Bigger is not always better.
Especially when bigger is too big.
That’s why Mater Dei backed away from having its football game against St. John Bosco at SoFi Stadium.
Mater Dei announced Tuesday that it would keep that Oct. 7 home game at Santa Ana Stadium, its home field for football for several decades.
Mater Dei’s explanation was properly uninformative. It offered plenty of thanks to SoFi Stadium and to the marvelous stadium’s chief attraction the Rams, but provided no reason why Santa Ana Stadium is the preferred venue.
A studied look at what’s been happening at Mater Dei gives some clues.
The Diocese of Orange’s appointment of former Servite principal Michael Brennan as Mater Dei president and Brennan’s later selection of former Servite associate athletic director Joel Hartmann to the created position of Mater Dei executive director of athletics were made in large part to pull Mater Dei sports closer to normal high school sports.
Mater Dei leadership won’t mind if its Monarchs football team is playing at another huge venue, the Rose Bowl, in the CIF Southern Section football Division 1 championship game this Nov. 25. That location was secured by the Southern Section, and the Division 1 final will be tied to a celebration of the first California High School Football Hall of Fame selections and the unveiling of the Hall of Fame facility. It’s clearly going to be a high school event.
It became a concern that St. John Bosco-Mater Dei at SoFi was going to be bigger than some at Mater Dei want it to be.
Not the ticket prices; they would have been $15 for kids, $20-$35 for adults. Parking would have been $15.
Brennan, Hartmann and others at Mater Dei understand what a kick it would be for their players to play on that field, and for those players to be able to say to their children 25 years from now, “Hey, I played on that field.” That’s something St. John Bosco coach Jason Negro emphasized when discussing his disappointment that the game won’t be at SoFi.
Some trappings of the game did not mesh with the new vision of what Mater Dei athletics can and should be. Mater Dei over the past several days became uncomfortable with recent discussion that non-high school football elements would be involved, elements that could make the game more Hollywood and less high school football.
So the game stays at Santa Ana Stadium.
NOTES
Mater Dei as of Thursday was still formulating plans for ticket availability for the St. John Bosco game. It’s a 7:30 p.m. game that will be televised by Bally Sports West. …
Links to Bally Sports West’s live streaming Friday night of the Orange Lutheran-Sherman Oaks Notre Dame football game is at www.ballysports.com/news/cif-ss-high-school-football-week-four-streaming-games. …
Crean Lutheran plays its first on-campus varsity football night game Friday when the Saints play Laguna Beach. Crean said it got City of Irvine approval this week for on-campus football games at night. …
This week is the fifth week for many county football teams. Plenty of them will have their bye week next week before going into league play. …
San Clemente football home games consistently draw big crowds because games there are community events much like high school football games were around here decades ago and still are in many states. About one-third of attendees have not had a son on the team in many years, or never did. …
The cross country course at Irvine’s Great Park, site of the Woodbridge Classic this week, is more of a road course than a cross country one, so times could be faster than at, say, last week’s Laguna Hills Invitational. The Woodbridge event still will be a fine one with excellent competition from its exceptional field of teams and athletes. …
Mater Dei’s girls volleyball team beat national No. 9 Assumption of Kentucky in three sets Wednesday at Mater Dei. …
The Durango Tournament in girls volleyball on Friday and Saturday in Las Vegas is a national-level tournament that includes Beckman, Foothill, Los Alamitos and Mater Dei. …
Villa Park senior Gavin Grahovac, the Orange County baseball player of the year this past spring, is playing for Team USA this week in the World Baseball Softball Confederation U-18 Baseball World Cup in Florida. Grahovac homered and drove in three runs in a Team USA 16-0 win over South Africa on Wednesday. …
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Carter Bryant, a 6-foot-8 basketball forward, transferred to Sage Hill from Fountain Valley where he was All-County third team last season as a sophomore. Bryant has offers from Arizona, Duke, UCLA, USC and many others. His father, D’Cean Bryant, a recent county coach of the year at Fountain Valley, left Fountain Valley this year to become the coach at Sage Hill. …
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Some will say I am a prehistoric creature for writing this: It would be great to have high school boxing.