria before going on to Stanford and playing in the 1952 Rose Bowl.

Latham, whose grandfather moved to Carpinteria in the 1920s and started the local lumberyard, said it was years before anyone noticed that the school had rung up such an impressive winning streak against Moorpark.

“It wasn’t something people knew about,” he said. “It wasn’t until the mid-’80s when Moorpark’s enrollment started growing and they started to have more successful teams that all of a sudden the streak went on the front burner.

“It was just a game on the schedule to us. We knew we had always been successful against them, and we figured it should continue.”

For Marie Sullenbarger, ending The Streak is more important now than it was when she was a cheerleader at Moorpark in the early 1960s, an era when there wasn’t much to cheer about.

“I was just a teenager then,” she said. “Winning games wasn’t that big of a deal. Life went on.”

A 29-year employee of Moorpark High, Sullenbarger has been surrounded by Musketeer football players her entire life. Her father, Henry Bravo, played for Moorpark in the early 1940s, starting a tradition that has included her late husband, Charles; her twin brothers, Ernest and Joe; her son, Charles; and two nephews.

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If that wasn’t enough, her ties to the program became even stronger last season when her son-in-law, Wilford, became head coach.

Sullenbarger said the game tonight will be special for bringing old-time Moorpark families together with newer residents in a common cause: Cheering on their boys to end a curse that has hung over the community for the better part of this century.

“We have gone from this sleepy school to this awesome school,” she said. “We deserve to win. We deserve to feel big.”

Correspondent Mike Bresnahan contributed to this story.

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One-Sided Rivalry

Carpinteria leads series with Moorpark, 54-3

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Year Score 1928 Moorpark 12, Carpinteria 7 1929 Moorpark 9, Carpinteria 0 1930 Carpinteria 31, Moorpark 6 1932 Carpinteria 12, Moorpark 0 1933 Carpinteria 18, Moorpark 6 1934 Moorpark 13, Carpinteria 6 1935 Carpinteria 25, Moorpark 0 1936 Carpinteria 21, Moorpark 7 1938 Carpinteria 39, Moorpark 0 1944 Carpinteria 40, Moorpark 0 1944 Carpinteria 40, Moorpark 0 1945 Carpinteria 31, Moorpark 12 1945 Carpinteria 41, Moorpark 6 1947 Carpinteria 18, Moorpark 6 1948 Carpinteria 45, Moorpark 0 1949 Carpinteria 39, Moorpark 6 1950 Carpinteria 52, Moorpark 7 1951 Carpinteria 49, Moorpark 6 1952 Carpinteria 19, Moorpark 0 1953 Carpinteria 19, Moorpark 0 1954 Carpinteria 19, Moorpark 0 1955 Carpinteria 20, Moorpark 14 1956 Carpinteria 34, Moorpark 6 1958 Carpinteria 19, Moorpark 8 1959 Carpinteria 35, Moorpark 14 1960 Carpinteria 19, Moorpark 0 1961 Carpinteria 22, Moorpark 0 1962 Carpinteria 25, Moorpark 6 1963 Carpinteria 20, Moorpark 7 1964 Carpinteria 20, Moorpark 0 1965 Carpinteria 20, Moorpark 0 1966 Carpinteria 25, Moorpark 13 1967 Carpinteria 21, Moorpark 0 1968 Carpinteria 19, Moorpark 0 1969 Carpinteria 42, Moorpark 26 1970 Carpinteria 28, Moorpark 0 1971 Carpinteria 41, Moorpark 6 1972 Carpinteria 38, Moorpark 0 1973 Carpinteria 36, Moorpark 0 1974 Carpinteria 47, Moorpark 0 1975 Carpinteria 26, Moorpark 0 1976 Carpinteria 35, Moorpark 7 1977 Carpinteria 20, Moorpark 14 1978 Carpinteria 42, Moorpark 0 1979 Carpinteria 69, Moorpark 0 1980 Carpinteria 49, Moorpark 0 1981 Carpinteria 34, Moorpark 0 1982 Carpinteria 34, Moorpark 13 1983 Carpinteria 27, Moorpark 0 1984 Carpinteria 14, Moorpark 10 1985 Carpinteria 28, Moorpark 0 1986 Carpinteria 46, Moorpark 0 1987 Carpinteria 42, Moorpark 0 1988 Carpinteria 55, Moorpark 7 1989 Carpinteria 43, Moorpark 10 1990 Carpinteria 34, Moorpark 20 1991 Carpinteria 28, Moorpark 26

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Scoring totals: Carpinteria 1,728, Moorpark 303

Average score: Carpinteria 30, Moorpark 5

Shutouts: Carpinteria 28,Moorpark 1

Teams met twice in 1944 and 1945 seasons