AN UNUSUAL YEAR IN PREP FOOTBALL
How Pomona navigated one of the weirdest openers in school history “Hey up there. Hey! Can you social distance so we don’t get kicked out?” A pack of Pomona cheerleaders that had been filing into the metal bleachers froze, then scattered like mice.
Prep football during a pandemic is different. Very different. Pods of fans. Players sitting on chairs and avoiding the nearby benches. And a quiet that allows everyone to hear every word spoken.
“Thannnnnnnk you.”
One cheer squad was in the stands. Another stood on boxes placed roughly 20 yards behind the north end zone at the NAAC, dancing from a distance.
The sidelines looked more like a courtyard wedding than a football game. Instead of a long bench, 11 chairs were lined up in two rows, spaced about two feet apart. The loudest ambient noise other than the public address system was the constant, gentle buzzing of a small drone overhead.
What stunned Jay Madden the most during his season opener wasn’t that he could actually hear himself think. It was that he could suddenly hear everybody else think, too.
“You could pretty much hear everybody talking,” the longtime Pomona coach reflected. “If the coaches were coaching, you could hear every word they’d say. Even though there weren’t a lot of people, that was weird.”
Everything was weird. Befitting 2020, the first major Class 5A showdown in the metro, Panthers vs. Chaparral on a hazy Thursday evening, felt like it was being played just west of the Twilight Zone.
Fans were seated in two- tothreeperson pods along zig- zagging, alternating rows. Players brought their own water, hauled their own bags. Locker rooms were verboten.
The Wolverines, the road team, held their pregame, halftime and postgame meetings in or behind the south end zone. The Panthers did the same on the north side. The only shelter at field level was a set of porta- potties standing along the northeast corner of the facility.
“So it was interesting, how that halftime looked,” Chaparral athletic director Rob Johnson said with a grin. “It just doesn’t feel the same for them.”
It felt a heck of a lot better than the alternative, mind you.
“Ralston ( Valley) just got shut down,” Madden announced to Pomona principal Andy Giese just before the National Anthem. “Pine Creek got it.
“Every game, you gotta go …” With that, the coach clasped his hands together in a quickie prayer and rolled his eyes skyward. In The Year of COVID- 19, when you’re trying to play football, you’ll take any help from Higher Powers that you can get.
* * *
That the game — Pomona, ranked No. 5 in CHSAANow’s preseason poll, rolled 35- 0 — went off without serious incident was something of a small miracle in and of itself. Especially given the run- up.
The Wolverines brought 48 players. Madden suited up just 31. Most played both ways. Pomona started a 5- foot- 8 wideout at quarterback, Jack Pospisil, and the kid spent the better part of the next three hours zipping past Chaparral defenders the way the mechanical rabbit does a pack of greyhounds.
“We had six linemen suited up,” Madden said. “If anybody got hurt, we were done.”
The Panthers also ran wild without one of their stars, starting left tackle Aaron Karas, a 6- foot- 5 mountain of a teen who was under coronavirus quarantine for the week and couldn’t practice. They were short two starting cornerbacks and their top safety.
“A running back had to step in at corner and play every snap,” Madden said. “So that was a little bit more difficult.”
Just not as difficult as the few days prior. The Friday afternoon before the opener, Madden got a call, and his heart sank: One of the Pomona reserves had recorded a positive COVID test after Thursday’s practice.
While Madden had made a point to have the varsity and JV practice separately for this very reason, the latter had been practicing with the freshmen at the time, a gambit that had just sent 50 backups into quarantine for 14 days.
“We didn’t even know if we were going to have buses until seven days before the game,” Madden recalled. “We didn’t know how many kids could get on the buses. And the rules kept changing. I have no problem with following the rules, but I need to know what they are. Our AD did a good job of getting as much information as he could.”
The Panthers had their temperatures taken before they got on and off the buses. Favoring discretion, they’d done comparatively little live tackling in the weeks leading up to the opener. Madden said they’d hit embarrassingly little, given the sudden roster shortage, in the week immediately leading up to the opener.
“I think we’re all a little beat up, all tired, for sure,” senior guard Romin Jimenez said. “I know that our O- line, after that second or third drive ( Thursday), where we were just driving and driving, we were just gassed. But I think with them out, we’ve just got to be healthy. Be smart. Especially at practice and stuff like that. Keep our bodies right.”
The Wolverines, meanwhile, had also struggled to keep healthy bodies upright. Chaparral turned up with the No. 1 and No. 2 quarterbacks on its depth chart in quarantine. After the third- string
signal- caller got dinged up, coach Jeff Ketron was forced to finish the contest with his fourth option behind center.
“Hopefully, it starts to settle down, people will figure it out, and do things a little bit smarter,” Johnson said.
“When they go home and hang out with their friends — how are we doing that, what kind of ( stuff) are we getting into? They weren’t really thinking through that and now, all of sudden, it hits them: ‘ Oh, now I’m not playing, so now I’ve got to probably think a little bit more about what I’m doing.’”
If COVID tore into Pomona’s depth from the bottom up, Chaparral was getting bit from the top down.
“Actually, mercy- wise, we were one case away from varsity football going out and potentially school going on a two- week break,” Johnson said.
“Every day, every other day, it
seems like we have a new case that we’re trying to deal with. So it’s all ( we) deal with every day, is dealing with quarantines. That’s kind of our new job: We’re quarantine cops.”
* * *
The buzzing stopped. The crowd, sparse and spartan, applauded the effort and made for the exits. The 31 Panthers, job done, jogged to the south side of the stands to salute them in kind.
“DOG! SOLDIERS!” they barked. “DOG! SOLDIERS!”
“Masks or helmets on!” Madden shouted as troops turned and marched the other direction, forming a semi- circle around their coach near the north end zone.
Long way to go. Be smart. Be safe.
“No access to the building,” Madden reminded his kids as they separated to retrieve their belongings. “Just get your bags and
go home. Who’s going home with their parents?”
When the buses pulled back into the high school late Thursday night, Madden looked out at the student lot. To the spot where the players’ peers would ordinarily, traditionally be waiting to celebrate their return. Silence.
“Usually the student section comes back with us and waits for us in the student parking lot. That didn’t happen,” Madden said. “Usually, that’s a big deal.”
Weird, weird night. The weirdest.
“But I’ll bet, if you ask any kid out here if it’s worth it, with everything leading up to it?” Johnson said. “I’ll bet you every one of them would say, ‘ Yeah, we’ll do it all over again. We’ll do it next week. Here we go.’”