Analyzing the Aftermath

Clearing out some extra thoughts in the aftermath of Friday night's events at Citrus Valley...

It made me chuckle.

I was standing on the Citrus Valley sideline, when after another unsportsmanlike penalty was called against the Blackhawks, a voice came calling out as clear as day from the Aquinas stands:

"Maybe you need a good Catholic school education."

Really? You want to bring that into this?

First, there's the whole church and priest scandal thing. But let's move past that, because it really doesn't apply here.

And let's get on to the observation that this type of thing happens to a lot of public school teams who play parochial schools.

And before you come rushing to your kids' defense, there was no outward sign of it Friday night that I picked up on from my spot on the sideline. It's just something of an observation from over the years of being around high school sports. After a while of seeing and hearing about incidents such as this involving schools such as Mater Dei, Servite and Aquinas, it becomes less an isolated incident and more of a pattern.

It's not that they play dirty ... it's just that a lot of schools have ended acting the way that Citrus Valley did Friday night. It comes from a place of frustration and retaliation. When you feel like you're being picked on, you can only turn your cheek for so long before you need to fight back.

And Friday night, Citrus Valley kept getting caught, and each time they did, it meant the officials were going to watch them even closer. And the more flags, the more it spiraled out of control, especially when you feel like you're the only ones getting caught.

Of course, the whole thing may have simply come down to revenge. Seems that the 74-0 shellacking that Aquinas put up on the Blackhawks two years ago -- in the school's first season with only freshmen and sophomores -- left a bit of an impression.

“Our kids remember that loss,” Coach Pete Smolin told The Press-Enterprise after pairings were announced last week. “We looked at our possible opponents, and the kids were begging to get Aquinas. I think they’ll be excited to face them again.”

The bottom line is that kids are kids, no matter what religion they practice. Little cheap shots happen in every game -- and so does trash talk. There are always going to be one or two or more bad apples that can spoil the whole bunch, and ruin everything.

(I know from my own high school experience -- I was in games that were just as bad as Friday night. Soccer games involving multiple ejections and a baseball game that had a bench-clearing fight.)

It's just a matter of how you deal with it at the end. Citrus Valley didn't, and thus the end result.

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The honest truth in all this is we might not have been having any of these conversations if the Blackhawks had managed the clock at the end of the game.

They got the ball back with about four minutes to go with a 9-6 lead. They got a big first down, then inexplicably went to a hurry-up formation.

The logic behind the move was to keep the Aquinas defense off balance and tired. And it was working. They were moving the chains. They were forcing Aquinas to burn their timeouts.

But at a certain point ... it should have been time to go back into the huddle and burn as much of the clock as they could. They gave up the chance to burn off an extra minute, minute-and-a-half by rushing up to the line of scrimmage.

Smolin even said there was probably going to be some second-guessing about their play calling down the stretch. Sure enough, coach, you will have earned it.

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One of the positives -- as it were -- from Friday night was the security.

The whole post-game situation would have been a whole lot worse at a whole lot of games I've been to this season.

Why? Because there are too many people allowed on the sidelines that don't belong.

Normally when I'm out covering a game, I stalk the visitors' sideline because there are usually less people hanging around. Less "important" alumni, boosters or person who knows someone who knows someone who populate the home sidelines.

Friday night, that wasn't the case.

Citrus Valley did a good job of keeping the riff-raff in the stands and away from the field.

And there were two incidents that jumped out at me that were disasters waiting to happen, and they were defused.

The first was the coach and his lewd gesture. Administrators immediately jumped on him and told him he was done -- even after he cooled off and tried to apologize. Administrators were not accepting any apologies at that point. And as to the person who was tackled at midfield ... as people in my mentioned, that was a developmentally disabled young man who got wrapped up in the moment. And there was probably more concern for his well-being than there was for anyone on the Aquinas side.

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As for the aftermath, there will likely be a whole lot of things discussed at the school, district and CIF-Southern Section level. Referees will likely need to write a report (a player was officially kicked out). But I'm pretty sure CIF will leave it to the local level for discipline to be handed out.

But it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Redlands Unified schools are all off for Thanksgiving week -- thanks to starting school in early August. That means everyone will have get nine days to seethe, break down, reflect and cool off before returning to campus again.

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To see photos from this game, check out our .