Given the option to play in the Eureka area or not complete their playoff brackets, too many North Coast Section football teams in Divisions II through V chose to remain at home.
The travel cost would have been too high.
The quarterfinals will now be played at originally scheduled sites Nov. 24, a date that does not give the section enough time to complete the brackets in those divisions before the Northern California regionals Dec. 7-8.
The section will use head-to-head results to determine which finalists move on. If the teams did not play this season, a coin will be flipped to break the tie.
Later Friday, a third option was presented by the California Interscholastic Federation, NCS commissioner Gil Lemmon said. The finalists could play the section title game instead of participating in NorCals.
“I don’t see that as an option,” Lemmon added. “But it was nice that the CIF contacted me and said, ‘OK, here is what we’re willing to do. We’re not going to penalize you because you don’t send a team forward if you want to go ahead and finish off your championship.’”
Teams, naturally, would prefer to settle matters on the field over the possibility of watching state championship dreams vanish with the wrong side of a coin.
“Obviously I am not happy about it,” said Bishop O’Dowd coach Napoleon Kaufman, whose team is the No. 2 seed in Division II and features senior running back Austin Jones, a Stanford commit. “We basically don’t have any say in it, so what are we supposed to do?”
Kaufman said he feels badly for what has happened in the Paradise area, where 71 are known dead and thousands of homes have been lost in the devastating wildfires that have caused the unhealthy air throughout the Bay Area.
But Kaufman wished a solution could have been found to play this weekend, noting the work the kids have put in since January for this opportunity.
A trip to the Eureka area was not feasible for many schools, which would have incurred costs of approximately $4,500 to make the trip from the Bay Area, Lemmon said, adding that the section could not afford to foot the bill.
Granada coach Tim Silva accepted the section’s verdict.
“We’ve got a lot of other people worried about a lot bigger things than football, so whatever decision they came up with is what you live with,” he said. “”We’re in the same boat as everybody else. Just try to make it work and not being able to practice, a little bit of stuff in the gym, But again, we tell our kids, ‘Hey, big picture stuff, this is small potatoes.’”
Earlier Friday, Lemmon laid out the options in an email to the Bay Area News Group.
“NCS is working on playing quarterfinal games in football, but not in the Bay Area,” Lemmon wrote. “The only location is the Eureka area. NCS resources do not reach to areas outside of our section, making arrangements for games difficult, or really impossible.
“In Divisions 2-5 our schools have two choices, play in Eureka, or accept that NCS will not finish the brackets and the criteria for going on will be head-to-head, then flip of a coin.”
The section, which has been postponing and rescheduling athletic contests for more than a week, already had moved its Open Division and Division I football games to Nov. 24.
The NCS has flexibility with those two divisions because it has only two rounds in its Open Division and its Division I champion does not move on to NorCals.
The final in the Open can be played the weekend of Nov. 30-Dec. 1 and the final in Division I can be played the weekend of Dec. 7-8.
“We can play the championship game of Division I during the first week of the CIF NorCal,” Lemmon told the Bay Area News Group on Thursday. “I talked to the CIF about this. They have no problem with that.”
In Divisions II through V, the teams will only have the semifinal rounds completed after the weekend of Nov. 30-Dec. 1.
Campolindo coach Kevin Macy, whose team is supposed to play Ukiah in the Division II quarterfinals, said while playing in Eureka is not preferable, his team would make those accommodations if it had to.
“Our thing was to wait and see what the other schools were going to do, but we would have the resources and we could find a way to do it,” Macy said. “So we’re 50-50. It’s not preferable, but we’re not going to fight anything if that’s the way the movement was.”
Macy said the NCS was trying to gauge responses to the plan, and was hearing some other schools in the Division II bracket were not going to be able to make it to Eureka because of the logistics involved.
“We would have done whatever we would have had to do, based on the situation,” he said. “But if all of the other schools went in the direction of not wanting to do it, then we’re fine with that, too.”
Macy said his players haven’t been able to practice for over a week. They were able to get in the weight room two times when the air quality index for the area was below 150. But per Acalanes Union High School District rules, all athletic activity has to be shut down if the AQI is above 150.
“This school was a ghost town,” Macy said.
Lemmon, in a heartfelt letter he wrote titled “Unprecedented Times,” described this period as “one of the most challenging championship seasons of our 105-year history” but not life and death.
He paid tribute to Paradise, noting the lives lost by the devastating fire, and thanked everyone for their patience.
PLAYOFFS? WE’VE GOT YOU COVERED
It’s high school football playoff season, and our team is ready to provide can’t-miss stories from all the big games. So you don’t miss the action, we’ve got a deal that will keep you apprised of every dramatic twist and turn along the way. For just 12 cents a day for a year, you can have access to all the digital content at mercurynews.com and eastbaytimes.com. You just need to sign up at one of these two links: Mercury News or East Bay Times.