Action photo by Football Depot, Courtesy of CalHiSports.com. Additional reporting by Mike Guardabascio.
A quarter century ago, a high school football game shut down the city of Long Beach.
Like a scene straight out of “Friday Night Lights,” a small town (of over 460,000) turned its collective focus to Veterans Memorial Stadium, where the “Game of the Century” was being played.
On October 6, 2001, for the first time ever, the No. 1 high school team in the nation took on No. 2. The Long Beach Poly Jackrabbits hosted the De La Salle Spartans from Concord, Calif., playing a de facto national title game in front of more than 17,000 fans.
In order to accommodate the massive demand for tickets, temporary bleachers from the Grand Prix of Long Beach were added to the east side of the stadium, upping the venue’s capacity by about 5,000 seats. Still, there were hundreds of fans turned away at the gate, and overflow spectators lined the track, desperate to get a glimpse of arguably the most significant high school football game ever played.
Long Beach Poly’s current athletic director, Rob Shock, was the athletic trainer for the Jackrabbits back in 2001. He remembers the spectacle the game created, and how electric the atmosphere was on the sidelines.
“It was a spectacular game,” said Shock. “Obviously, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to, but it was just awesome to be in it; to be in that environment, and to say that I had the opportunity to coach in it.”
While specifics of that game continue to torment members of the Long Beach Poly Football community 25 years later, the game’s impact was much greater than De La Salle’s 29-15 victory. High school football games are now routinely featured on ESPN and other national networks, and the idea of teams playing opponents from outside their area have become commonplace.
Poly’s head coach at the time, Raul Lara, was in just his fourth game leading his alma mater when he took on De La Salle and its 116-game winning streak. He went on to a successful 13-year run as head coach of the Jackrabbits, winning five CIF-SS titles during that time, but the sting of that loss never fully left him.
Lara is now the head coach at Mater Dei High School, where he won a national championship in his first season, defeating (who else?) De La Salle in the state championship game.
Look no further than Mater Dei’s recent schedules to see how much high school football has evolved over the last 25 years. Lara’s teams have played at least three out-of-state opponents in all three of his seasons as head coach, playing schools from Maryland, Florida, Hawai’i, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah.
Travon Patterson, the current head coach at Long Beach Poly, was in eighth grade when the Jackrabbits hosted De La Salle. He was among the fans packed into the regular concrete stands, rooting for a program he would soon play for on his way to USC and the NFL.
“I’d been around Poly football for a while at that point. I started watching them play in the ‘90s with Chris Lewis and those guys, and the games were pretty packed then, but that De La Salle game, the vibe was just different,” Patterson recalled. “It felt like a college or NFL game. Every seat at Vets was taken … Being young, you heard about all the anticipation from everyone. Everyone my age was excited about it.”
Currently in his first season as head coach, and just seven games into his tenure, Patterson has a new appreciation for what Lara must have been feeling in that environment.
“When you take over the head coaching job at Poly, you know the expectations, but you really don’t know until you’re actually in that seat,” Patterson admitted. “You have to manage the staff, players, everything, there is a lot. Thinking about where I’m at now, obviously this program isn’t what it was then–I can only imagine what he was going through at that time.”
As Patterson noted, Long Beach Poly is no longer in the national spotlight the way it was in the late 1990s through the 2000s. The Jackrabbits won seven CIF-Southern Section titles from 1997-2008, all in the CIF’s highest division.
The 2001 team was particularly loaded with talent, featuring a record five Parade Magazine All-Americans: Darnell Bing, Hershel Dennis, Winston Justice, Marcedes Lewis, and Manuel Wright. Despite the loss to De La Salle, that ‘01 squad went on to win a CIF title, making Poly the first program ever to win three CIF-SS championships in a row.
All five had terrific collegiate careers and eventually made their way into pro football, and Lewis, remarkably, is still not officially retired from the NFL. The 42-year-old played in five games last season for the Denver Broncos, becoming the oldest tight end ever to play in the league, and he ranks 17th all-time with 290 games played in his career.
Meanwhile, the star running back for De La Salle was Maurice Drew, who burst onto the scene with four touchdowns in that memorable win over the Jackrabbits. He eventually became teammates with Lewis at UCLA and with the Jacksonville Jaguars, known at that time as Maurice Jones-Drew.
Fittingly, this year’s Spartans roster also features a stocky but talented running back wearing No. 21: Maurice’s son, Duece, who also plans to attend UCLA.
In the 25 years since Poly-De La Salle, the power balance in Southern California high school football has taken a noticeable shift toward well-funded private schools. Poly won the top title in 2012 and Corona Centennial claimed it in 2015: but since 2016, every CIF-SS Division 1 champion has been a private school from the Trinity League, leaving fans to wonder if we’ll ever see a public school like Poly get the chance to play for a national title again.
“The private schools are the private schools, and they’re going to be the dominant programs,” said Shock. “It’s going to be a struggle for some schools where we can’t get to that level, and we have to try to keep the kids in our own backyard. I think that’s the biggest thing, but keeping kids home is a struggle.”
As high school football continues to evolve into a world of six-figure coaching contracts and national TV broadcasts, its growth can be traced back to that October evening in Long Beach, when one great game had the world watching.
