The OC Weekly’s Gustavo Arellano has a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times about local high school football and the changing demographics in O.C.
Some outsiders will no doubt be shocked and amazed that the Colonists have gotten this far. See, Anaheim High is now more than 90% Latino  and for two decades we’ve been told that Latinos just don’t have enough football in their culture to succeed in this uniquely American game. Former USC offensive tackle and NFL Hall of Famer Anthony Muñoz might disagree, but that’s what Orange County sports pundits have repeated as gospel over the years as our once-proud team deteriorated into the football version of the Bad News Bears.
This dude can write. The comeback of fútbol Americano.
Yeah, he steals story ideas with the best of ’em! He’s got a long career in writing ahead of him.
the interesting thing is that all the alums from the good old days are 100% behind their old school…
The pull of demographics sometimes works the other way-Moorpark High, one of the Northern Division finalists, was for year a sleepy farm town with a population that generally consisted of Mexican field hands and their descendants. As a result, it’s long football history generally consisted of loyally-supported, very bad football teams in the lower division of Ventura County football-epitomized by a 51-game losing streak to Carpinteria High in Santa Barbara.
Well, the forces of suburban migration took hold, and all of a sudden the town grew-first a new high school in 1990; then a gorgeous new football field seating 8000, then hiring away the football coach from D-I Crespi (who happened to live across the street from the new high school), and when the kids that moved into those new houses matured-voila-a new high school football power….Oh by the way, the last Carpinteria/Moorpark football game took place in 1998-the last year Moorpark played lower-division football before moving up to the big-school Marmonte League-and in the semifinals of the playoffs, Moorpark won 37-0 in a driving rain to end the longest
consecutive game losing streak to a single high school in US history. The
stadium was still almost 2/3 full the night the devil was exercised in Moorpark, and I suspect with decent weather, the turnout would have been overflow.
Now Moorpark lines up guys like Darrell Scott (a potential NFL’er) and huge offensive lines-but since the core of the town is still very Mexican, a few guys named Lopez and Sanchez as well-and is teeing it up with the Canyon Countries (and I suspect in the future the Mater Dei’s) of the world.
I took my wife (born and raised in Veracruz state, BTW) and daughter to Moorpark’s game with Canyon tonite-a classic nail-biter won on a field goal by Canyon with 9 seconds left-and found myself talking to old-timers who played for Moorpark in the good old days, were speaking both English and Spanish to each other, and who were eating up the fact that their school, which used to be cannon-fodder for much smaller schools, is now a bona-fide heavyweight. They grew up there, played for the Musketeers, still wear their letter jackets, and never miss a game-either now or in the past.