This story has really nothing to do with what went on during the play on the field or on a court. As a matter of fact, the game turned into a blowout.
This story is more about what it took for me to go to a city I had really no familiarity with before and how I got a story to our paper with an early deadline in mind.
Yeah, don't try this at a paper with a rookie. You might get burned, editors.
It was Thursday, February 26, 2004. I had been at the Palatka Daily News for over six months and had gotten huge praise for how I had handled things at the paper when I had first gotten there, from my boss' heart attack and having to work the sports department alone the first month and a half to whatever layout and editing I did with the section to being reliable to get a story to my boss before deadline.
OK, I'll admit it -- I was the star prodigy. But I also welcomed doing events away from Putnam County, which I was finding out early had as much as excitement within its boundaries as a Saturday gathering at a picnic to watch grass grow. So when my boss said he had season press passes to cover the Jacksonville Jaguars, I jumped on that like a fat boy to cake. And if there was a state championship worthy of covering, I could easily just combine it with something else that I could cover the day before. For instance, in early November 2003, I got to cover Crescent City Junior-Senior High's final football game of the season, a blowout loss at St. Petersburg Catholic, a good three hours from the building. After I got to write that story up at the local Kinko's in Clearwater, I had a hotel room waiting for me in St. Pete to stay overnight to cover the FHSAA 2A cross country championship meet the next day since both Talisa Bishop and Jeremy Criscione were running to represent Interlachen High. Jeremy finished sixth in that meet, Talisa had finished 27th in her final high school race that night. It was also the last varsity event I covered involving the late Dwayne Cox, who would pass away in August 2004.
It was Saturday, February 21, 2004, that I had covered Crescent City's District 8-2A boys basketball championship victory at home against Father Lopez High of Daytona Beach, the first district title for coach Al Carter in his sixth season in charge. While I got to see Carter's Raiders win that title, my boss got to see Palatka High lose its district championship game at Nease High against Nease's Panthers, 78-67 ... the same coach Bud Beech-led Nease High team that I saw torment Key West High in the state 3A championship two years earlier in Lakeland, though Chet Stachitas was looooong gone by then. As a side note, one Nease player who came off the bench to score seven points in that outing was a sophomore named Tim Tebow.
With Crescent City winning the district title and Palatka losing its district championship, it meant that Crescent City would open up the state tournament hosting Jacksonville Providence, a private school, in the Region 2-2A tournament, while Palatka, though losing to Nease, would be on the road in the first round of the Region 2-4A tournament against District 8-2A champion Jones High of Orlando.
By Monday night, though, we were finding out that the Friday edition of our newspaper had to be out and running on the presses at 10 p.m.
F**king 10 p.m.!
Why, you may wonder? At that time in early 2004, we were running advertisement circulars from Wal-mart. And they came separately from the newspaper that was being printed, so to make life a bit easier for our carriers who had to put the papers together, they wanted us to be done early so the carriers weren't delivering the newspapers at say, 5 in the morning.
I look back now on some of the hoops we had to jump through at that time and it makes me happy we eventually updated into the 21st century. It was a long time coming.
But it wasn't going to help us on this particular Thursday night. I know Andy, very close to those at Palatka High and still to this day close them, wanted to go to see the Panthers play Jones High's Tigers. But the game was down in Orlando, and quite honestly, he needed to be laying out our section early so he could get the stories he and I wrote, put the pictures James, our photographer then, took of the Crescent City-Providence game, and get the paper out by 10 p.m. as management wanted. Andy was more adept at it than I was, even though I knew the system fairly well.
So we switched for the sake of getting the paper out on time. He took the Crescent City game with Providence, while it was I who got to make the road trip to Orlando.
It was exciting for me, but one problem – in all my life, I had never ventured through Orlando other than the one time just over two years earlier when I was taking a vacation from the Key West Citizen and I had a Westgate timeshare that I finished paying for and took the week before Christmas to stay in Orlando for a week. It was really, really nice I do admit. I got to see Orlando outside of Disney World and I had a blast.
But that was it. I had driven through Orlando on I-4, but had not actually stopped there in my six months at the paper. Now I was going somewhere that I was not all that familiar with. And with the early deadline, I didn't want to have to run to the Orlando Sentinel to write the story in which time is the key. So just a couple of days before this game in O-town, I called up Mapquest to see where the heck I was going.
The game was not going to be played at Jones High. The school gymnasium was going through renovations, so all the basketball games they hosted were held at the Memorial Middle School gymnasium. The good news, I find out, was that this gym and school was located right off of I-4 and off Orange Blossom Trail. Figured I'd be there in no time.
Back in 2004, though, I had a penchant for road trips in which I could accomplish two or three things in one long roadie. And before I finally got a subscription to the magazine, my Billboard magazines came to the local bookstores on Wednesdays in northeast Florida. But the one store I had any trust in to have the magazine for a Thursday pickup was the Books-A-Million store located off of State Road-200 in Ocala. Billboard, the top news-worthy music magazine in the business better known for their weekly charts, including the Hot 100, was a staple of mine ever since I got my first one in December 1979.
I can't live without my mag, let's just say that.
So after preparing the scoreboard page like I normally do when I have a road trip the night before, I didn't have to see the office that night one bit. All I had to do was get to my game and get there safely, then get to the local Kinko's and get there safely. And then get home and, yeah, you get it -- get home safely.
The first part of the road trip was to Ocala where I would trek along State Road-20 past Interlachen to get to Hawthorne. I'd veer off onto US-301 and head south from there to Ocala. It was a straight shot down, but the one thing I remember from making this ride was in the northbound lane, these two very good-looking women were hitch-hiking north. My thought, was, "Oh, if only I was going north!"
I wasn't though. I had left at 4 p.m. with the goal of getting to the Books-A-Million by just after 5. I found it, they had the Billboard magazine copy I needed, I paid for it and got a nice discount from the store for using their card and was on my way back to US-301, which was now US-301/US-441. The plan here was to take US-301/441 south all the way to Orlando. Sound easy, right?
Well little did I know that the trip on US-441 from Ocala to Orlando wasn't going to be your normal run-of-the-mill, get-there-in-90-minute trip. I completely forgot to factor in traffic lights and I must have hit every red light you can imagine from Ocala through Leesburg through Tavares through Zellwood and through Apopka.
This was where I knew I blew it for not being well-versed with the roads around Orlando: It was 6:20 p.m. and I knew I needed some kind of a shortcut, anywhere that would get me closer to my destination. And along US-441 as I was going toward Orlando, I should have remained on the road until it linked up with State Road-50 or gotten on the first toll road I saw and let that hook up with Florida's Turnpike and onto the East-West Expressway. I would have gotten dumped off back on US-17/92/441 ... the OBT ... and would have been about five miles from my destination.
But no, I just kept going and made a wrong turn and found myself on State Road-46 – heading away from Orlando. By the time I figured this all out, it was 6:45 p.m. and I was getting getting onto I-4 at Exit 90 with 15 minutes to go to get to the game and a possible traffic jam ahead of me between Exit 90 and Exit 81 since I was driving through the heart of Orlando.
And sure as anything, there was some traffic, but thankfully, not the kind of traffic that holds you up for minutes upon minutes. I was able to navigate my way through the I-4 jigsaw puzzle and toward Exit 80, which was the OBT. I jumped off that left-handed exit and realized the moment I got off ... I was heading the wrong way!! It was not even 10 seconds and I knew I was on the wrong side of I-4.
Again, thankfully, I didn't have traffic that badly behind me and there was nothing in front of me. So I could get into the middle lane and just turn the car around going the other way on OBT. And that's where I saw "her."
Yeah, my first Orange Blossom Trail hooker. She was dressed the part: An African-American young lady scantily-clad, tight jeans and fairly long heels. It was dark and it didn't take long from there to realize that yeah, I was in the really, really, really bad part of Orlando.
From the directions I had, I got to the first traffic light and made a left turn. I had to drive almost half a mile through this dumpy area of the city to get to the middle school. By the time I get out of the car in the school parking lot, it's just about 7 p.m. I had wasted valuable time with a turn I didn't make and now I found myself rushing through the parking lot to get to my destination.
But as I get to the entrance to the gym, I see both teams starting to warm up ... and there's like 10 minutes before the game on the scoreboard clock. It's almost 7:05 p.m. The game is starting at 7. I see Palatka coach Willie Mitchell by the bench watching his team and asked what's going on.
"We took a wrong turn on the way here," he said. "We just got here about 10 minutes ago so they were kind enough to let us warm up with the usual time."
On one hand, I was relieved I didn't miss a moment of this state tournament game. The bad news, though, was that I had a 10 p.m. deadline to play with and what if this game goes to overtime? This is going to be a nightmare. I have confidence I can bang a story and boxscore on this game out in about 30 minutes, but this is now too close for comfort.
Palatka's team had talent, and leading the charge was our paper's eventual player of the year, Tavarres Williams, a senior averaging 25.8 points a game who was on his way to the University of Southern Mississippi to play both football and basketball for the Eagles. They had a nice forward tandem in junior Laveras Keenan and senior James Kiser. They had talented youngsters in A.C. Leonard and Josh Miller. And their point guard, senior Teddy Brown, could not have been more than 5-foot-3.
But laugh as I may about Young's height, he epitomized the shortness of the Panther squad. And that was going to be a problem against a Jones team that had lost the state 3A championship the year before and was bringing back a good amount of its talent, including 6-foot-6 senior center Antoine Dade, a manchild that no Panther player could match up efficiently with.
So with that disadvantage in my mind already going in, I had to take a look to see what the rest of the team had in store. They were big and they were quick. I suddenly realized that the Panthers, who were 13-9 going in, had very little chance against the Tigers, who were 23-4 on the court, but had to forfeit five of their victories during the season because of the use of an ineligible player.
By 7:25 p.m., the game finally tipped off. And it didn't take long for this game to be decided.
The first Palatka possession actually. Williams got to the midcourt line and as if someone barked an order, senior guard Elwin Carbon came rushing toward the cool-as-a-cucumber Williams. So startled by what he saw, Williams dribbled the ball off his foot and out of bounds. Palatka, to its credit, though, rebounded from the first of those 25 turnovers and took a 5-2 lead in the first 93 seconds of the game.
But I knew it wasn't going to last long. Point guard Darius Walker hit Dade with an alley-oop pass. He got a hand on the ball and directed it into the basket while being fouled by Kiser in the process. He hit the free throw after that to tie the game at 5-all.
Kiser hit one of two free throws on the next possession down and the Panthers led 6-5.
That would be the last lead they would have on the night. Palatka did it tie it one more time at 10-all before Walker hit Jarvis Williams with a bullet pass underneath and Williams put in the layup while getting fouled by Miller. He completed the three-point play and Jones led 13-10 with 3:16 left in the opening quarter. And it was only going to get worse as for the rest of the quarter, Jones outscored Palatka 16-2 to take a 29-12 lead after one period.
Still holding a 36-21 lead just two minutes into the second quarter, Jones' Tigers went on another run, this time 7-0 to go up 43-21 as Jarvis Williams, who finished with 19 points, hit a 3-pointer and a layup and Walker hit a layup. They would lead it 51-30 at halftime.
The game was still long from being in 35-point, running-clock mode, but I knew the Panthers were not making a tremendous comeback in the second half. I called Andy to let him know where my game stood and that it started late. I could hear the sound of concern in his voice as his game was already nearing the end of the third quarter with Crescent City leading 30-27. I assured him I knew where I was going after the game to file my story – the Kinko's not too far from where I was sitting at the moment.
It was going to be interesting to say the least.
Starting the third quarter, Keenan bombed in a 3-pointer to cut the lead to 51-33. But that only made the Tigers mad. They went on a 15-3 run and suddenly had a 66-36 lead with 4:55 to go. And it was getting worse. Jones led it 71-44 going into the final quarter. And they were about to pour it on more thanks to Jarvis Williams and Dade, who finished with 18 points, seven rebounds and one blocked shot. By the midway point of the already decided matchup, the Jones lead ballooned to 35 points. And with that, the clock ran freely the rest of the way. This, still, didn't stop the Tigers from running their offense, even with the substitutes in the ballgame. By the end of the night, Jones shot 51.4 percent from the field, going 38-for-74, and out-rebounded Palatka, 46-28.
Suddenly, the Tigers were at 90-plus points. And they weren't stopping. They got to 92, then 94, 96 and 98 with about 80 seconds left.
Damn, they were trying to break the scoreboard and flash triple-digits. This, though, was not going to happen. Palatka took its sweet time down the court down 98-64 and with about 55 seconds left, the diminutive Brown at the free-throw line after being fouled. Now keep in mind, a running clock is a running clock. The Jones fans still there were demanding Brown speed up his free-throw routine. But all Brown did was smile. He missed the first one. The clock was down to about 28 seconds and he was still taking his sweet time in preparing to take the second shot.
He did and he hit the shot. But there was about nine seconds left. The Tigers rushed the ball up the court and took some wild 3-point shot that missed the mark. The buzzer sounded and the Tigers had their 98-65 victory.
Before he could go into the locker room to talk to his kids, I grabbed Mitchell and asked him a few quick questions for which I was only going to use one of those questions' answers for my story. I jumped back into the car and drove off to the Kinko's to do my story. It was now about 9:10 p.m. and I had 50 minutes to get to the Kinko's, re-add my statistics, type in the agate boxscore and do the story. They were serious about this 10 p.m. deadline thing.
Again, though, I had really no idea of where this Kinko's was located. I found myself back on I-4 and heading west for about six miles to Sand Lake Drive (Exit 74). Once I got off that exit, I headed south toward my next turn. That would be Orange Blossom Trail. I was back on US-441 and heading north toward the Kinko's, which I would find by about 9:35 p.m. If I had just taken OBT south, I would have gotten to my destination more than likely 10-15 minutes sooner.
Now the pressure was really on. I had to bang that story out fast. I don't know how I did it, but I got both the story and boxscore done by 9:55 p.m. Andy did a quick-read and got the last two pages out and onto the presses by 10:05 p.m. He had asked earlier in the day without my knowledge for a few minutes more since we were covering state tournament basketball games. And though our managing editor was reluctant (this guy was reluctant to allow us to breathe upon asking), he gave us an extra 10 minutes to finish up. I found out from Andy that Crescent City held a 10-point lead with over four minutes to go against Providence and got outscored, 12-1, the rest of the way to lose its regional tournament game, 43-42. He DEFINITELY had the better game of the two of us that night.
With my night done, I ended up going to the Ale House not too far from the Kinko's on OBT. I was there to meet an online lady friend named Denise who had blue eyes that were prettier than the waters around Bermuda. She was an Ohio native who happened to be a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan. We had a good time. I left the restaurant by about 12:30 in the morning and headed north back to Palatka after what was a really, really long day and night.
It was an experience I will never forget from start to finish.
And none of the better drama from that day even happened in the game I was covering.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Friday, January 31, 2014
The 11-year wait that almost ended in a title
Eleven long years had passed between the most infamous game in South Jersey girls basketball history and this game I was about to cover on Monday, March 6, 1995, at Rancocas Valley High School in Mount Holly.
After coming up short of reaching the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV final the year before when it lost to Vineland, Southern Regional was in the SJ IV championship game after an 11-year absence. And the opponent on the other side of the court for this title game was Washington Township -- the same Minutemen program that beat the Rams in the 1984 SJ IV title game in overtime.
The problem, though, was when doing the preview for the game with longtime Southern Regional basketball coach Kathy Snyder, she didn't want to discuss the game. I knew this because the year before, she didn't want to talk about the game that ended the most wonderful season in her time with the program. The 1983-84 Southern team had talented players on it like Patti Gallant, Kathy Harlfinger and Judy Keefer, but had the star player of the Shore area in senior all-everything guard Jill Spaschak.
It was Spaschak that hit the "jumper heard 'round the Shore" on February 25, 1984 at the buzzer that lifted Southern to the 42-40 victory over Neptune in the Shore Conference Tournament championship game at Brick Memorial High School. Ten years later and almost to the date, I talked to Spaschak about that team, that game, that season, along with Snyder, who was Kathy Leslie at the time of the championship.
They were literal fountains when talking about that team. Once they started jabbering, you couldn't get them to stop. So many memories in those phone calls. By the end of their calls, I felt like I knew every single game they played that year and that I was in that Brick Memorial gym when Spaschak hit that game-winner. Unfortunately, I never got to see that Southern team -- that was my senior year in high school and I was focusing on just being a senior. So I had a lot of catch-up to do, though, I had done a feature story on Keefer when we were both at Ocean County College and she was just a delight to talk to.
However, there was one sore spot that was off limits. I didn't know it, but when I asked Snyder about the night of Saturday, March 10, 1984, she simply said, "I don't want to discuss that. It's still too painful."
And it was. It was the loss that ended that magical 28-2 Southern season. But it wasn't just any loss. This was a hurtful one. Southern led 24-0 Washington Township by as many as a dozen points early in the fourth quarter in the SJ IV title game at Overbrook High School. Then midway through the fourth quarter, Spaschak got called for her fourth foul, a mystery foul that she wasn't really near when the call was made. But mere moments later, she committed her fifth foul that disqualified her from the game. Again, she was nowhere near the site of the foul. How do I know this? It just so happened that Adelphia-Cable 8 was doing the game for future broadcast. And it was pretty darn clear to me that if there was a foul called, it wasn't on Jill Spaschak.
Southern, sadly, fell apart in that game, Washington Township tied it and ultimately won the game in overtime, 51-46. And the memory of that broadcast was the stuff that wasn't allowed to be said on the air. Game announcers Ken Turp and the outspoken Nick "The Quick" Werkman were reporting "angry." They were livid with the officiating that was being done and let their feelings be known in that broadcast of 30 years ago.
And I have to agree to this day, they were right. I wish I was in that Overbrook High gym that night, but I wasn't. And what I saw on TV was just deplorable. Every close call went against Southern and the whistles seemed to avoid Washington Township. In the Ocean County Observer's account of the game, Kathy Snyder was not once quoted in it.
That's how angry she was. And it didn't make her feel any better when she found out that one of the officials for that particular game was the roommate of one of the Washington Township head coaches!
Excuse me, but how the h-e-double hockey sticks was that assignment allowed to happen? Needless to say, the NJSIAA, looking stupid as expected over what happened, passed down a rule that said officials could not do the games of relatives, friends, roommates, etc., shortly after the incident.
It was a little too late for Kathy Snyder or that amazingly talented team of '84. And it took 11 years for that program to get back to the SJ IV title game.
But here they were, and the fact that it would be a talented Washington Township team on the other side was just pure coincidence. Then again, these Minutemen were ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press' state poll. They had a star senior guard named Jen Natale, who was closing in on 1,000 career points in this final. Their supporting cast was a strong one and they liked to run it up and down.
And that was playing perfectly into the hands of a master defensive coach like Snyder, who could turn any sports car into a bicycle with her team playing the right pressure defense and could slow the pace effectively offensively. And with a 21-2 record during the season, it's easy to say she had the kind of team that could slow the opponent down at any time.
The brains of the outfit was senior point guard Jodie Davis, who was Snyder's eyes on the court and could pretty much control what was happening on a basketball court. She was paired in the backcourt with another senior, Kirsten Sciallo. Jamie Bogdol was an effective forward. But the scoring brunt was handled by a 6-foot-1 16-year-old sophomore center named Candice McCallum, who by now, I had figured out that her first name was spelled with an 'i' in it so to remember that her play was like 'ice.'
The things you gotta do sometimes.
I knew I was in for a good game. But it was early in the afternoon, I got a phone call from work. The dayshift editor, Helen, had left me a message from Tom "The Candy Man" Kelleher. In all my years of working at the Observer and all those years I covered events where Tom was also there to hand out his trademark candy and sing his patriotic songs, never did I have to give him a call about anything.
Seems he heard that I was covering the game this night. He first thought one of our stringers at the time that he had known a lot better than me for years was doing the game. Well needless to say, word got to him that I was going out to Mount Holly to cover the game and just about five hours before the game, I was calling him at his Toms River home.
"Yeah, I heard you're doing the game tonight."
"Yup. That'd be me going out there."
"Can you pick me up and take me with you?"
I had to think about it. But it didn't take long for an answer.
"Suuuuuure. Give me your address and I will be there about 5 o'clock."
The game was a 6:30 p.m. start, and I knew it would take almost an hour to get out to Rancocas Valley. So I left my folks' place at 4:45 and headed toward near Indian Head Road where Tom lived. In all these years I was friendly with the man, I never knew where he lived, but he lived in a very modest house. He came out after I knocked on the door and he was dressed up like he always was, wearing his "Candy Man" hat, his blue metal-button jacket and buoyed by his waist-strapped pocket holder that nothing but Jolly Ranchers, gum and Tootsie Rolls.
Believe me when I say this -- this man was a dentist's dream.
So we head out on Route 571 and turn onto Route 70. From there, it was into Manchester and out of there. When the turnoff toward Pemberton came upon us, I made a slight right turn and it was one winding road after another until we found Route 38 and ultimately, we found the street that Rancocas Valley High was located.
By the time we got there at 6 p.m., I had left him to go do his thing and I went to do my thing. I knew he wasn't going to cause me any problems on this night and he knew I had a game to cover. I jotted down both teams' lineups and set up my statistical sheet and shot box soon after while sitting up top in the bleachers looking down at midcourt.
And when I heard who was singing the national anthem -- it was Tom -- I found myself saying, "Man, he works people quickly, doesn't he?" He did a stellar job as usual on the anthem.
This Washington Township team looked like it wanted to run. But defensive tempo does dictate a lot of things and on this night, Kathy Snyder's team wasn't going to allow that to happen.
And the Rams had one weapon that the Minutemen had no idea how to keep in check. That was the tall and lanky McCallum, Washington Township had a center to try and neutralize her named Melissa Pickering. She was no match and Snyder, Davis and McCallum knew that. Basically, what Davis or Sciallo did was throw high lob passes for McCallum over Pickering and McCallum laid those shots in for easy baskets.
While McCallum was having a blast in taking advantage of the defense the Minutemen were playing against her, Davis was effectively slowing things up and making sure that she was getting her center with passes in a positive position down low. Two times, the Rams built leads of seven points on the Minutemen in the second quarter and just as halftime approached, Davis delivered one more lob pass for an easy McCallum bucket to finish her 15-point first half. And Southern led at halftime once again by seven points.
Yeah, the No. 1 team in the state was losing by seven points to slow-'em-down Southern, 25-18. They were not wilting under the Washington Township pressure, turning it over just nine times in the first half. They were winning the rebounding war, 12-7, and were shooting almost 58 percent from the floor (11-of-19).
I had to make sure I was really watching this. Apparently, word never got to Washington Township's coaches (who were different from to the debacle of '84) that Southern liked slowing things down.
First I checked in with Tom to see if he was alright. This man, who was over 80 years old at this point, told me he was doing fine. Then I found a payphone in the hallway and called my boss.
"Observer sports, may I help you?"
"Mike, it's me."
"Oh ... hi me! How's it going out there?"
"You're not going to believe me when I tell you this, but Southern is up seven at halftime and Kathy Snyder has brilliantly coached the first 16 minutes."
"I see that. How's Tom doing?"
"Oh, he's staying out of trouble and hasn't gotten us thrown out yet. This is a plus."
"Good, well let me know what happens when it's over."
I felt good about Southern's performance after one half. But I was cautious, too. I had seen this script in a game the year before against Toms River North in which Southern slowed it down to the tune of leading 8-6 at halftime ... only for North to make the proper adjustments and win the game in the end, 32-18.
And that was what was going on in Washington Township's locker room at halftime. They knew they were conceding too many points to McCallum, so to cut the head of the monster off, they were going to have to pressure Davis and Sciallo.
That was exactly what happened. And the Rams couldn't buy a basket even if it was on sale at the concession stand. For the first 6:50 of the third quarter, Southern went scoreless. And Washington Township began to exploit the Rams. Defensively, they forced the Rams into nine third-quarter turnovers. And that led to the Minutemen scoring the first 12 points of the quarter to take a 29-25 lead.
McCallum rebounded a Bogdol free throw miss and scored to make it a 29-27 game. But Natale drove the basket to score on a layup to make it 31-27. The basket marked her 1,000th career point and the game was stopped for the moment. It also allowed Southern to regroup while the short ceremony was taking place.
The teams traded baskets to start the fourth quarter, but the Minutemen began to start pulling away. Southern, though, hung in there and those who made the trip across state for this one, stood up and yelled loudly for the gold-and-black-clad Rams.
It wasn't going to be enough -- Washington Township went 8-for-9 from the free-throw line and eventually pulled away for the 49-41 victory and the SJ IV title.
Washington players and coaches were excited that they survived this one to capture a sectional championship. Southern's heads were understandably down afterward. Unlike 11 years earlier in one of the more controversial games in history, Snyder was subdued. She gave credit where credit was due -- to Washington for adjusting and eventually winning the game.
She gave her team credit for the kind of game it played. She called her team's performance in the first half "picture perfect" and that "they could've done anything they wanted" in that first half. But the writing was on the wall and Washington Township showed why they were No. 1 in the state.
McCallum finished the night with 29 points and nine rebounds and was continuing to build her own legacy as a Ram after just two years. Davis handed out eight assists in what was her final basketball game at Southern. "We tried our hardest. They can be beaten and I think we had a chance of doing that," McCallum said. "I just wish we could have that chance again."
I got my interviews done and collected Tom with me. For the next hour, we drove back across New Jersey talking about the game a little and about the rest of that school year. Girls basketball was over for the year in Ocean County. He had a whole bunch of plans for the spring season.
Less than an hour later, I dropped him off at his place and I proceeded to head home to write the story on one of our Tandy 180 machines at the dining room table of my folks' place. I don't know why it took me an unusual amount of time, but I ended up getting the story done sometime after 11 p.m. that night.
Once I confirmed with Mike I had the story, all was good.
Southern Regional's girls had a hard pill to swallow that night. So close, yet it slipped away when Washington Township decide it wanted to make the lives of Davis and Sciallo miserable. They both graduated, but Southern and Snyder persevered. In 1996, the Rams lost to Class A South rival Toms River North for the SJ IV championship, but one year later, Snyder had her elusive sectional title by beating North in the SJ IV final. By then, Snyder was finishing up her 18th season as head coach. McCallum would finish with close to 2,000 career points and remains one of the two best tall girls I ever covered in the sport along with Consuelo Lezcano of Keys based-Marathon High in Florida.
As for Tom, it was an honor to take him to do his labor of love and what he did best. Sadly, though, I only saw him at a ball game one more time ... it was that spring I saw him for the last time. He was in failing health the last few years of his life and he couldn't go out anymore and do what he did best -- make others happy. He passed away in December 1998 and there are days I miss seeing him at anything I cover now.
Snyder continued coaching the Rams into the 21st century, long after I left the Observer, until her sudden passing on Friday, January 24, 2014 at the age of 58. She and longtime Toms River North two-sport mentor Becky Miller are still the greatest female sports coach I ever covered in nearly 30 years. It was an honor to finally see her win that SJ IV title over North in '97.
It would have been nicer to have done it against the No. 1 team in the state two years earlier. But it wasn't meant to be. Still, this SJ IV final against Washington Township on that Monday night in March 1995 didn't end the way it sadly ended 11 years earlier.
And it only made the wait for Snyder's elusive SJ IV championship that much more bearable and special when it did happen.
After coming up short of reaching the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV final the year before when it lost to Vineland, Southern Regional was in the SJ IV championship game after an 11-year absence. And the opponent on the other side of the court for this title game was Washington Township -- the same Minutemen program that beat the Rams in the 1984 SJ IV title game in overtime.
The problem, though, was when doing the preview for the game with longtime Southern Regional basketball coach Kathy Snyder, she didn't want to discuss the game. I knew this because the year before, she didn't want to talk about the game that ended the most wonderful season in her time with the program. The 1983-84 Southern team had talented players on it like Patti Gallant, Kathy Harlfinger and Judy Keefer, but had the star player of the Shore area in senior all-everything guard Jill Spaschak.
It was Spaschak that hit the "jumper heard 'round the Shore" on February 25, 1984 at the buzzer that lifted Southern to the 42-40 victory over Neptune in the Shore Conference Tournament championship game at Brick Memorial High School. Ten years later and almost to the date, I talked to Spaschak about that team, that game, that season, along with Snyder, who was Kathy Leslie at the time of the championship.
They were literal fountains when talking about that team. Once they started jabbering, you couldn't get them to stop. So many memories in those phone calls. By the end of their calls, I felt like I knew every single game they played that year and that I was in that Brick Memorial gym when Spaschak hit that game-winner. Unfortunately, I never got to see that Southern team -- that was my senior year in high school and I was focusing on just being a senior. So I had a lot of catch-up to do, though, I had done a feature story on Keefer when we were both at Ocean County College and she was just a delight to talk to.
However, there was one sore spot that was off limits. I didn't know it, but when I asked Snyder about the night of Saturday, March 10, 1984, she simply said, "I don't want to discuss that. It's still too painful."
And it was. It was the loss that ended that magical 28-2 Southern season. But it wasn't just any loss. This was a hurtful one. Southern led 24-0 Washington Township by as many as a dozen points early in the fourth quarter in the SJ IV title game at Overbrook High School. Then midway through the fourth quarter, Spaschak got called for her fourth foul, a mystery foul that she wasn't really near when the call was made. But mere moments later, she committed her fifth foul that disqualified her from the game. Again, she was nowhere near the site of the foul. How do I know this? It just so happened that Adelphia-Cable 8 was doing the game for future broadcast. And it was pretty darn clear to me that if there was a foul called, it wasn't on Jill Spaschak.
Southern, sadly, fell apart in that game, Washington Township tied it and ultimately won the game in overtime, 51-46. And the memory of that broadcast was the stuff that wasn't allowed to be said on the air. Game announcers Ken Turp and the outspoken Nick "The Quick" Werkman were reporting "angry." They were livid with the officiating that was being done and let their feelings be known in that broadcast of 30 years ago.
And I have to agree to this day, they were right. I wish I was in that Overbrook High gym that night, but I wasn't. And what I saw on TV was just deplorable. Every close call went against Southern and the whistles seemed to avoid Washington Township. In the Ocean County Observer's account of the game, Kathy Snyder was not once quoted in it.
That's how angry she was. And it didn't make her feel any better when she found out that one of the officials for that particular game was the roommate of one of the Washington Township head coaches!
Excuse me, but how the h-e-double hockey sticks was that assignment allowed to happen? Needless to say, the NJSIAA, looking stupid as expected over what happened, passed down a rule that said officials could not do the games of relatives, friends, roommates, etc., shortly after the incident.
It was a little too late for Kathy Snyder or that amazingly talented team of '84. And it took 11 years for that program to get back to the SJ IV title game.
But here they were, and the fact that it would be a talented Washington Township team on the other side was just pure coincidence. Then again, these Minutemen were ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press' state poll. They had a star senior guard named Jen Natale, who was closing in on 1,000 career points in this final. Their supporting cast was a strong one and they liked to run it up and down.
And that was playing perfectly into the hands of a master defensive coach like Snyder, who could turn any sports car into a bicycle with her team playing the right pressure defense and could slow the pace effectively offensively. And with a 21-2 record during the season, it's easy to say she had the kind of team that could slow the opponent down at any time.
The brains of the outfit was senior point guard Jodie Davis, who was Snyder's eyes on the court and could pretty much control what was happening on a basketball court. She was paired in the backcourt with another senior, Kirsten Sciallo. Jamie Bogdol was an effective forward. But the scoring brunt was handled by a 6-foot-1 16-year-old sophomore center named Candice McCallum, who by now, I had figured out that her first name was spelled with an 'i' in it so to remember that her play was like 'ice.'
The things you gotta do sometimes.
I knew I was in for a good game. But it was early in the afternoon, I got a phone call from work. The dayshift editor, Helen, had left me a message from Tom "The Candy Man" Kelleher. In all my years of working at the Observer and all those years I covered events where Tom was also there to hand out his trademark candy and sing his patriotic songs, never did I have to give him a call about anything.
Seems he heard that I was covering the game this night. He first thought one of our stringers at the time that he had known a lot better than me for years was doing the game. Well needless to say, word got to him that I was going out to Mount Holly to cover the game and just about five hours before the game, I was calling him at his Toms River home.
"Yeah, I heard you're doing the game tonight."
"Yup. That'd be me going out there."
"Can you pick me up and take me with you?"
I had to think about it. But it didn't take long for an answer.
"Suuuuuure. Give me your address and I will be there about 5 o'clock."
The game was a 6:30 p.m. start, and I knew it would take almost an hour to get out to Rancocas Valley. So I left my folks' place at 4:45 and headed toward near Indian Head Road where Tom lived. In all these years I was friendly with the man, I never knew where he lived, but he lived in a very modest house. He came out after I knocked on the door and he was dressed up like he always was, wearing his "Candy Man" hat, his blue metal-button jacket and buoyed by his waist-strapped pocket holder that nothing but Jolly Ranchers, gum and Tootsie Rolls.
Believe me when I say this -- this man was a dentist's dream.
So we head out on Route 571 and turn onto Route 70. From there, it was into Manchester and out of there. When the turnoff toward Pemberton came upon us, I made a slight right turn and it was one winding road after another until we found Route 38 and ultimately, we found the street that Rancocas Valley High was located.
By the time we got there at 6 p.m., I had left him to go do his thing and I went to do my thing. I knew he wasn't going to cause me any problems on this night and he knew I had a game to cover. I jotted down both teams' lineups and set up my statistical sheet and shot box soon after while sitting up top in the bleachers looking down at midcourt.
And when I heard who was singing the national anthem -- it was Tom -- I found myself saying, "Man, he works people quickly, doesn't he?" He did a stellar job as usual on the anthem.
This Washington Township team looked like it wanted to run. But defensive tempo does dictate a lot of things and on this night, Kathy Snyder's team wasn't going to allow that to happen.
And the Rams had one weapon that the Minutemen had no idea how to keep in check. That was the tall and lanky McCallum, Washington Township had a center to try and neutralize her named Melissa Pickering. She was no match and Snyder, Davis and McCallum knew that. Basically, what Davis or Sciallo did was throw high lob passes for McCallum over Pickering and McCallum laid those shots in for easy baskets.
While McCallum was having a blast in taking advantage of the defense the Minutemen were playing against her, Davis was effectively slowing things up and making sure that she was getting her center with passes in a positive position down low. Two times, the Rams built leads of seven points on the Minutemen in the second quarter and just as halftime approached, Davis delivered one more lob pass for an easy McCallum bucket to finish her 15-point first half. And Southern led at halftime once again by seven points.
Yeah, the No. 1 team in the state was losing by seven points to slow-'em-down Southern, 25-18. They were not wilting under the Washington Township pressure, turning it over just nine times in the first half. They were winning the rebounding war, 12-7, and were shooting almost 58 percent from the floor (11-of-19).
I had to make sure I was really watching this. Apparently, word never got to Washington Township's coaches (who were different from to the debacle of '84) that Southern liked slowing things down.
First I checked in with Tom to see if he was alright. This man, who was over 80 years old at this point, told me he was doing fine. Then I found a payphone in the hallway and called my boss.
"Observer sports, may I help you?"
"Mike, it's me."
"Oh ... hi me! How's it going out there?"
"You're not going to believe me when I tell you this, but Southern is up seven at halftime and Kathy Snyder has brilliantly coached the first 16 minutes."
"I see that. How's Tom doing?"
"Oh, he's staying out of trouble and hasn't gotten us thrown out yet. This is a plus."
"Good, well let me know what happens when it's over."
I felt good about Southern's performance after one half. But I was cautious, too. I had seen this script in a game the year before against Toms River North in which Southern slowed it down to the tune of leading 8-6 at halftime ... only for North to make the proper adjustments and win the game in the end, 32-18.
And that was what was going on in Washington Township's locker room at halftime. They knew they were conceding too many points to McCallum, so to cut the head of the monster off, they were going to have to pressure Davis and Sciallo.
That was exactly what happened. And the Rams couldn't buy a basket even if it was on sale at the concession stand. For the first 6:50 of the third quarter, Southern went scoreless. And Washington Township began to exploit the Rams. Defensively, they forced the Rams into nine third-quarter turnovers. And that led to the Minutemen scoring the first 12 points of the quarter to take a 29-25 lead.
McCallum rebounded a Bogdol free throw miss and scored to make it a 29-27 game. But Natale drove the basket to score on a layup to make it 31-27. The basket marked her 1,000th career point and the game was stopped for the moment. It also allowed Southern to regroup while the short ceremony was taking place.
The teams traded baskets to start the fourth quarter, but the Minutemen began to start pulling away. Southern, though, hung in there and those who made the trip across state for this one, stood up and yelled loudly for the gold-and-black-clad Rams.
It wasn't going to be enough -- Washington Township went 8-for-9 from the free-throw line and eventually pulled away for the 49-41 victory and the SJ IV title.
Washington players and coaches were excited that they survived this one to capture a sectional championship. Southern's heads were understandably down afterward. Unlike 11 years earlier in one of the more controversial games in history, Snyder was subdued. She gave credit where credit was due -- to Washington for adjusting and eventually winning the game.
She gave her team credit for the kind of game it played. She called her team's performance in the first half "picture perfect" and that "they could've done anything they wanted" in that first half. But the writing was on the wall and Washington Township showed why they were No. 1 in the state.
McCallum finished the night with 29 points and nine rebounds and was continuing to build her own legacy as a Ram after just two years. Davis handed out eight assists in what was her final basketball game at Southern. "We tried our hardest. They can be beaten and I think we had a chance of doing that," McCallum said. "I just wish we could have that chance again."
I got my interviews done and collected Tom with me. For the next hour, we drove back across New Jersey talking about the game a little and about the rest of that school year. Girls basketball was over for the year in Ocean County. He had a whole bunch of plans for the spring season.
Less than an hour later, I dropped him off at his place and I proceeded to head home to write the story on one of our Tandy 180 machines at the dining room table of my folks' place. I don't know why it took me an unusual amount of time, but I ended up getting the story done sometime after 11 p.m. that night.
Once I confirmed with Mike I had the story, all was good.
Southern Regional's girls had a hard pill to swallow that night. So close, yet it slipped away when Washington Township decide it wanted to make the lives of Davis and Sciallo miserable. They both graduated, but Southern and Snyder persevered. In 1996, the Rams lost to Class A South rival Toms River North for the SJ IV championship, but one year later, Snyder had her elusive sectional title by beating North in the SJ IV final. By then, Snyder was finishing up her 18th season as head coach. McCallum would finish with close to 2,000 career points and remains one of the two best tall girls I ever covered in the sport along with Consuelo Lezcano of Keys based-Marathon High in Florida.
As for Tom, it was an honor to take him to do his labor of love and what he did best. Sadly, though, I only saw him at a ball game one more time ... it was that spring I saw him for the last time. He was in failing health the last few years of his life and he couldn't go out anymore and do what he did best -- make others happy. He passed away in December 1998 and there are days I miss seeing him at anything I cover now.
Snyder continued coaching the Rams into the 21st century, long after I left the Observer, until her sudden passing on Friday, January 24, 2014 at the age of 58. She and longtime Toms River North two-sport mentor Becky Miller are still the greatest female sports coach I ever covered in nearly 30 years. It was an honor to finally see her win that SJ IV title over North in '97.
It would have been nicer to have done it against the No. 1 team in the state two years earlier. But it wasn't meant to be. Still, this SJ IV final against Washington Township on that Monday night in March 1995 didn't end the way it sadly ended 11 years earlier.
And it only made the wait for Snyder's elusive SJ IV championship that much more bearable and special when it did happen.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
A tough last pill to swallow
By almost 9 p.m. on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, the balloon's air had been blown out completely. And my one long-term lasting memory of that night at Interlachen High School will be of star soccer midfielder/forward Jacqueline Fraga belly down on the ground, fists pounding at the turf in tears.
This should have been her time. It should have been Interlachen's time, really.
But it wasn't.
When the 2010-11 girls soccer season began in early November for Interlachen's Rams, there was a lot expected of the team. They had strong leadership with numerous seniors on the club, starting in the back with two standout defenders in Rebecca Beatty and Jasmine Beamon. They had a dynamite third-year starting goalkeeper in junior Terri Tompson, who was getting stronger with each year.
But the centerpiece of this club were the two seniors who had won the previous three Palatka Daily News Girls Soccer Player of the Year honors in forward Alana Christian, the recipient of the honor in her freshman and sophomore years and Fraga, who was the winner of the honor her junior year.
Interlachen was 10-6-5 during the season, but most of the losses were to the three teams that finished with a better district record than the Rams did -- Bishop Snyder of Jacksonville, perennial rival Keystone Heights and surprising West Nassau of Callahan. To that point, the season for the Rams and seventh-year coach Mike Stevens had been a disappointment. They needed to turn it around and the district tournament would be the starting point.
That district tournament was to be held this season at Interlachen High, so for the seniors, the last hurrah would be in front of friends and family. And for as talented as this Rams team had been over the years, there was one glaring oversight on their resumes.
No, it wasn't a state tournament berth. It was the fact the team didn't even win a single game in the previous three district tournaments. Even when the Rams were a No. 2 seed in 2009, they lost to Pierson Taylor. I still have visions of Stevens running as fast as he can to get a ball that had gone out of bounds to give to his player throwing it in as time was running out on what would be a 2-1 loss at Keystone Heights High that year.
Now the Rams had to put up or shut up in this tournament. Christian, the third 100-goal scorer I ever covered in high school girls soccer after legendary Point Pleasant Boro High standouts Kim Yankowski and Christie Pearce, had scored 26 goals that season while teams were double-teaming her. That was freeing things up for Fraga, who led the team with 27 goals. Though polar opposites of one another, the outgoing and outspoken Fraga and the quiet and shy Christian knew how to work with one another effectively.
Most importantly, they needed each other for this tournament for if the Rams had not gotten to the state tournament for the first time since their only trip in 2006, the season was a failure in some ways.
So on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, the Rams opened play up on a crisp, cool evening against sixth-seeded and Putnam County rival Crescent City. Unfortunately, the Rams were going to play this game without Christian, who had been hampered for the better part of two weeks with a hamstring injury. That's just something you can't take a chance on running up and down and turning and twisting on soccer fields.
Fraga, though, came to the rescue. She scored both goals the Rams put in and the defense did the rest in a 2-0 victory, the first for the program in the postseason since beating Pierson Taylor, 2-1, in the 2006 district semifinals to advance to their first state tournament berth.
That 400-pound gorilla finally stopped jumping up and down these girls' backs. But one was still having a good ol' time jumping up and down -- the one that had them avoiding the state tournament the last three years. But that was not going to be easy for Bishop Snyder's Cardinals were going to be a formidable foe as the top seed of the tournament.
The Cardinals had a nice team going into Wednesday's semifinal, sporting a 14-2 record. They didn't have a star player defensively and in the midfield, but they had one true leader up front in Taylor Savage, who had scored more than 40 goals for her team.
The winner was going to the state tournament with an automatic berth and would play in the district final on Friday night against the Keystone Heights-West Nassau winner on the same Interlachen turf.
This Wednesday night was a tense one and was a night in the low 60s temperature-wise, making for comfortable weather. I can still see the focus on Fraga's face as she prepped for what would be the biggest game of her life. Stevens had a decision to make with Christian. He felt that the extra day of rest was worth it and inserted her into the lineup.
But from the get-go, you can see her mobility was going to be limited to staying within the first one-third of the soccer field, patiently waiting for the ball to come her way and fighting for all the loose balls within her area without straying too far. This wasn't sitting all that well for Fraga, who herself was fighting a slight fracture in her foot but you wouldn't have known that the way she was going full throttle.
From the start, you can tell that the Cardinals as a team were much, much better than the Rams and you could see why they were the top seed of the tournament. They were more aggressive to the ball and made things look much easier than the scrappy Rams, who in their own right were talented.
And that's where the intensity level was ratcheted up another notch. What the Rams did was take a more physical approach against the Cardinals -- not the kind of play that would knock bodies to the ground, but at least some bumpin' that would get their opponent's attention.
However, 10 minutes into the match and already having a good amount of the play in Interlachen's end, Bishop Snyder struck as Victoria Verveille pushed a ball forward toward the goal. Tompson made the split-second decision to try to meet the ball before Savage did.
She came out second best in that battle. Savage got her foot on the ball and poke-kicked the ball into the net for the 1-0 lead.
Stevens did not get down. He continued to encourage his girls to stay strong in this one. There was still 70 minutes left and he was under the impression Bishop Snyder wasn't going to blow his team off the field. His players felt that way, too. So did the Rams fans.
So did I. The problem was the Cardinals just weren't allowing the Rams to get anything going on offense. They continued to peck away at the Rams' defense. But this was working to one player's advantage.
Alana Christian. Because she was relegated to nothing more than an offensive player, she did not have to come back and play much defense. And because Snyder had played the Rams twice during the season, it was a good idea to have someone stay with her throughout the game. Heck, the two of them could have gotten to know one another throughout the entire game with long conversations. That's how close they were to one another.
With only a few minutes left in the first half, the Rams finally broke out and had a chance. Fraga delivered the shot. It went wide left of the mark. But for the first time in a while, the field was spread out instead of being in one section of play. The Rams were going to continue to threaten and push the issue in these last moments before halftime. If you were a Rams fan, you felt awfully good about what was going on.
The Rams got the ball to Christian and she slipped by her defenders to dribble in on the net. Her shot was deflected by a Snyder player. But right there to scoop up the rebound was a freshman named Taryn Davis, who was able to capture the ball on the other side and persuade defenders and goalie Sarah Fisher to come out at her. She simply put a pass right back to Christian, who had the wide-open net to score her 27th goal of the season and tie it at 1-1 with 31 seconds left before the break.
Interlachen players were excited. Fans were excited. Stevens was elated. His team had decided to go on a much more defensive approach and took advantage of the opportunities it did have to tie it at the break.
In my mind, I could see Interlachen stunning this Bishop Snyder team. But I stopped myself because I was expecting more of the same in the second half. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the second half as the Cardinals put pressure on the Rams' defense again. This time, Verveille took a shot that Tompson seemed to have cut off the angle when the ball was booted. By mere luck, though, the ball just found the inside of the goal and with 32:37 left in the game, the Cardinals had re-taken the lead at 2-1.
Still, there was plenty of time left. And as strange as it sounded, I felt as if Interlachen was in control of things even if they would be out-shot in this game, 26-5, and the bulk of this battle was taking place in Interlachen's end. It would take one "jail break" and the game would be tied up. It just needed a moment and a place to happen.
Less than four minutes after Verveille's goal, that opportunity came. The taller Christian won a headball battle and was able to run onto the ball and make a move toward the goal when she was tripped up by a Snyder defender just outside the 18-yard box. Because the call came outside the box, it meant no penalty kick. However, the Rams had a direct kick to take from the 25 just to the right side of the goal.
And the Rams had the right person to take this kick. The night before against Crescent City, Fraga delivered a direct kick goal in the 2-0 win. Now she was about to deliver another memorable long-distance kick. She booted the ball over the makeshift wall three Snyder defenders built. It kept rising and rising as it approached Fisher.
Fisher had no chance of even getting a finger on the ball. It cleared just underneath the crossbar and into the net.
Voila! The game was tied again at 2-2 because Fraga, who was about to become our paper's player of the year for the second straight year, had delivered her 30th goal of the season.
Now it was any one's game with just under 29 minutes to go. And the intensity went up another level as bodies now were starting to fly. But to the officials' credit, they allowed both teams to play. Still, though, the Cardinals had the better of the play in the Rams' end. They put up numerous shots against Tompson, but the shots went wide of the mark or were knocked aside by the keeper.
As it crept under four minutes to go, I had the feeling that I was going to be seeing sudden-death overtime sessions on the field, the possibility of a golden goal or a shootout, which I was favoring Tompson over Fisher. Felt the same way with three minutes to go ... then again when it got to two minutes to play.
The clock on the Interlachen High scoreboard was stopped at two minutes. The time would be kept on the field from this point. Snyder made one last push and a midfielder put a ball into the Rams' box. There was a scramble for the ball. There was nothing out of the ordinary from what I had seen in the previous 78 minutes. Both teams were fighting for the ball. It had skipped to Tompson, who was about to cover up and clear it.
That's when I heard a whistle. Play was stopped.
Enter the head official of this battle, who had done a superb job in controlling the game. Now he was about to make a decision that would decide both teams' fates.
He called the Rams for something called "handling." Was it holding? No explanation was made. Well, who was it? No explanation of who was the culprit. Can you point out where it happened? Not really.
These were some of the questions Stevens and Rams players had at that particular moment. And because the foul was called inside the Rams' box, that constituted a penalty kick. Savage was called upon to make the kick against Tompson. Still looking stunned over the call she had nothing to do with, Tompson had to re-focus on making the save against Savage, all the bit as surprised as everyone else that she was about to deliver the go-ahead goal.
The whistle sounded. Savage approached her kick. She nailed her shot past Tompson's right side to give the Cardinals a 3-2 lead. Tompson was helpless. So were the Rams, who now had 91 seconds to make one last run.
Rams players did everything they could to get the ball to the feet of either Christian or Fraga. If Davis was open, they tried to get it to her. But each threat was met by a Cardinals' defender, who was getting the job done in lockdown mode.
And just as this head official sounded the whistle, the game was over. A number of Interlachen players started screaming in anger over what had just happened moments earlier. Some walked away visibly shaken and crying. And others started to go after the official and the officiating crew who had just taken this hard-fought game away from them.
The officiating crew was smart. Mere moments after the game ended, they made their obligatory handshakes with the coaches and got out of IHS as fast as they could before Rams fans started chasing them through the parking lot.
They were screwed. Unequivocally screwed. To this day, no one knows who committed the "foul" or "hold" or "handle" for that matter that caused the penalty kick. And why make that call now when the physical nature of the game was pronounced throughout. It's a pretty lousy time to start giving out penalty kicks when the game has been like this throughout.
I never want to believe that the officials just wanted to give Snyder the penalty kick because they wanted to get the heck out of there and avoid officiating the overtime sessions. But that phantom call has left a big hole for me for these last three years.
It also left a hole for Fraga, who was there on the ground pounding her fists in tears because her senior season was over without really an explanation. It was all she was left to do because the thought of chasing the officials down to the parking lot was gone by the time that trio got in their cars and left Thompson-Baker Field.
Snyder players were laughing and having a good time on the other end of the field, mobbing each other because they had just gotten away with virtual murder in picking up a state tournament berth.
That same berth that may have had Interlachen's name all over it except for the call that led to the penalty kick that kept the Rams from the state tourney. The Rams have still not made it back to the state tournament since 2006.
Fraga and Christian were inconsolable. They didn't want their careers to end this way. Beatty, meanwhile, was hotter than a jalapeno pepper.
"We're playing soccer ... we're not playing golf, we're not playing tennis," she adamantly began, the vitriol seeping through her words. "(The official) told me there was 'handling' in the box and that someone grabbed a jersey. I asked him, 'Who was it?' and he did not say. We put everything into this and to have it end this way was wrong."
The usually even-keel Stevens wasn't having none of the officials' explanations of what happened near the end of the game either.
"I can live with getting it to overtime, play 10 and 10 minute (periods) and if (Snyder) scores a golden goal to win it, then that's it," he said. "But this was unnecessary. Obviously, we are good enough to push one of the best teams in Jacksonville around to where they need the 12th man (the official)."
And with the outcome, I had just witnessed the second-worst call in my long career in covering sports. Ironically, the two worst calls I've ever witnessed happened within a few 100 feet of each other and within almost three month's time. On October 28, 2010 in the Interlachen High gymnasium, I watched Crescent City's Kayshia Brady deliver an emphatic spike -- only to have it overturned by an official as a "carry," which I've seen the replay dozens and dozens of times since showing it wasn't even close to a carry -- in the critical fifth set that gave Keystone Heights the deciding point and district volleyball tournament semifinal win that sent the Indians to the state tournament and sent the Raiders home for the season.
But Brady and most of her teammates were coming back from that debacle in 2011. Fraga, Christian, Beatty and the other seniors weren't coming back. It was a travesty in how it ended.
Before I left the field that night, I politely asked all-around good guy and Interlachen High athletic director Ron Whitehurst if he knew who the officials were.
"No. But I can get the names on the card up in the press box."
"Could you please do that?"
"No problem."
He was still upset at what happened, too, and that two of the biggest officiating screwings had taken place at his complex in a short amount of time. He got the names for me a few minutes later and I jotted down the officiating crew and left to head back to the office to write this tale of wronged woe against the IHS Rams girls soccer team.
Christian never pursued a college soccer career even though she had the potential to play at the next level. I never truly knew why she didn't go off to college. Fraga, though, did. But her one year of soccer experience at Warner University in Polk County, Florida, was not good and what she was hoping for. She left after that freshman year.
Bishop Snyder ultimately beat Keystone Heights in the district tournament final and won a first-round state match before falling to another Jacksonville-based school, The Bolles School, in the regional semifinal.
Maybe the Rams don't get as far as Snyder does. But they would have been there playing in the tournament. And it would have at least let those seniors go away with some kind of glory in the end.
Unfortunately, one official took that opportunity away on a call that to this day no one knows where the foul was committed.
Such a sad shame.
This should have been her time. It should have been Interlachen's time, really.
But it wasn't.
When the 2010-11 girls soccer season began in early November for Interlachen's Rams, there was a lot expected of the team. They had strong leadership with numerous seniors on the club, starting in the back with two standout defenders in Rebecca Beatty and Jasmine Beamon. They had a dynamite third-year starting goalkeeper in junior Terri Tompson, who was getting stronger with each year.
But the centerpiece of this club were the two seniors who had won the previous three Palatka Daily News Girls Soccer Player of the Year honors in forward Alana Christian, the recipient of the honor in her freshman and sophomore years and Fraga, who was the winner of the honor her junior year.
Interlachen was 10-6-5 during the season, but most of the losses were to the three teams that finished with a better district record than the Rams did -- Bishop Snyder of Jacksonville, perennial rival Keystone Heights and surprising West Nassau of Callahan. To that point, the season for the Rams and seventh-year coach Mike Stevens had been a disappointment. They needed to turn it around and the district tournament would be the starting point.
That district tournament was to be held this season at Interlachen High, so for the seniors, the last hurrah would be in front of friends and family. And for as talented as this Rams team had been over the years, there was one glaring oversight on their resumes.
No, it wasn't a state tournament berth. It was the fact the team didn't even win a single game in the previous three district tournaments. Even when the Rams were a No. 2 seed in 2009, they lost to Pierson Taylor. I still have visions of Stevens running as fast as he can to get a ball that had gone out of bounds to give to his player throwing it in as time was running out on what would be a 2-1 loss at Keystone Heights High that year.
Now the Rams had to put up or shut up in this tournament. Christian, the third 100-goal scorer I ever covered in high school girls soccer after legendary Point Pleasant Boro High standouts Kim Yankowski and Christie Pearce, had scored 26 goals that season while teams were double-teaming her. That was freeing things up for Fraga, who led the team with 27 goals. Though polar opposites of one another, the outgoing and outspoken Fraga and the quiet and shy Christian knew how to work with one another effectively.
Most importantly, they needed each other for this tournament for if the Rams had not gotten to the state tournament for the first time since their only trip in 2006, the season was a failure in some ways.
So on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, the Rams opened play up on a crisp, cool evening against sixth-seeded and Putnam County rival Crescent City. Unfortunately, the Rams were going to play this game without Christian, who had been hampered for the better part of two weeks with a hamstring injury. That's just something you can't take a chance on running up and down and turning and twisting on soccer fields.
Fraga, though, came to the rescue. She scored both goals the Rams put in and the defense did the rest in a 2-0 victory, the first for the program in the postseason since beating Pierson Taylor, 2-1, in the 2006 district semifinals to advance to their first state tournament berth.
That 400-pound gorilla finally stopped jumping up and down these girls' backs. But one was still having a good ol' time jumping up and down -- the one that had them avoiding the state tournament the last three years. But that was not going to be easy for Bishop Snyder's Cardinals were going to be a formidable foe as the top seed of the tournament.
The Cardinals had a nice team going into Wednesday's semifinal, sporting a 14-2 record. They didn't have a star player defensively and in the midfield, but they had one true leader up front in Taylor Savage, who had scored more than 40 goals for her team.
The winner was going to the state tournament with an automatic berth and would play in the district final on Friday night against the Keystone Heights-West Nassau winner on the same Interlachen turf.
This Wednesday night was a tense one and was a night in the low 60s temperature-wise, making for comfortable weather. I can still see the focus on Fraga's face as she prepped for what would be the biggest game of her life. Stevens had a decision to make with Christian. He felt that the extra day of rest was worth it and inserted her into the lineup.
But from the get-go, you can see her mobility was going to be limited to staying within the first one-third of the soccer field, patiently waiting for the ball to come her way and fighting for all the loose balls within her area without straying too far. This wasn't sitting all that well for Fraga, who herself was fighting a slight fracture in her foot but you wouldn't have known that the way she was going full throttle.
From the start, you can tell that the Cardinals as a team were much, much better than the Rams and you could see why they were the top seed of the tournament. They were more aggressive to the ball and made things look much easier than the scrappy Rams, who in their own right were talented.
And that's where the intensity level was ratcheted up another notch. What the Rams did was take a more physical approach against the Cardinals -- not the kind of play that would knock bodies to the ground, but at least some bumpin' that would get their opponent's attention.
However, 10 minutes into the match and already having a good amount of the play in Interlachen's end, Bishop Snyder struck as Victoria Verveille pushed a ball forward toward the goal. Tompson made the split-second decision to try to meet the ball before Savage did.
She came out second best in that battle. Savage got her foot on the ball and poke-kicked the ball into the net for the 1-0 lead.
Stevens did not get down. He continued to encourage his girls to stay strong in this one. There was still 70 minutes left and he was under the impression Bishop Snyder wasn't going to blow his team off the field. His players felt that way, too. So did the Rams fans.
So did I. The problem was the Cardinals just weren't allowing the Rams to get anything going on offense. They continued to peck away at the Rams' defense. But this was working to one player's advantage.
Alana Christian. Because she was relegated to nothing more than an offensive player, she did not have to come back and play much defense. And because Snyder had played the Rams twice during the season, it was a good idea to have someone stay with her throughout the game. Heck, the two of them could have gotten to know one another throughout the entire game with long conversations. That's how close they were to one another.
With only a few minutes left in the first half, the Rams finally broke out and had a chance. Fraga delivered the shot. It went wide left of the mark. But for the first time in a while, the field was spread out instead of being in one section of play. The Rams were going to continue to threaten and push the issue in these last moments before halftime. If you were a Rams fan, you felt awfully good about what was going on.
The Rams got the ball to Christian and she slipped by her defenders to dribble in on the net. Her shot was deflected by a Snyder player. But right there to scoop up the rebound was a freshman named Taryn Davis, who was able to capture the ball on the other side and persuade defenders and goalie Sarah Fisher to come out at her. She simply put a pass right back to Christian, who had the wide-open net to score her 27th goal of the season and tie it at 1-1 with 31 seconds left before the break.
Interlachen players were excited. Fans were excited. Stevens was elated. His team had decided to go on a much more defensive approach and took advantage of the opportunities it did have to tie it at the break.
In my mind, I could see Interlachen stunning this Bishop Snyder team. But I stopped myself because I was expecting more of the same in the second half. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the second half as the Cardinals put pressure on the Rams' defense again. This time, Verveille took a shot that Tompson seemed to have cut off the angle when the ball was booted. By mere luck, though, the ball just found the inside of the goal and with 32:37 left in the game, the Cardinals had re-taken the lead at 2-1.
Still, there was plenty of time left. And as strange as it sounded, I felt as if Interlachen was in control of things even if they would be out-shot in this game, 26-5, and the bulk of this battle was taking place in Interlachen's end. It would take one "jail break" and the game would be tied up. It just needed a moment and a place to happen.
Less than four minutes after Verveille's goal, that opportunity came. The taller Christian won a headball battle and was able to run onto the ball and make a move toward the goal when she was tripped up by a Snyder defender just outside the 18-yard box. Because the call came outside the box, it meant no penalty kick. However, the Rams had a direct kick to take from the 25 just to the right side of the goal.
And the Rams had the right person to take this kick. The night before against Crescent City, Fraga delivered a direct kick goal in the 2-0 win. Now she was about to deliver another memorable long-distance kick. She booted the ball over the makeshift wall three Snyder defenders built. It kept rising and rising as it approached Fisher.
Fisher had no chance of even getting a finger on the ball. It cleared just underneath the crossbar and into the net.
Voila! The game was tied again at 2-2 because Fraga, who was about to become our paper's player of the year for the second straight year, had delivered her 30th goal of the season.
Now it was any one's game with just under 29 minutes to go. And the intensity went up another level as bodies now were starting to fly. But to the officials' credit, they allowed both teams to play. Still, though, the Cardinals had the better of the play in the Rams' end. They put up numerous shots against Tompson, but the shots went wide of the mark or were knocked aside by the keeper.
As it crept under four minutes to go, I had the feeling that I was going to be seeing sudden-death overtime sessions on the field, the possibility of a golden goal or a shootout, which I was favoring Tompson over Fisher. Felt the same way with three minutes to go ... then again when it got to two minutes to play.
The clock on the Interlachen High scoreboard was stopped at two minutes. The time would be kept on the field from this point. Snyder made one last push and a midfielder put a ball into the Rams' box. There was a scramble for the ball. There was nothing out of the ordinary from what I had seen in the previous 78 minutes. Both teams were fighting for the ball. It had skipped to Tompson, who was about to cover up and clear it.
That's when I heard a whistle. Play was stopped.
Enter the head official of this battle, who had done a superb job in controlling the game. Now he was about to make a decision that would decide both teams' fates.
He called the Rams for something called "handling." Was it holding? No explanation was made. Well, who was it? No explanation of who was the culprit. Can you point out where it happened? Not really.
These were some of the questions Stevens and Rams players had at that particular moment. And because the foul was called inside the Rams' box, that constituted a penalty kick. Savage was called upon to make the kick against Tompson. Still looking stunned over the call she had nothing to do with, Tompson had to re-focus on making the save against Savage, all the bit as surprised as everyone else that she was about to deliver the go-ahead goal.
The whistle sounded. Savage approached her kick. She nailed her shot past Tompson's right side to give the Cardinals a 3-2 lead. Tompson was helpless. So were the Rams, who now had 91 seconds to make one last run.
Rams players did everything they could to get the ball to the feet of either Christian or Fraga. If Davis was open, they tried to get it to her. But each threat was met by a Cardinals' defender, who was getting the job done in lockdown mode.
And just as this head official sounded the whistle, the game was over. A number of Interlachen players started screaming in anger over what had just happened moments earlier. Some walked away visibly shaken and crying. And others started to go after the official and the officiating crew who had just taken this hard-fought game away from them.
The officiating crew was smart. Mere moments after the game ended, they made their obligatory handshakes with the coaches and got out of IHS as fast as they could before Rams fans started chasing them through the parking lot.
They were screwed. Unequivocally screwed. To this day, no one knows who committed the "foul" or "hold" or "handle" for that matter that caused the penalty kick. And why make that call now when the physical nature of the game was pronounced throughout. It's a pretty lousy time to start giving out penalty kicks when the game has been like this throughout.
I never want to believe that the officials just wanted to give Snyder the penalty kick because they wanted to get the heck out of there and avoid officiating the overtime sessions. But that phantom call has left a big hole for me for these last three years.
It also left a hole for Fraga, who was there on the ground pounding her fists in tears because her senior season was over without really an explanation. It was all she was left to do because the thought of chasing the officials down to the parking lot was gone by the time that trio got in their cars and left Thompson-Baker Field.
Snyder players were laughing and having a good time on the other end of the field, mobbing each other because they had just gotten away with virtual murder in picking up a state tournament berth.
That same berth that may have had Interlachen's name all over it except for the call that led to the penalty kick that kept the Rams from the state tourney. The Rams have still not made it back to the state tournament since 2006.
Fraga and Christian were inconsolable. They didn't want their careers to end this way. Beatty, meanwhile, was hotter than a jalapeno pepper.
"We're playing soccer ... we're not playing golf, we're not playing tennis," she adamantly began, the vitriol seeping through her words. "(The official) told me there was 'handling' in the box and that someone grabbed a jersey. I asked him, 'Who was it?' and he did not say. We put everything into this and to have it end this way was wrong."
The usually even-keel Stevens wasn't having none of the officials' explanations of what happened near the end of the game either.
"I can live with getting it to overtime, play 10 and 10 minute (periods) and if (Snyder) scores a golden goal to win it, then that's it," he said. "But this was unnecessary. Obviously, we are good enough to push one of the best teams in Jacksonville around to where they need the 12th man (the official)."
And with the outcome, I had just witnessed the second-worst call in my long career in covering sports. Ironically, the two worst calls I've ever witnessed happened within a few 100 feet of each other and within almost three month's time. On October 28, 2010 in the Interlachen High gymnasium, I watched Crescent City's Kayshia Brady deliver an emphatic spike -- only to have it overturned by an official as a "carry," which I've seen the replay dozens and dozens of times since showing it wasn't even close to a carry -- in the critical fifth set that gave Keystone Heights the deciding point and district volleyball tournament semifinal win that sent the Indians to the state tournament and sent the Raiders home for the season.
But Brady and most of her teammates were coming back from that debacle in 2011. Fraga, Christian, Beatty and the other seniors weren't coming back. It was a travesty in how it ended.
Before I left the field that night, I politely asked all-around good guy and Interlachen High athletic director Ron Whitehurst if he knew who the officials were.
"No. But I can get the names on the card up in the press box."
"Could you please do that?"
"No problem."
He was still upset at what happened, too, and that two of the biggest officiating screwings had taken place at his complex in a short amount of time. He got the names for me a few minutes later and I jotted down the officiating crew and left to head back to the office to write this tale of wronged woe against the IHS Rams girls soccer team.
Christian never pursued a college soccer career even though she had the potential to play at the next level. I never truly knew why she didn't go off to college. Fraga, though, did. But her one year of soccer experience at Warner University in Polk County, Florida, was not good and what she was hoping for. She left after that freshman year.
Bishop Snyder ultimately beat Keystone Heights in the district tournament final and won a first-round state match before falling to another Jacksonville-based school, The Bolles School, in the regional semifinal.
Maybe the Rams don't get as far as Snyder does. But they would have been there playing in the tournament. And it would have at least let those seniors go away with some kind of glory in the end.
Unfortunately, one official took that opportunity away on a call that to this day no one knows where the foul was committed.
Such a sad shame.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Just too big and talented ... and they have Riley Cooper, too
The 2005 football season has been the best I've witnessed in my time working at the Palatka Daily News.
That season, both Palatka High and Crescent City Junior-Senior High, the team I primarily covered in my team at the paper, made the state playoffs and Interlachen, which has struggled for the better part of the last 15 years, had a 4-6 season, which in many ways was like going 8-2 for that program, under coach Bobby Humphries.
But to have two of our three county teams in the state tournament was a thrill enough, even if both Palatka and Crescent City were second-place teams in their districts that season. Palatka was up in Jacksonville to face Andrew Jackson High in the 3A playoffs. That's where my boss Andy went. As for myself, Crescent City was opening up the Class 2B playoffs ... but they weren't going to be anywhere near the Palatka office.
No, for their first-round matchup, the Raiders were to make a three-hour trek to Pinellas County to face off with Clearwater Central Catholic. So I had to make arrangements to get a hotel room for overnight and locate the nearest Kinko's since these were the days before I would get my own laptop. It's a lot of hustling around, but I was able to locate the closest one to the field I was going to be at was about 10 minutes away up US-19 and fortunately, it was a 24-hour store.
This meant neither Andy nor myself were going to be back in the office to write our stories and lay out the sports section. But unlike today where the backup system doesn't exist anymore, we had a backup plan as the nightside news editor -- and a former sports writer and editor -- named Bob was back in the office.
So leading up to the night of Friday, November 11, 2005, Andy, Bob and myself had to devise a plan to make everything work. In a bare-bones operation such as our newspaper, there could not be a slip-up. We would keep Bob up to date as to what happened that night and if there were any other sports going on that night, it would be up to either Andy or myself to track them down and get the results via cell phones. Thankfully, basketball season had not tipped off just yet, but on the schedule, the only team playing was the Crescent City Junior-Senior High boys soccer team, which was missing a couple of kids from the football team. Crescent City was playing Flagler Palm Coast on this evening, a non-district opponent. In the midst of having to cover and write up the football game, I had to try to remember to make a call to Raiders coach John Thomas after the game.
Such is the life of a small newspaper worker.
Not only did I have to make plans with those at work, I had a girlfriend at the time that I was living with and told her that I was leaving Friday afternoon to head to Clearwater and was not coming back home until Saturday night. Working at a sheriff's office, this was her weekend to work there and she had just switched from late nights to the morning-afternoon shift, so I was not going to see her as I left. As per usual, she would get up at 4 a.m. and take over an hour to get ready for work. I kissed her goodbye and jumped back into bed to sleep until about 11:30 that morning.
I left Palatka at just after 2 p.m. and made the long trek down US-301 and then down I-75 until connecting with the exit for I-275. When I got to where I-4 connected with the I-275 loop, I took that exit and headed east on I-4 for an exit or two. I arrived at the Days Inn in Ybor City. One thing, though -- the hotel people who I set my reservation up for failed to tell me that getting into the hotel was a challenge.
The main entrances were being blocked off for motorists to get into because they were in the middle of some massive upheaval of the roads there. I literally asked a worker how do I get into the hotel -- they had no freakin' clue.
"Just keep driving around" was all this low-brained construction guy could tell me. It took me about 20 minutes to figure out where and how to get into the hotel, but ultimately, I did. And then the first minute of my reservation confirmation was spent bitching out the person there because there was a lack of communication as to how to get in and out of the hotel in which that person kept apologizing for the inconvenience.
Thankfully, my hotel room didn't have a window anywhere near the eyesore of the construction. I had relaxed for about 60 minutes, then it was back out the door again and heading to Clearwater Central Catholic, a school that I vaguely remembered was off of US-19 because there were signs going both ways on that highway that led you in the direction of the school.
With the darkness now settled in since the recent move from standard time to daylight saving's time, I maneuvered my way around the traffic on I-275 until I got to the exit for SR-60 and a long trip over the Campbell Causeway and toward the tricky turn onto US-19 in Clearwater. State Road-60 has a ton of traffic on it, so you have to move fast in getting to where you have to go.
Thankfully, I caught the turn-off and found myself going south on US-19. Now was a matter of finding that sign I had seen a number of times before while I was down that way. And in the flood of night lights and headlights, it was right there on the right side of the road -- CLEARWATER CENTRAL CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL, NEXT LEFT.
Bingo! One turn and the parking lot wasn't that far away. I had settled into my spot, grabbed my things and got to the fairly spacious press box that overlooked the field by around 7 p.m. for the 7:30 kickoff.
Now did I think Crescent City had a shot of winning this game? I did -- but it was a puncher's chance. The Clearwater Central Catholic Marauders were 8-2, so they weren't invincible by any means even if they had won eight in a row going in. But for 5-5 Crescent City to beat the Marauders, a whooooooole bunch of things needed to go just right. Quarterback Louis Haines, now a sophomore, needed to be on his game. Running backs D.J. Johnson, B.J. Sharper, Kerlon Williams and Daniel Wortman had to find the holes and make plays. And the offensive line had to be strong.
The latter was going to be a challenge. For as big as Crescent City was -- this included 6-foot-2, 225-pound Rudy Davis, 6-2, 240-pound Leviticus Bennett and 6-2, 252-pound Antonio Henderson, their center was all of 5-foot-3 and 138 pounds ... soaking wet. But for as big as senior Patrich Buenaventura was, his heart and determination were far bigger than he was.
Still, this was going to be a bit of a challenge because one look at CCC's big senior boys told you everything you needed to know about this group. Toby DeJarnatt was a 6-4, 290-pound center and defensive lineman. Austin Gould was a 6-0, 270-pound guard and defensive lineman. And the biggest of the big boys -- offensive and defensive tackle Kevin Young -- was 6-6 and 320 pounds.
Good luck with handling this situation, Crescent City. While Al Wisnoski, the first-year head coach of the Raiders and a longtime assistant before getting the job, acknowledge the challenge would be burdensome to handle that line on both sides, he still felt confident his coaches would be able to figure out something and expose it during the game.
Well even if he did, there were three skill players to worry about on the CCC side. There was quarterback Anthony Nowels, a 6-4, 211-pound junior who presented a challenge to Crescent City to bring down. There was little Ron Harris, a 5-5, 150-pound sparkplug with blazing speed.
And then there was the best of all these players on the field, a smooth-as-silk, 6-4, 205-pound senior who played wide receiver and free safety and was being recruited by a bunch of schools, including Florida, Texas, Oklahoma State and Tennessee, where he just happened to be flying off to for a recruiting trip that weekend.
His name was Riley Cooper. Had heard a lot about his prowess as one of the 10 best senior players in the country. Now I was going to get the entire Riley Cooper experience on this night.
The Raiders won the coin toss, but opted to defer to the Marauders, sending the message they were ready to play on this evening. And it seemed to work in the first six minutes of the game. The Raiders stopped the Marauders with a three-and-out and got the ball back off a punt at the Raider 48. Williams went eight yards with a handoff, but fumbled. Thankfully, he recovered his own fumble. Then on third-and-1, Haines drew the Marauders off sides for a first down. Wortman, a fullback, went 11 yards up the middle with a dive, then Sharper went 22 yards with a run to the Marauder 5. A face mask call on the play moved the ball halfway to the goal to the 3.
The Raiders were in business to score and dictate the tempo. Sharper, though, got nothing on first down. Johnson, a 1,000-yard rusher his sophomore year, also got nothing on second down. That set up third and goal from the 3.
The play Wisnoski called in was brilliant in diagram -- Sharper would take his defender out wide on a fake handoff and then Johnson would get the ball in the hole created by the defender trying to get to Sharper. It may have worked out if not for one little detail.
Cooper stayed at home on the play. Cooper followed Johnson to where he was going and tackled him for the 2-yard loss. Cooper would say later to me he knew the play was coming from seeing it on film during the week and that he just "followed the play to where it was being run."
Wisnoski needed points and from the 5, a 22-yard field goal with sure-footed kicker and freshman Nate Brown was a good option. But from the time the ball snapped to Brown putting his shoe on the ball, something went wrong. He miss-kicked it and the ball wound up slamming off a Raiders lineman blocking on the play and bounced through the end zone.
No points. Little did any of us know that for all the momentum the Raiders had in those first six minutes of the game, that would be the closest they would get the rest of the night to the end zone on offense.
The Maurauders moved the ball to the Raider 40 on their next drive, but a false-start penalty and two incompletions ended the drive. Crescent City started at its 12 and got a couple of first downs, however the Raiders stalled at the 35. So Davis was called in to punt the ball away.
Standing at the other end of the field was Cooper, the all-everything Marauder. Davis got the punt off and it was a pretty nice one I admit. It took a bounce around the 25 and Cooper had to get it on a hop at the 22. But just as Cooper got the hop on the ball, flying in like a Ninja was a Raider defender who had ideas of making himself a highlight reel hero. He smashed into Cooper with everything he had.
Cooper, though, didn't flinch. He absorbed the hit and stayed on his feet. Heading toward the closest sideline to my view, CCC's sideline, he found what he was looking for -- a block from teammate Colin McCarthy. That sprung him loose and he picked up a wall of blockers, who took care of Davis, the closest person to Cooper on the play. Cooper went untouched the rest of the way and finished out a 78-yard run to give the Marauders the lead with 9:42 left in the first half.
There was excitement upstairs where I was, but it was tempered ... as if they've seen this happen before. To these people, the only things Cooper was missing were the "S" on his jersey and the cape behind him.
Nonetheless, the onslaught was about to begin. On the next Crescent City possession, Haines lost the handle of the ball and fumbled. Marauder defensive end/ tight end Ted Wunderlich, a 6-2, 205-pound senior, snatched the ball at the Raider 34. Four runs and an incomplete pass later, Harris scampered around the left side, found a block to his liking and found paydirt for a 14-yard score with 6:16 left before halftime to make it 14-0 after Anthony Leandri's extra-point kick.
Both teams traded possessions and even though Crescent City got a first down on the next possession after the tradeoffs, they were forced to punt again. Cooper got just eight yards on his return this time and the Marauders had the ball back at their 38. On second and 9 from the 39, Nowels dropped back, practically far from pressured by the smaller Raider linemen, and dropped a perfect pass to McCarthy for 35 yards to the Raider 26. On the next play, Nowels dropped back again and hit Cooper with a perfect slant-pattern throw. Cooper did the rest from there to finish out the score with 20 seconds left before halftime, making it 21-0.
If I wasn't sure the game was over before that, it was over now. For as hard as the Raiders tried in the first half, they were trailing by three scores and after that first drive to the 3 ended with no points, it was highly unlikely they were coming back on this night.
I made the phone call to Bob back in the office that this one was not going to be close and Andy called me with what was going on in his game. Palatka was trailing in its game at halftime, 14-10, and seemed to have a far better chance of winning than Crescent City did.
Glum? Yes I was. But I knew there was a possibility of this happening, too. Now it was a matter of pride in the second half.
Leandri put the second-half kickoff out of bounds and the Raiders opted to move the Marauders back five yards to the 30, hoping to capitalize on field position. But when the Raiders muffed the kickoff on the second go round and Johnson had to retrieve the ball at the goal line, only to get to the 10, it told me all I needed to know about the Raiders' enthusiasm toward the second half.
Three runs by Johnson got eight yards and Wisnoski was not taking any chances. They punted the ball away, but Davis' punt was a poor 18-yard attempt and the Marauders had the ball at the 36. A holding call against the Marauders (for as big as their line was, they weren't very clean as the 15 penalties backed that up on this night) moved the ball back to the 46. Nowels hit Chris Campbell with a 12-yard pass back to the 34, but two false start penalties moved them back to the 44.
Still, the Marauders had confidence and a 9-yard run by Harris and a 4-yard reception by Harris put the Marauders at the 31 with fourth and 5. They went for it and when Nowels hit Cooper with a 7-yard pass for the first down, you can see the deflation of enthusiasm on the other side of the field.
A couple of plays later, I saw worse. Buenaventura, who was also the nose guard of the team, was literally speared in the back by 280-pound center DeJarnatt, who was attempting to block, and he wasn't moving. Whether there was intent or not, and I don't believe there was, it was a pretty mean-spirited spearing.
After the game, Wisnoski was not all too happy with either DeJarnatt or his head coach, Mike Jalazo. He even said he thought it was one of the dirtiest things he'd ever seen in his long coaching career. But no official saw it and Buenaventura had to be taken off the field.
Talk about adding insult to injury by taking out the 5-3, 138-pound nose guard because you could.
The Marauders continued to drive and got a pass interference call against the Raiders to move the ball to the 11. Two Harris runs later, he was in the end zone on a 5-yard score to cap off a nine-play, all-over-the-place 46-yard drive.
After Davis' fifth and final punt of the night, the Marauders went to work one last time against the struggling Raiders. They crafted a beautiful 15-play drive with 10 runs and five passes, and marched 71 yards where Harris finished it off with a 3-yard run to cap off an 18-carry, 106-yard night.
And with 9:06 left in the game, that meant the clock got to run to zero unstopped with the Raiders down 35-0 and the mercy-rule lead taking effect in the fourth quarter. But just as it looked as if there would be no highlights from the visiting team on this night, the Raiders got the one big moment they were hoping to have.
Leandri kicked it off and sent it toward returner/wide receiver Chevelle Taylor. Taylor took the ball and was looking to run a fake play with fellow returner Johnson ... or at least that's what he said to me after the game. But when he saw Johnson go off to block, he knew he was on his own. The senior found his blockers to run behind, then broke into daylight where no one was going to catch him. By the time he was done, he had a 95-yard return for a touchdown in the books and Brown's extra-point kick made it 35-7.
Just two years earlier down the road a bit in St. Petersburg, I had seen Taylor return a kickoff 100 yards for a score against St. Petersburg Catholic and earlier in the season, he had a kickoff return for a score in a Crescent City 18-14 win at Wildwood.
The Marauders had the ball one more time with backups in the game and got the ball to the 32, but Leandri missed a 48-yard field goal. And on the first play after the missed kick, Haines was intercepted for his only time of the night by Nathan Lenz with 2:01 left to put a ribbon on the 35-7 CCC victory.
And there were a lot of Crescent City kids in tears afterward. As I would write in my lead after the game, "About the only thing that came easy for the Crescent City Junior-Senior High School football team Friday night were the tears that flowed freely from each player's eyes after what turned out to be the final game of the season."
I had interviewed Wisnoski, still seething over the spearing of Buenaventura, and Taylor. I also interviewed Jalazo and Cooper afterward.
And I left the field and parking lot that night, heading north on US-19 to the Kinko's in Clearwater, located on the southbound lane. It was tricky to find where I had to go, but I did. I wrote my story up as quick as I could and sent the statistics of the game to Bob, who seemed to be in control of the situation. Bob was done with the news side pages earlier in the evening and all he had to do was fill in the blanks that Andy and I left him for our section, which was about three-plus pages.
Oh, how I miss Bob a great deal. Bob could jump in and help lay out the sports section if need be. We only had him do that twice while I was there and he made our front look fantastic. We sadly do not have someone else to take on that responsibility at the Daily News anymore like we did when Bob was there. It makes our job that much more difficult and it made us appreciate what we had while he was there.
At around 11:30, I had sauntered into my favorite restaurant in all of Florida, Pete and Shorty's, located on US-60. The people and the service are both fantastic. About 20 minutes into being there, I suddenly realized that I still had a soccer match to go after. I made a call to John Thomas, who was already home and he had told me they lost the match, 1-0. I said to him I'd get the results in the paper on Tuesday and he wasn't all that upset about it one bit.
By the time my night was done, I was back at the hotel with the difficult parking lot entry. And the next day, I was back over the Causeway and back into Clearwater after checking out. I ate my lunch at -- you guessed it -- Pete and Shorty's and indulged in an 18-hole round of golf at a resort somewhere in the southern part of Clearwater. I can't remember the darn name, but I can still see me driving to the place. I went to my step-grandmother's house for dinner that night in Clearwater and then made the long trip back to Palatka where I didn't get back home until just after midnight.
Palatka, meanwhile, would lose a tough one in the end to Jackson High, 21-17, to see its season end.
Clearwater Central Catholic went on to beat Sarasota Cardinal Mooney, 24-17, the next week in the playoffs, but would ultimately lose to Pahokee in the state 2B semifinal, 35-16. As for Cooper, he would ultimately choose to go to Gainesville and the University of Florida, where he would get the ball thrown to him quite a bit by a guy who was leading Nease High to the state 4A title in the fall of 2005, Tim Tebow. He would be part of two national championship teams at UF before the Philadelphia Eagles drafted him in the 2010 draft.
I got to interview Cooper when he was a senior at UF after a win against lowly Savannah State, then got to interview him the next year as a rookie after his Eagles defeated the Jacksonville Jaguars at EverBank Field with the big story being quarterback Michael Vick's first big start with the team.
To this day, Riley Cooper is the only player I ever got to interview as a high school athlete, a college athlete and as a pro athlete. And unlike the ugly incident at a Kenny Chesney concert in June 2013 in which he made indecent racial remarks that gave his credibility a black eye, I found him to be a very good quote. It's a shame he's defined the way he is now.
I love the road trips I would take for high school football games even if I don't take as many as I used to. And even if the team I'm covering loses, the players and things you get to see on these trips -- like I did in 2005 in Clearwater -- are well worth it.
That season, both Palatka High and Crescent City Junior-Senior High, the team I primarily covered in my team at the paper, made the state playoffs and Interlachen, which has struggled for the better part of the last 15 years, had a 4-6 season, which in many ways was like going 8-2 for that program, under coach Bobby Humphries.
But to have two of our three county teams in the state tournament was a thrill enough, even if both Palatka and Crescent City were second-place teams in their districts that season. Palatka was up in Jacksonville to face Andrew Jackson High in the 3A playoffs. That's where my boss Andy went. As for myself, Crescent City was opening up the Class 2B playoffs ... but they weren't going to be anywhere near the Palatka office.
No, for their first-round matchup, the Raiders were to make a three-hour trek to Pinellas County to face off with Clearwater Central Catholic. So I had to make arrangements to get a hotel room for overnight and locate the nearest Kinko's since these were the days before I would get my own laptop. It's a lot of hustling around, but I was able to locate the closest one to the field I was going to be at was about 10 minutes away up US-19 and fortunately, it was a 24-hour store.
This meant neither Andy nor myself were going to be back in the office to write our stories and lay out the sports section. But unlike today where the backup system doesn't exist anymore, we had a backup plan as the nightside news editor -- and a former sports writer and editor -- named Bob was back in the office.
So leading up to the night of Friday, November 11, 2005, Andy, Bob and myself had to devise a plan to make everything work. In a bare-bones operation such as our newspaper, there could not be a slip-up. We would keep Bob up to date as to what happened that night and if there were any other sports going on that night, it would be up to either Andy or myself to track them down and get the results via cell phones. Thankfully, basketball season had not tipped off just yet, but on the schedule, the only team playing was the Crescent City Junior-Senior High boys soccer team, which was missing a couple of kids from the football team. Crescent City was playing Flagler Palm Coast on this evening, a non-district opponent. In the midst of having to cover and write up the football game, I had to try to remember to make a call to Raiders coach John Thomas after the game.
Such is the life of a small newspaper worker.
Not only did I have to make plans with those at work, I had a girlfriend at the time that I was living with and told her that I was leaving Friday afternoon to head to Clearwater and was not coming back home until Saturday night. Working at a sheriff's office, this was her weekend to work there and she had just switched from late nights to the morning-afternoon shift, so I was not going to see her as I left. As per usual, she would get up at 4 a.m. and take over an hour to get ready for work. I kissed her goodbye and jumped back into bed to sleep until about 11:30 that morning.
I left Palatka at just after 2 p.m. and made the long trek down US-301 and then down I-75 until connecting with the exit for I-275. When I got to where I-4 connected with the I-275 loop, I took that exit and headed east on I-4 for an exit or two. I arrived at the Days Inn in Ybor City. One thing, though -- the hotel people who I set my reservation up for failed to tell me that getting into the hotel was a challenge.
The main entrances were being blocked off for motorists to get into because they were in the middle of some massive upheaval of the roads there. I literally asked a worker how do I get into the hotel -- they had no freakin' clue.
"Just keep driving around" was all this low-brained construction guy could tell me. It took me about 20 minutes to figure out where and how to get into the hotel, but ultimately, I did. And then the first minute of my reservation confirmation was spent bitching out the person there because there was a lack of communication as to how to get in and out of the hotel in which that person kept apologizing for the inconvenience.
Thankfully, my hotel room didn't have a window anywhere near the eyesore of the construction. I had relaxed for about 60 minutes, then it was back out the door again and heading to Clearwater Central Catholic, a school that I vaguely remembered was off of US-19 because there were signs going both ways on that highway that led you in the direction of the school.
With the darkness now settled in since the recent move from standard time to daylight saving's time, I maneuvered my way around the traffic on I-275 until I got to the exit for SR-60 and a long trip over the Campbell Causeway and toward the tricky turn onto US-19 in Clearwater. State Road-60 has a ton of traffic on it, so you have to move fast in getting to where you have to go.
Thankfully, I caught the turn-off and found myself going south on US-19. Now was a matter of finding that sign I had seen a number of times before while I was down that way. And in the flood of night lights and headlights, it was right there on the right side of the road -- CLEARWATER CENTRAL CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL, NEXT LEFT.
Bingo! One turn and the parking lot wasn't that far away. I had settled into my spot, grabbed my things and got to the fairly spacious press box that overlooked the field by around 7 p.m. for the 7:30 kickoff.
Now did I think Crescent City had a shot of winning this game? I did -- but it was a puncher's chance. The Clearwater Central Catholic Marauders were 8-2, so they weren't invincible by any means even if they had won eight in a row going in. But for 5-5 Crescent City to beat the Marauders, a whooooooole bunch of things needed to go just right. Quarterback Louis Haines, now a sophomore, needed to be on his game. Running backs D.J. Johnson, B.J. Sharper, Kerlon Williams and Daniel Wortman had to find the holes and make plays. And the offensive line had to be strong.
The latter was going to be a challenge. For as big as Crescent City was -- this included 6-foot-2, 225-pound Rudy Davis, 6-2, 240-pound Leviticus Bennett and 6-2, 252-pound Antonio Henderson, their center was all of 5-foot-3 and 138 pounds ... soaking wet. But for as big as senior Patrich Buenaventura was, his heart and determination were far bigger than he was.
Still, this was going to be a bit of a challenge because one look at CCC's big senior boys told you everything you needed to know about this group. Toby DeJarnatt was a 6-4, 290-pound center and defensive lineman. Austin Gould was a 6-0, 270-pound guard and defensive lineman. And the biggest of the big boys -- offensive and defensive tackle Kevin Young -- was 6-6 and 320 pounds.
Good luck with handling this situation, Crescent City. While Al Wisnoski, the first-year head coach of the Raiders and a longtime assistant before getting the job, acknowledge the challenge would be burdensome to handle that line on both sides, he still felt confident his coaches would be able to figure out something and expose it during the game.
Well even if he did, there were three skill players to worry about on the CCC side. There was quarterback Anthony Nowels, a 6-4, 211-pound junior who presented a challenge to Crescent City to bring down. There was little Ron Harris, a 5-5, 150-pound sparkplug with blazing speed.
And then there was the best of all these players on the field, a smooth-as-silk, 6-4, 205-pound senior who played wide receiver and free safety and was being recruited by a bunch of schools, including Florida, Texas, Oklahoma State and Tennessee, where he just happened to be flying off to for a recruiting trip that weekend.
His name was Riley Cooper. Had heard a lot about his prowess as one of the 10 best senior players in the country. Now I was going to get the entire Riley Cooper experience on this night.
The Raiders won the coin toss, but opted to defer to the Marauders, sending the message they were ready to play on this evening. And it seemed to work in the first six minutes of the game. The Raiders stopped the Marauders with a three-and-out and got the ball back off a punt at the Raider 48. Williams went eight yards with a handoff, but fumbled. Thankfully, he recovered his own fumble. Then on third-and-1, Haines drew the Marauders off sides for a first down. Wortman, a fullback, went 11 yards up the middle with a dive, then Sharper went 22 yards with a run to the Marauder 5. A face mask call on the play moved the ball halfway to the goal to the 3.
The Raiders were in business to score and dictate the tempo. Sharper, though, got nothing on first down. Johnson, a 1,000-yard rusher his sophomore year, also got nothing on second down. That set up third and goal from the 3.
The play Wisnoski called in was brilliant in diagram -- Sharper would take his defender out wide on a fake handoff and then Johnson would get the ball in the hole created by the defender trying to get to Sharper. It may have worked out if not for one little detail.
Cooper stayed at home on the play. Cooper followed Johnson to where he was going and tackled him for the 2-yard loss. Cooper would say later to me he knew the play was coming from seeing it on film during the week and that he just "followed the play to where it was being run."
Wisnoski needed points and from the 5, a 22-yard field goal with sure-footed kicker and freshman Nate Brown was a good option. But from the time the ball snapped to Brown putting his shoe on the ball, something went wrong. He miss-kicked it and the ball wound up slamming off a Raiders lineman blocking on the play and bounced through the end zone.
No points. Little did any of us know that for all the momentum the Raiders had in those first six minutes of the game, that would be the closest they would get the rest of the night to the end zone on offense.
The Maurauders moved the ball to the Raider 40 on their next drive, but a false-start penalty and two incompletions ended the drive. Crescent City started at its 12 and got a couple of first downs, however the Raiders stalled at the 35. So Davis was called in to punt the ball away.
Standing at the other end of the field was Cooper, the all-everything Marauder. Davis got the punt off and it was a pretty nice one I admit. It took a bounce around the 25 and Cooper had to get it on a hop at the 22. But just as Cooper got the hop on the ball, flying in like a Ninja was a Raider defender who had ideas of making himself a highlight reel hero. He smashed into Cooper with everything he had.
Cooper, though, didn't flinch. He absorbed the hit and stayed on his feet. Heading toward the closest sideline to my view, CCC's sideline, he found what he was looking for -- a block from teammate Colin McCarthy. That sprung him loose and he picked up a wall of blockers, who took care of Davis, the closest person to Cooper on the play. Cooper went untouched the rest of the way and finished out a 78-yard run to give the Marauders the lead with 9:42 left in the first half.
There was excitement upstairs where I was, but it was tempered ... as if they've seen this happen before. To these people, the only things Cooper was missing were the "S" on his jersey and the cape behind him.
Nonetheless, the onslaught was about to begin. On the next Crescent City possession, Haines lost the handle of the ball and fumbled. Marauder defensive end/ tight end Ted Wunderlich, a 6-2, 205-pound senior, snatched the ball at the Raider 34. Four runs and an incomplete pass later, Harris scampered around the left side, found a block to his liking and found paydirt for a 14-yard score with 6:16 left before halftime to make it 14-0 after Anthony Leandri's extra-point kick.
Both teams traded possessions and even though Crescent City got a first down on the next possession after the tradeoffs, they were forced to punt again. Cooper got just eight yards on his return this time and the Marauders had the ball back at their 38. On second and 9 from the 39, Nowels dropped back, practically far from pressured by the smaller Raider linemen, and dropped a perfect pass to McCarthy for 35 yards to the Raider 26. On the next play, Nowels dropped back again and hit Cooper with a perfect slant-pattern throw. Cooper did the rest from there to finish out the score with 20 seconds left before halftime, making it 21-0.
If I wasn't sure the game was over before that, it was over now. For as hard as the Raiders tried in the first half, they were trailing by three scores and after that first drive to the 3 ended with no points, it was highly unlikely they were coming back on this night.
I made the phone call to Bob back in the office that this one was not going to be close and Andy called me with what was going on in his game. Palatka was trailing in its game at halftime, 14-10, and seemed to have a far better chance of winning than Crescent City did.
Glum? Yes I was. But I knew there was a possibility of this happening, too. Now it was a matter of pride in the second half.
Leandri put the second-half kickoff out of bounds and the Raiders opted to move the Marauders back five yards to the 30, hoping to capitalize on field position. But when the Raiders muffed the kickoff on the second go round and Johnson had to retrieve the ball at the goal line, only to get to the 10, it told me all I needed to know about the Raiders' enthusiasm toward the second half.
Three runs by Johnson got eight yards and Wisnoski was not taking any chances. They punted the ball away, but Davis' punt was a poor 18-yard attempt and the Marauders had the ball at the 36. A holding call against the Marauders (for as big as their line was, they weren't very clean as the 15 penalties backed that up on this night) moved the ball back to the 46. Nowels hit Chris Campbell with a 12-yard pass back to the 34, but two false start penalties moved them back to the 44.
Still, the Marauders had confidence and a 9-yard run by Harris and a 4-yard reception by Harris put the Marauders at the 31 with fourth and 5. They went for it and when Nowels hit Cooper with a 7-yard pass for the first down, you can see the deflation of enthusiasm on the other side of the field.
A couple of plays later, I saw worse. Buenaventura, who was also the nose guard of the team, was literally speared in the back by 280-pound center DeJarnatt, who was attempting to block, and he wasn't moving. Whether there was intent or not, and I don't believe there was, it was a pretty mean-spirited spearing.
After the game, Wisnoski was not all too happy with either DeJarnatt or his head coach, Mike Jalazo. He even said he thought it was one of the dirtiest things he'd ever seen in his long coaching career. But no official saw it and Buenaventura had to be taken off the field.
Talk about adding insult to injury by taking out the 5-3, 138-pound nose guard because you could.
The Marauders continued to drive and got a pass interference call against the Raiders to move the ball to the 11. Two Harris runs later, he was in the end zone on a 5-yard score to cap off a nine-play, all-over-the-place 46-yard drive.
After Davis' fifth and final punt of the night, the Marauders went to work one last time against the struggling Raiders. They crafted a beautiful 15-play drive with 10 runs and five passes, and marched 71 yards where Harris finished it off with a 3-yard run to cap off an 18-carry, 106-yard night.
And with 9:06 left in the game, that meant the clock got to run to zero unstopped with the Raiders down 35-0 and the mercy-rule lead taking effect in the fourth quarter. But just as it looked as if there would be no highlights from the visiting team on this night, the Raiders got the one big moment they were hoping to have.
Leandri kicked it off and sent it toward returner/wide receiver Chevelle Taylor. Taylor took the ball and was looking to run a fake play with fellow returner Johnson ... or at least that's what he said to me after the game. But when he saw Johnson go off to block, he knew he was on his own. The senior found his blockers to run behind, then broke into daylight where no one was going to catch him. By the time he was done, he had a 95-yard return for a touchdown in the books and Brown's extra-point kick made it 35-7.
Just two years earlier down the road a bit in St. Petersburg, I had seen Taylor return a kickoff 100 yards for a score against St. Petersburg Catholic and earlier in the season, he had a kickoff return for a score in a Crescent City 18-14 win at Wildwood.
The Marauders had the ball one more time with backups in the game and got the ball to the 32, but Leandri missed a 48-yard field goal. And on the first play after the missed kick, Haines was intercepted for his only time of the night by Nathan Lenz with 2:01 left to put a ribbon on the 35-7 CCC victory.
And there were a lot of Crescent City kids in tears afterward. As I would write in my lead after the game, "About the only thing that came easy for the Crescent City Junior-Senior High School football team Friday night were the tears that flowed freely from each player's eyes after what turned out to be the final game of the season."
I had interviewed Wisnoski, still seething over the spearing of Buenaventura, and Taylor. I also interviewed Jalazo and Cooper afterward.
And I left the field and parking lot that night, heading north on US-19 to the Kinko's in Clearwater, located on the southbound lane. It was tricky to find where I had to go, but I did. I wrote my story up as quick as I could and sent the statistics of the game to Bob, who seemed to be in control of the situation. Bob was done with the news side pages earlier in the evening and all he had to do was fill in the blanks that Andy and I left him for our section, which was about three-plus pages.
Oh, how I miss Bob a great deal. Bob could jump in and help lay out the sports section if need be. We only had him do that twice while I was there and he made our front look fantastic. We sadly do not have someone else to take on that responsibility at the Daily News anymore like we did when Bob was there. It makes our job that much more difficult and it made us appreciate what we had while he was there.
At around 11:30, I had sauntered into my favorite restaurant in all of Florida, Pete and Shorty's, located on US-60. The people and the service are both fantastic. About 20 minutes into being there, I suddenly realized that I still had a soccer match to go after. I made a call to John Thomas, who was already home and he had told me they lost the match, 1-0. I said to him I'd get the results in the paper on Tuesday and he wasn't all that upset about it one bit.
By the time my night was done, I was back at the hotel with the difficult parking lot entry. And the next day, I was back over the Causeway and back into Clearwater after checking out. I ate my lunch at -- you guessed it -- Pete and Shorty's and indulged in an 18-hole round of golf at a resort somewhere in the southern part of Clearwater. I can't remember the darn name, but I can still see me driving to the place. I went to my step-grandmother's house for dinner that night in Clearwater and then made the long trip back to Palatka where I didn't get back home until just after midnight.
Palatka, meanwhile, would lose a tough one in the end to Jackson High, 21-17, to see its season end.
Clearwater Central Catholic went on to beat Sarasota Cardinal Mooney, 24-17, the next week in the playoffs, but would ultimately lose to Pahokee in the state 2B semifinal, 35-16. As for Cooper, he would ultimately choose to go to Gainesville and the University of Florida, where he would get the ball thrown to him quite a bit by a guy who was leading Nease High to the state 4A title in the fall of 2005, Tim Tebow. He would be part of two national championship teams at UF before the Philadelphia Eagles drafted him in the 2010 draft.
I got to interview Cooper when he was a senior at UF after a win against lowly Savannah State, then got to interview him the next year as a rookie after his Eagles defeated the Jacksonville Jaguars at EverBank Field with the big story being quarterback Michael Vick's first big start with the team.
To this day, Riley Cooper is the only player I ever got to interview as a high school athlete, a college athlete and as a pro athlete. And unlike the ugly incident at a Kenny Chesney concert in June 2013 in which he made indecent racial remarks that gave his credibility a black eye, I found him to be a very good quote. It's a shame he's defined the way he is now.
I love the road trips I would take for high school football games even if I don't take as many as I used to. And even if the team I'm covering loses, the players and things you get to see on these trips -- like I did in 2005 in Clearwater -- are well worth it.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Three stories, one day -- well, that's what I was hoping to do!
When you're almost 20 years old, you think you're 10 foot tall and bulletproof.
And it's OK, too. We're really only young once. Enjoy your youth while you have it.
So back in the days when we had five- or six-page sports sections, I was open to write anything as long as I could deliver the story in a timely fashion and could find relative reason to have that story in the paper.
My boss at the Observer wanted me to cover not one, but TWO football games on Saturday, November 1, 1986. He had me covering these games far from the office, too. I had the rare 3 p.m. start to a Saturday afternoon game between host Middletown South and Southern Regional, then I had to shuffle off to Shore Regional in West Long Branch to cover the game between Shore, going through one of its best seasons, and Manchester, having a decent year under second-year mentor Bob Hunt, and who a month earlier I had seen upset Freehold Boro and Temple-bound quarterback Anthony Richardson at Freehold.
But two football games weren't going to be enough for my insatiable appetite. Nooooooo! I wanted to do more and had the perfect place to go for a third assignment. It was at Asbury Park's Convention Hall that baseball card afficianado Ed Walsh was hosting. At that time, Asbury Park was on an upswing (I know this because my dad was working at the famous Berkeley-Carteret Hotel across the way from the Hall) and having these big-time card shows was enhancing the reputation.
But this was no ordinary card show with a Hall of Famer.
No, this time around, the card show "star" of the day was a current player ... a player who just happened to have won a World Series title five days earlier sharing center field duties with Mookie Wilson of the champion New York Mets. Somehow, Ed Walsh was able to get Lenny Dykstra to come down and sign autographs. Got in touch with Ed via phone (yes, this was in the era loooong before email) and he saw no problem with me stopping in Asbury Park at around 1 p.m. My goal was to see if I can ween my way through the crowd onto the stage to talk with the Mets' 23-year-old star in the making. Ed didn't seem against the idea. I had been in Asbury Park in August when the great Hank Aaron and Mets pitching great Jerry Koosman were in town to sign autographs and he was able to grant me interviews while they were signing cards.
Naive me figured Hank, Jerry and Lenny were the same baseball kinda guys who were generous with their times and amiable with everyone. Boy was I going to find out differently.
Now how this was all going to work out perfectly where I would be at three places, write three stories and give dictation to our various writers in the office three times was going to need choreography that even Toni Basil or Paula Abdul couldn't quite assemble. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure how I was going to pull this off.
So "winging it" was going to be the operative term of the day. I left my house in Toms River around 11:45 that morning to head to Asbury Park first. The autograph show started at noon, so I figured I'd see a nice-sized crowd there. As I crossed into Asbury Park about 50 minutes later and as I got closer toward the Shore line and the parking lot right by Convention Hall, something just gave me the impression that this was going to be no ordinary day here.
There were lots and lots and lots and lots of cars. World Series championships are going to give it away each and every time. I mean everybody wanted to be at Convention Hall to meet a World Champion New York Mets player. Most everyone might have hoped for Carter or Hernandez or Strawberry or Gooden or even Mookie.
But Lenny Dykstra? Yeah, he was a part-time outfielder but he came up big in a number of spots that fall with the Mets, most memorably his ninth-inning home run off Astros closer Dave Smith to give the Mets a come-from-behind victory over Houston at Shea Stadium in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series.
I walked into Convention Hall and the line of those who were there for Dykstra to sign everything from baseball bats to pictures to autograph books seemed endless! I knew I needed to see my man Ed and see what the deal was going to be to even have a chance to ask his star attraction at least two or three questions, let alone sit next to him for a half hour.
I can see that blank "I'm not sure exactly what to tell you" look on Walsh's face when I approached him as to what he thought would be my best plan of attack. Just looking at the situation, you can see the star attraction was just a bit busy at the moment. And quite honestly, I wasn't really all that jazzed up to find out if Dykstra could multi-task all that well, signing autographs and talking to me as I threw questions out at him.
"It might be best if you came back tomorrow," was all Ed was going to tell me. "I don't really know what to tell you."
Ed was being very honest on this day. I was right on the stage probably no more than about 20 feet from Dykstra. I pretty much had made my decision that this was not going to happen today -- the interview and the story. I could have improvised and interviewed someone who had made the trip from Ocean County to meet the man and have him sign whatever they had for him to sign. But somewhere along the way, the light bulb went on and suddenly I wasn't so interested in overworking myself on this day. After all, even though this was a very big story that a New York Mets player had come to the Jersey Shore for an autograph show at a high-profile place like Convention Hall, it wasn't on Ocean County turf.
Sounds like a copout, but truth it was.
At about that same moment, I saw Joe Zedalis, who was there to do a story for the Asbury Park Press. He was looking at Dykstra from the same angle as I was. So I asked him how long he had been there and what has he seen or heard from the man he was there to do a feature story on.
"He's been acting like a complete ass," Joe said, indicating that he was going to have to pursue his story from a totally different angle since getting an interview with Dykstra seemed as reachable as getting to the South Pole in an hour. "He just looks like he doesn't want to be there."
I was there a lesser amount of time, yet I got that impression as well. Though he was signing autographs and being amicable with the fans who came to see him that day, the Southern California native just never looked like he wanted to be there, as if he wanted to go back to Southern California, already going through the throes of a world championship and everything tied to that title, including the big parade three days earlier.
Resigned to not having any story -- actually happy I didn't have a story -- I told Ed I'd see him on Sunday right back at the Hall and headed to a phone booth on the boardwalk to call my boss at home. Told him he wasn't going to get a story and I knew he wasn't going to be upset. He knew if I had gotten Dykstra and interviewed him, then it'd be an accomplishment. And after all, the two more important stories were still on the docket and at about 2 p.m., I started heading out of Asbury Park and found my way to the Garden State Parkway where I traveled north to Exit 114.
I had been to Middletown South High five months earlier for Shore Conference Tournament softball when Toms River South upset the top-seeded Eagles in the semifinals. But that was a beautiful, sunny late spring day. Today, it was a dreary, yucky, grey mid-fall day in the mid-50s. Made it to the press box for what I thought it would be an easy game to cover.
However, I should have probably read more on this game. Little did I know that Middletown South's quarterback liked to throw the ball. And so did his coaching staff. Southern was in the middle of a miserably bad football season and this was the last year for Ron Emmert as the head coach. Middletown South was having its way in the football game. Honestly, I remember very little from this game. But what I do remember was that South was throwing the ball on three of every four plays and Southern Regional wasn't getting very far ... and the game took three hours! Middletown South won in a romp that could have been ended say 30 minutes earlier, I grabbed the mild-mannered Emmert after the game as he and I were walking on the field and since I had interviewed him a number of times before, I knew what to expect to hear from him -- good effort, but not good enough to beat a team that was better than his team. I sensed he knew the end of the line was coming for a good amount of the '86 season.
With my notes from the game and the interview I did, I had to saunter somewhere to write the game story and dictate it, but I had very little time to make it happen in just under an hour, knowing the second game was at 7:30. I got to the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown at about 6:30 and quickly composed the story. But at 7 p.m. and grabbing something quick to eat in the food court, I made a phone call to one of our writers in the office to tell him that the story was written, but I knew I had to be at Shore Regional to write the game story so at halftime, I'd dictate the story and statistics to him.
And so I got on the road again from the mall to West Long Branch and Shore Regional High, which again I was familiar with since I was a student at Monmouth College nearby and had seen my fair share of field hockcy matches in recent times featuring the vaunted Shore Regional program. I got into the press box about five minutes before kickoff and asked if there was a pay phone somewhere near the field. The only pay phone, the guy doing the public address system that day told me, was in the front of the school, which was a fairly long walk from the football field. So as I kept my statistics from the football game that was competitive early on between Shore and Manchester, I scoped the field to see Jim Hintelmann of the Red Bank Register walking the sidelines covering the game as well.
When halftime arrived, I got to my car quickly in the parking lot behind the football field and drove around the school to the front of it on Route 36. There was a perfect pay phone there where I could talk to whoever I wanted to from the seat of the car. Once I was able to get in touch with Chris, one of our writers, I was able to give him statistics and dictate my Southern-Middletown South story to him. Thankfully it was a blowout that I could dictate to him in less than 10 minutes. He hit the save button and told him we'd do it again after the Shore game.
So I scurried along some streets back to the football field parking lot, jumped out of the car and started covering the game on the field, something I disdain doing even to this day because you can't see an entire field from your spot walking the same field. But being this was an emergency situation, I had no choice. I walked alongside Jim and for the better part of the third quarter, I was catching up on the game from him between plays and timeouts getting each and every play in order as it happened. Football is not a sport that you can take a play off while keeping statistics -- every play is important and needs to be jotted down.
By this point, Shore had pulled away and was en route to victory over Manchester and in the fourth quarter. Having the statistics taken care of thanks to Jim, who I will always remember fondly in this business, the only thing left was to grab Hunt and interview him afterward. I had done so and it was back to the car ... and back to the front of the building to the same pay phone where I had the call made collect and then dictated the statistics. Then about 15 minutes later, I called collect again and dictated the story on Shore's wipeout of Manchester, which just didn't have it that night.
And by about 10:45 p.m., the night was over. I made a stop at my favorite place in the Eatontown-West Long Branch area -- White Castle on Route 35. My favorite girl working there, Mary, was not there on this Saturday night because she was off celebrating her birthday. But I remember eating in silence and heading home afterward.
The long day was over and two football games that I know I covered in a half-ass manner were done and written and the one assignment I really looked forward to was never finished because of extending circumstances involving the person who was there to sign autographs and the attitude he took on the day.
The next afternoon, I went back to Asbury Park to see Ed and things were much, much quieter on this day -- it was the legendary Brooklyn Dodger Duke Snider, a Hall of Famer in every way. The crowds weren't as huge as they were 27 hours earlier, and that was more than fine. He gave me a great interview and told me about his time as not only a Brooklyn Dodger, but as a New York Met in the early years of the franchise-- "They sold me off like I was a slave."
I went back to the office that evening to write the story for Greg, our assistant sports editor.
The adventurous weekend was over and in the end, I got three stories -- just not in one day.
Sometimes, it's best you don't think of yourself as 10 feet tall and bulletproof. You get better results that way.
And it's OK, too. We're really only young once. Enjoy your youth while you have it.
So back in the days when we had five- or six-page sports sections, I was open to write anything as long as I could deliver the story in a timely fashion and could find relative reason to have that story in the paper.
My boss at the Observer wanted me to cover not one, but TWO football games on Saturday, November 1, 1986. He had me covering these games far from the office, too. I had the rare 3 p.m. start to a Saturday afternoon game between host Middletown South and Southern Regional, then I had to shuffle off to Shore Regional in West Long Branch to cover the game between Shore, going through one of its best seasons, and Manchester, having a decent year under second-year mentor Bob Hunt, and who a month earlier I had seen upset Freehold Boro and Temple-bound quarterback Anthony Richardson at Freehold.
But two football games weren't going to be enough for my insatiable appetite. Nooooooo! I wanted to do more and had the perfect place to go for a third assignment. It was at Asbury Park's Convention Hall that baseball card afficianado Ed Walsh was hosting. At that time, Asbury Park was on an upswing (I know this because my dad was working at the famous Berkeley-Carteret Hotel across the way from the Hall) and having these big-time card shows was enhancing the reputation.
But this was no ordinary card show with a Hall of Famer.
No, this time around, the card show "star" of the day was a current player ... a player who just happened to have won a World Series title five days earlier sharing center field duties with Mookie Wilson of the champion New York Mets. Somehow, Ed Walsh was able to get Lenny Dykstra to come down and sign autographs. Got in touch with Ed via phone (yes, this was in the era loooong before email) and he saw no problem with me stopping in Asbury Park at around 1 p.m. My goal was to see if I can ween my way through the crowd onto the stage to talk with the Mets' 23-year-old star in the making. Ed didn't seem against the idea. I had been in Asbury Park in August when the great Hank Aaron and Mets pitching great Jerry Koosman were in town to sign autographs and he was able to grant me interviews while they were signing cards.
Naive me figured Hank, Jerry and Lenny were the same baseball kinda guys who were generous with their times and amiable with everyone. Boy was I going to find out differently.
Now how this was all going to work out perfectly where I would be at three places, write three stories and give dictation to our various writers in the office three times was going to need choreography that even Toni Basil or Paula Abdul couldn't quite assemble. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure how I was going to pull this off.
So "winging it" was going to be the operative term of the day. I left my house in Toms River around 11:45 that morning to head to Asbury Park first. The autograph show started at noon, so I figured I'd see a nice-sized crowd there. As I crossed into Asbury Park about 50 minutes later and as I got closer toward the Shore line and the parking lot right by Convention Hall, something just gave me the impression that this was going to be no ordinary day here.
There were lots and lots and lots and lots of cars. World Series championships are going to give it away each and every time. I mean everybody wanted to be at Convention Hall to meet a World Champion New York Mets player. Most everyone might have hoped for Carter or Hernandez or Strawberry or Gooden or even Mookie.
But Lenny Dykstra? Yeah, he was a part-time outfielder but he came up big in a number of spots that fall with the Mets, most memorably his ninth-inning home run off Astros closer Dave Smith to give the Mets a come-from-behind victory over Houston at Shea Stadium in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series.
I walked into Convention Hall and the line of those who were there for Dykstra to sign everything from baseball bats to pictures to autograph books seemed endless! I knew I needed to see my man Ed and see what the deal was going to be to even have a chance to ask his star attraction at least two or three questions, let alone sit next to him for a half hour.
I can see that blank "I'm not sure exactly what to tell you" look on Walsh's face when I approached him as to what he thought would be my best plan of attack. Just looking at the situation, you can see the star attraction was just a bit busy at the moment. And quite honestly, I wasn't really all that jazzed up to find out if Dykstra could multi-task all that well, signing autographs and talking to me as I threw questions out at him.
"It might be best if you came back tomorrow," was all Ed was going to tell me. "I don't really know what to tell you."
Ed was being very honest on this day. I was right on the stage probably no more than about 20 feet from Dykstra. I pretty much had made my decision that this was not going to happen today -- the interview and the story. I could have improvised and interviewed someone who had made the trip from Ocean County to meet the man and have him sign whatever they had for him to sign. But somewhere along the way, the light bulb went on and suddenly I wasn't so interested in overworking myself on this day. After all, even though this was a very big story that a New York Mets player had come to the Jersey Shore for an autograph show at a high-profile place like Convention Hall, it wasn't on Ocean County turf.
Sounds like a copout, but truth it was.
At about that same moment, I saw Joe Zedalis, who was there to do a story for the Asbury Park Press. He was looking at Dykstra from the same angle as I was. So I asked him how long he had been there and what has he seen or heard from the man he was there to do a feature story on.
"He's been acting like a complete ass," Joe said, indicating that he was going to have to pursue his story from a totally different angle since getting an interview with Dykstra seemed as reachable as getting to the South Pole in an hour. "He just looks like he doesn't want to be there."
I was there a lesser amount of time, yet I got that impression as well. Though he was signing autographs and being amicable with the fans who came to see him that day, the Southern California native just never looked like he wanted to be there, as if he wanted to go back to Southern California, already going through the throes of a world championship and everything tied to that title, including the big parade three days earlier.
Resigned to not having any story -- actually happy I didn't have a story -- I told Ed I'd see him on Sunday right back at the Hall and headed to a phone booth on the boardwalk to call my boss at home. Told him he wasn't going to get a story and I knew he wasn't going to be upset. He knew if I had gotten Dykstra and interviewed him, then it'd be an accomplishment. And after all, the two more important stories were still on the docket and at about 2 p.m., I started heading out of Asbury Park and found my way to the Garden State Parkway where I traveled north to Exit 114.
I had been to Middletown South High five months earlier for Shore Conference Tournament softball when Toms River South upset the top-seeded Eagles in the semifinals. But that was a beautiful, sunny late spring day. Today, it was a dreary, yucky, grey mid-fall day in the mid-50s. Made it to the press box for what I thought it would be an easy game to cover.
However, I should have probably read more on this game. Little did I know that Middletown South's quarterback liked to throw the ball. And so did his coaching staff. Southern was in the middle of a miserably bad football season and this was the last year for Ron Emmert as the head coach. Middletown South was having its way in the football game. Honestly, I remember very little from this game. But what I do remember was that South was throwing the ball on three of every four plays and Southern Regional wasn't getting very far ... and the game took three hours! Middletown South won in a romp that could have been ended say 30 minutes earlier, I grabbed the mild-mannered Emmert after the game as he and I were walking on the field and since I had interviewed him a number of times before, I knew what to expect to hear from him -- good effort, but not good enough to beat a team that was better than his team. I sensed he knew the end of the line was coming for a good amount of the '86 season.
With my notes from the game and the interview I did, I had to saunter somewhere to write the game story and dictate it, but I had very little time to make it happen in just under an hour, knowing the second game was at 7:30. I got to the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown at about 6:30 and quickly composed the story. But at 7 p.m. and grabbing something quick to eat in the food court, I made a phone call to one of our writers in the office to tell him that the story was written, but I knew I had to be at Shore Regional to write the game story so at halftime, I'd dictate the story and statistics to him.
And so I got on the road again from the mall to West Long Branch and Shore Regional High, which again I was familiar with since I was a student at Monmouth College nearby and had seen my fair share of field hockcy matches in recent times featuring the vaunted Shore Regional program. I got into the press box about five minutes before kickoff and asked if there was a pay phone somewhere near the field. The only pay phone, the guy doing the public address system that day told me, was in the front of the school, which was a fairly long walk from the football field. So as I kept my statistics from the football game that was competitive early on between Shore and Manchester, I scoped the field to see Jim Hintelmann of the Red Bank Register walking the sidelines covering the game as well.
When halftime arrived, I got to my car quickly in the parking lot behind the football field and drove around the school to the front of it on Route 36. There was a perfect pay phone there where I could talk to whoever I wanted to from the seat of the car. Once I was able to get in touch with Chris, one of our writers, I was able to give him statistics and dictate my Southern-Middletown South story to him. Thankfully it was a blowout that I could dictate to him in less than 10 minutes. He hit the save button and told him we'd do it again after the Shore game.
So I scurried along some streets back to the football field parking lot, jumped out of the car and started covering the game on the field, something I disdain doing even to this day because you can't see an entire field from your spot walking the same field. But being this was an emergency situation, I had no choice. I walked alongside Jim and for the better part of the third quarter, I was catching up on the game from him between plays and timeouts getting each and every play in order as it happened. Football is not a sport that you can take a play off while keeping statistics -- every play is important and needs to be jotted down.
By this point, Shore had pulled away and was en route to victory over Manchester and in the fourth quarter. Having the statistics taken care of thanks to Jim, who I will always remember fondly in this business, the only thing left was to grab Hunt and interview him afterward. I had done so and it was back to the car ... and back to the front of the building to the same pay phone where I had the call made collect and then dictated the statistics. Then about 15 minutes later, I called collect again and dictated the story on Shore's wipeout of Manchester, which just didn't have it that night.
And by about 10:45 p.m., the night was over. I made a stop at my favorite place in the Eatontown-West Long Branch area -- White Castle on Route 35. My favorite girl working there, Mary, was not there on this Saturday night because she was off celebrating her birthday. But I remember eating in silence and heading home afterward.
The long day was over and two football games that I know I covered in a half-ass manner were done and written and the one assignment I really looked forward to was never finished because of extending circumstances involving the person who was there to sign autographs and the attitude he took on the day.
The next afternoon, I went back to Asbury Park to see Ed and things were much, much quieter on this day -- it was the legendary Brooklyn Dodger Duke Snider, a Hall of Famer in every way. The crowds weren't as huge as they were 27 hours earlier, and that was more than fine. He gave me a great interview and told me about his time as not only a Brooklyn Dodger, but as a New York Met in the early years of the franchise-- "They sold me off like I was a slave."
I went back to the office that evening to write the story for Greg, our assistant sports editor.
The adventurous weekend was over and in the end, I got three stories -- just not in one day.
Sometimes, it's best you don't think of yourself as 10 feet tall and bulletproof. You get better results that way.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
The 2003 Amy-Talisa battle royale in western Putnam County
And I was handling coverage of cross country. Now let me tell you about my relationship with cross country before I moved to Florida -- it was one race, really. I covered it in 1993 at the Ocean County Observer for Bob Considine, who was stuck doing something else on a Saturday morning, so my boss sent me to a cross country meet on an September day at Toms River High School North.
Here are my memories of that day -- it was cold, it was humid, and it was raining non-stop. And I got to bond with the Asbury Park Press writer who I had seen at a couple of assignments I was at before. She brought hot chocolate in a thermos and we sat in her car. I wasn't turning her down when she offered some that hot chocolate to me. Lemme tell ya, it was pretty damn gooooooooood.
When I moved to Key West in the late summer 1999, I was the sports department for all high school sports except for football and I got to handle it that first fall with a disgruntled assistant who didn't get the job that I got. But I wasn't required to be there to cover the cross country event, just to happen on by the Key West Golf Course where the races were held and I'd scribble down the results and head back to the office afterward. There was never really any big cross country meets in the Keys, just the two or three events every fall.
So by the time I got to Palatka, I needed to be well-versed in the sport. I had an idea of how scoring went, first runner in for a team scores one point, second-place runner gets two points for his or her team and the first five runners from a team score and that's their team score at the end of the race. In other words, the lowest score wins.
And my first cross country coach who got me enthused about the sport was Interlachen High veteran mentor Dwayne Cox. Now he had been the head coach of the program for a number of years, and not only was he enthusiastic with what his team could do, but he was also enthusiastic about the sport in general. He held an annual race at the school every second Saturday of October. That's unheard of in Putnam County, Florida since most of the high schools would rather just take the weekend off from hosting anything and get right back into it on a Monday.
He invited me to IHS to take some pictures of some of his runners for the sport's preview story. So I did and got a picture for the preview of his two best runners -- Jeremy Criscione, a junior, on the boys side, and Talisa Bishop, a senior, on the girls side. If you heard Dwayne Cox talk, you'd have sworn these two young people never ... lost ... a ... race! If someone beat them, they had to be some kind of something, if you know what I mean.
So being a newbie to the sport in Putnam County, I figured, "OK, no one is going to really challenge them." But then I had to talk to the other two coaches in the county, Phil Johnson at Crescent City and new coach Mike Lehning at Palatka. And at Palatka High, Lehning was raving about his senior leader on the girls side, a young lady with a load of talent named Amy Eller. And so while I was headlining the preview with the two IHS kids to lead off, I also had mentioned how good Eller might be during the season.
Again, a newbie picking up all he can pick up just enhances a story. So indirectly and practically by accident, I had contrived this rivalry between Eller and Bishop. But I didn't really need to try hard to do that -- they had both carved out a nice little rivalry between them. In the All-Putnam County meet that was started by Cox in 2000, Eller had won the first two county championships, but in 2002, she had developed mononucleosis and was not at 100 percent when Bishop got her and won the title.
During the 2003 season, the two had run against one another in races at different sites. Both times, Bishop had beaten Eller. And during the season, both runners had run personal bests under 22 minutes.
And that would be the backdrop for the next All-Putnam County championship, which for the second straight year was being held at Interlachen High's home course at the hilly West Putnam Recreation Center on Wednesday, October 15, 2003. The fact the race was held on a Wednesday was remarkable in its own right -- it's a religious day and it's rare anything gets held in Bible Belt Florida on that day!
As I drove down State Road-20 into Interlachen, then made a left turn and traveled the one mile south to get to the park, I took a look at the backdrop and saw how vast and wide this place was. The park had a lot of trees in the outlying area and in the middle was a downhill-like bowl ... not quite like the famous "Bowl" at Holmdel Park, where the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association championships were held every third Saturday in November, but still a challenge nonetheless.
Though there are just three schools that run cross country in the county -- all three public high schools -- there were 39 competitors for the race that day, 21 on the boys side and 18 on the girls side. Some of the boys and girls were doing simple jogs of the course preparing for the race, some were relaxed under the large gazebo with benches underneath where race headquarters were.
Cox had things measured out beforehand and actually had the kids walk the outer ring of the course so they could get a feel of how the course looked, especially to the schools that had not run at this challenging park before. That had already been done by the time I arrived at 3:40 p.m. for what I thought was a 4 p.m. race. It would start closer to 4:15 p.m.
The first race up was the girls race. I knew the boys race was going to be a freakin' farce since Criscione, who had started his domination of the sport in the area by now, had run races in the 17- and 18-minute range and not too many other runners were crashing in under 20 minutes.
No, this day was about the Amy vs. Talisa matchup. This would also make for the last matchup between the two since they did not have any more regular-season runs left and both girls had their schools in different classifications.
Though Bishop had won twice against Eller, I figured it might be a closer race this time around because this was the county meet -- Bishop had something that Eller wanted and was trying to keep her from doing ... defending the title.
And so as the 18 girls lined up to start the race down at the start of the bowl to run up the bowl and around the park twice, I kept my focus on the two favorites. I also figured with a pretty solid team that Interlachen, led by Bishop, her twin sister Heather and some other good runners, would win the team title. Almost figured that was in the bag for the Rams.
Holding on to his trusty clipboard in one hand and his stopwatch in the other, Cox got the girls lined up and as he said, "Go!" they were all off and running. And coming up the hill and winding their way around the first turn in the first circle of the race, Bishop and Eller were leading with Heather Bishop and Palatka's Emily Piscitello, also a senior, following right behind. But within the first mile, it was clear where this race was headed as Talisa Bishop and Eller forged ahead and left the other two girls behind in the larger second wave of runners.
For the next 15 minutes or so, this was the Talisa and Amy Show. And neither had a big lead on the other for the rest of the first mile. But as I can see them coming to start the second lap around the park, Eller caught Bishop and forged ahead. It was almost the halfway point of the race and I can see that it may have been a bit of a struggle for Eller, as if she may have picked the wrong time to go ahead. Not too long after she had gone ahead, it was Bishop passing Eller by as they headed for the woods.
But in spite of seemingly looking like she was in control, Bishop could never shake off Eller and build a bigger lead. On this very cool October day, both runners were running a ridiculous pace, both at just over 13 minutes after two miles, neither looking ready to give up. Simply insane.
After the second lap, runners had to go out of the park temporarily to run a shorter distance, but would come right back in. As the pair neared the third mile, it was clear Eller had one more burst in her. She had been shadowing Bishop for most of the race and now with about three-tenths of a mile to go, she was making one last effort to storm ahead. In that last three-tenths of a mile at West Putnam Recreation Center, runners had to go down the bowl one last time and then challenge themselves at the 3-mile mark to run back up the bowl and onto flat land, then circle the outside of a soccer field and detour onto the soccer field where they would cross the finish line.
As they got to the middle of the bottom of that bowl, Eller passed up Bishop. And as if she got her second wind, Eller was widening the gap on Bishop as they climbed out of the bowl and made a right turn for the outside of that soccer field.
There was no stopping Eller. She was undeterred at this point. The pig-tailed, brown-eyed beauty was in another gear that Bishop couldn't keep up at. And she widened her lead as she made it around the soccer field to the very end, then cut across as she crossed past the goal at the one end of field and came storming up the field to the finish line.
Eller crossed and collapsed in a heap. She was handed her first-place card by Johnson while she was still on the ground recovering from the last two-tenths of a mile. Not too far behind was Bishop, who crossed the finish line, was given her second-place card and walked away in near shock.
Meanwhile, Eller was still on the side of the finish line recovering ... and weeping, both out of exhaustion and out of total elation.
Yes, she won that race. Amy Eller won the 2003 All-Putnam County title in the best girls race I had ever covered -- and really, it was my first one. She had crossed the finish line on this challenging course in 21 minutes and 40 seconds. Bishop crossed the line 18 seconds later in 21:58.
When asked why she thought she'd win, Eller answered simply, "I love the cold weather. This whole summer it was so hot, but when I felt it was just a bit cold, I felt my Yankee blood can handle it."
Now let me stop here -- Amy Eller was born in Arkansas. That's far from Yankee territory, but her parents hailed from Syracuse, N.Y. So I'm sure the visits she made to see family up north may have contributed to the "colder days" and the "Yankee blood" thing kicking in.
As for winning, Eller said afterward, "It's hard because both of us (she and Bishop) wanted to win and we had to go as hard as we could. I wanted to prove I could get the title back. I wanted this because when I remember back to my high school career, I wanted to remember that I won the final time I raced (in Putnam County)."
I never got to interview Talisa Bishop afterward. And I should have. But this day belonged to her rival. It also belonged to Palatka's girls. Piscitello finished fourth behind Heather Bishop, then a slew of Panther runenrs came in behind Piscitello -- Traci Driggers was fifth, Alice Heh was seventh and Mia John was eighth. First, fourth, fifth, seventh and eighth ... that's 25 points and the Panthers had taken the county girls team title away from Interlachen, which scored 43 points.
The boys race was just an afterthought in the end -- Criscione massacred the field, winning in 17:12 and making the challenging home course look like a stroll in the park. His next closest competitor, teammate Bryan Meily, was a distant second in 19:20. Interlachen won the boys team title handily with 20 points.
The 17:12 Criscione ran set a record for the county meet on the boys side
It still stands today.
So does the times put up by Eller and Bishop on that day they both laid it out on the line for county supremacy. Ten years later, Eller's 21:40 and Bishop's 21:58 are still the two fastest times ever run in the 13-year history of the event.
Still!
A few days later, I talked with Cox. I asked him what happened to his best girls runner at the end of the county meet. Turns out, according to him, that she was not properly snacking right coming into that race, saying there were days leading up to that run in which she wasn't snacking at all.
Well, Cox got all this straightened out with Bishop. A week later at the district meet in Inverness, Bishop placed fifth in the race and qualified, along with her team, for the regional meet. That's where she put together a great race to finish second -- yes, second in the region. It qualified her for the state 2A meet at Tampa's Ed Radice Park. Though she finished 27th, she was able to say she made it all the way to the last race of the season.
That, unfortunately, could not be said of Eller. She finished ninth in a tough district race held 10 days after the county meet at Middleburg High School. However, she would finish 20th in the region meet and miss out on qualifying for the state 3A meet.
But that senior year was the start of big things for both girls. For Eller, she would continue on to score a then-record 14 goals for her PHS soccer team that winter, then make All-County as a first singles player and first doubles player in tennis that spring. Teaming up with freshman Kristin Smith, the pair won first singles at their district meet and won a first-round match in the state tournament before losing in the next round and finishing their doubles season at 19-1. Bishop, meanwhile, ran track and qualified for the 2A state meet in the 3,200 at the University of Florida, located 30 miles from IHS. She finished seventh on the track that day to also finish her IHS sports career on a high note.
Both Eller and Bishop went off to nice college careers in their sports. And in years after they graduated high school in 2004, both have competed in running. Eller was Putnam County's top female runner at the 15-kilometer Gate River Run in Jacksonville for five straight years. Meanwhile, Bishop, now married and a mom known as Talisa Fletcher, has won her share of road runs since moving on from an NAIA All-American running career at Montreat College in North Carolina.
To this day, both are still fantastically great young ladies in their mid-20s that I see or talk to from time to time. And yes, I have a hard time thinking of one without the other.
Because for one cool October afternoon in western Putnam County, they had a battle royale in sneakers that tested their skills and wills.
A day that I remember quite vividly ... still.
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