AREA COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Football season is here, but Will Thurston is more concerned with birdies and pars than swing passes and end-arounds.

After 21 years as a football assistant at Moorpark College, Thurston left the program to coach the first-year women’s golf team at the school.

The golf team, which includes one player in her late 40s and one in her 30s, has a 2-3 record and Thurston is having fun.

“I don’t miss football whatsoever,” Thurston said.

It is the first women’s golf team at a Ventura County junior college and Thurston said Moorpark is filling a big void.

“There’s a lot of interest in junior golf and high school golf, and our college is tapping into the women’s golf scene,” Thurston said. “It’s pretty uncharted waters at the community college level.”

The Raiders are holding their own. Two of their losses came against Mt. San Antonio, defending state champion, and one against Orange Coast, which finished third in the state last year.

Thurston anticipated getting out of football by a certain time.

“I knew that when my two boys got into their teens, I would lose interest in becoming a head football coach,” he said.

Thurston’s 15-year-old son, Kyle, is a freshman at Thousand Oaks and among the top junior golf players in the state. Nick, 12, likes to surf.

“I was at the UCLA football game [on Saturday] with my kids,” Thurston said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was coaching football. I would have been at a [Moorpark] scrimmage.”

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Carl Ferrill, football coach at Valley College, is hoping to hold off surgery for prostate cancer until after the season.

“I have a checkup every week,” Ferrill said. “If [the cancer] is not moving, they’ll put off the surgery.”

Ferrill, in his second year with the Monarchs, said chemotherapy treatments the last few weeks left him without much energy.

“I did a poor job recruiting the local area because I just couldn’t get out,” Ferrill said. “I sent a letter to the local high school coaches apologizing for that.”

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The reality check of the week goes to Cal State Northridge receiver Drew Amerson for his postgame analysis after the Division I-AA Matadors were hammered by Division I-A Air Force, 55-6, on Saturday.

“We did certainly come here thinking we could really win this game,” Amerson said. “We had too many mental breakdowns and we took ourselves out of the game.”

Let’s hope Amerson didn’t ask Air Force officials if the Matadors could fly an F-14 because they thought they really could.