It wasn
’t exactly the easiest year for Live Oak High athletics, 2003.
In fact, there were times when it seemed like the fates were lined
up against the school’s sports program.
It wasn’t exactly the easiest year for Live Oak High athletics, 2003.
In fact, there were times when it seemed like the fates were lined up against the school’s sports pro-gram.
There was the threat of losing some varsity sports to budget cuts.
There were the imperfections in the high school’s newly renovated, very expensive all-weather track.
Then there were the huge chunks of turf that were ripped out of the high school’s brand new football field surface after the Acorns’ season-opener at Richert Field, not to mention the sink holes looking for an ankle to sprain, that forced the varsity football squad on the road for a “home” game.
Live Oak’s run of bad luck began just before the end of the 2002-03 school year with the school board’s announcement that it would slash boys and girls varsity tennis, boys and girls varsity golf, varsity diving, junior varsity wrestling, and freshmen football, baseball and girls volleyball, as part of a district-wide budget-cutting move.
But the school board reinstated the sports after public outcry and subsequent promises by the school’s athletic boosters to fund the programs. The boosters chipped in close to $26,000 to save the programs, most of it coming from the Golf Classic, the boosters’ new fundraising golf tourney event held in October.
Then, in August, questions were raised about the fitness of the high school’s refurbished track. It seems that three sections of the track were laid down at once, followed by a fourth section. That left a ridge between the sections. There were also questions about the density of the track’s asphalt.
However, former Live Oak principal Rich Knapp, who oversaw the school’s renovations, said the errors were minor and would cost more to fix than to leave alone.
Knapp also said repairing the problems would ruin the track’s seal and allow water to leak onto its surface.
Finally, the biggest fiasco occurred in September when the newly resodded football field turned into a quagmire of torn-up hunks of grass and sink-holes after Live Oak’s season-opener against Oak Grove.
Accusations flew betw-een LOHS football coach Glen Webb, who called the football field an “administrative major-league screw-up,” and district administrators who said football coaches had used the field too much too soon.
Knapp said the district followed the recommend-ations of San Jose-based Beals Sports when installing the field and trusted its advice.
But the district also chose to sod the field rather than seeding it so the surface would be ready for graduation.
The bottom line was that the Acorn varsity had to play its next home game against Alisal at Gilroy High before returning to the field for Homecoming against Hollister.
And, the Live Oak freshman and Morgan Hill Pop Warner football teams ended up banned from the field entirely.
The Live Oak varsity football team, after managing a tie in its “home” game away from home, finished the season winless and extended its streak without a victory to 24 straight games.
But, in a hopeful postscript to the disastrous turn of events, the field appeared to hold up fine for the rest of the season, the freshmen football team parlayed a season full of road games into a .500 record and two local Pop Warner teams won their first regional championships in more than a decade.
