It has come to this. Worried about a repeat of a verbal
confrontation between fans following a Jan. 28 meeting between the
two schools, administrators are leaving little to chance when the
Live Oak High and Gilroy High boys basketball teams meet for the
second time this season on Wednesday. Three administrators from
each school, as well as a Gilroy Police presence, will be on hand
to keep a close rein on the game, the players and fans during the
rematch between the neighboring rivals. Everything from the gym to
the parking lot will be kept under close watch, according to school
officials.
It has come to this. Worried about a repeat of a verbal confrontation between fans following a Jan. 28 meeting between the two schools, administrators are leaving little to chance when the Live Oak High and Gilroy High boys basketball teams meet for the second time this season on Wednesday.
Three administrators from each school, as well as a Gilroy Police presence, will be on hand to keep a close rein on the game, the players and fans during the rematch between the neighboring rivals. Everything from the gym to the parking lot will be kept under close watch, according to school officials.
“Normally, we don’t have police at Gilroy High basketball games,” GHS Athletic Director Jack Daley said. “But it was important to set the tone that we’re not going to let something like happened last time happen again. To show that it’s important for us for everyone to have a good time and enjoy the basketball game.”
Adding a police presence to make sure everyone has a good time at a basketball game? That smacks of an inner city hoops showdown. Certainly not a game between two high schools from South Santa Clara County.
But the fact is, any time Live Oak and Gilroy hook up, there’s plenty of emotion involved no matter what the circumstances.
There sure was the last time the Acorn and Mustang boys hoops teams did.
To be sure, the first contest wasn’t a typical high school basketball situation. It was a Homecoming doubleheader (the LO-Gilroy girls hoops teams played in the evening’s early game) on a Friday night, and the Live Oak gym was standing-room-only by the time the two boys teams took the floor. Now, this wasn’t exactly a league championship matchup. In fact, neither team had managed to win a league game up to that point, so it was a contest to see who could stay out of last place. The crowd was loud and partisan for both sides but by all accounts things stayed relatively under control, although Gilroy High parents complained about the confrontational style of Live Oak’s “Sixth Man Club,” basically a group of students who wear yellow shirts and root as a unit in the style of college basketball fans.
But after the game was over, things got testy. (LO won the boys game in a tight contest after GHS had won the girls game.)
That’s when the crowd began rolling out of the gym toward the parking lot, where there was reportedly a complete lack of security or administrative presence, and things got sketchy.
It seems that a group of youngsters, including an unidentified Live Oak student and two of his friends (not LO students), began taunting and yelling insults at Gilroy fans, including a group that included at least one Mustang player and his family.
According to one observer, the Gilroy player’s father told the LO group that they needed to have a “little class.” With that, the altercation escalated and things got “pretty heated,” according to observers.
According to Gilroy High parent Mike Kennedy, father of Mustang senior center Mark Kennedy, a group of LO fans, many without their shirts on, began approaching the GHS group and had them cornered near their cars. The elder Kennedy said the last thing he wanted to occur was a physical altercation with the young LO fans but he felt compelled to defend his family.
“I didn’t want to take on high school kids but I wasn’t going to let them at my family,” Kennedy said. “It could have gotten ugly.”
Luckily, a potential disaster was averted when a Gilroy parent who is a Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Deputy investigator shined her undercover squad car light on the shouting youths and sounded the siren.
Kennedy said Morgan Hill police arrived moments later. There were reportedly no arrests.
Kennedy said he believes Live Oak’s “Sixth Man Club” was at least partly responsible for creating the confrontational atmosphere that allowed the incident to occur. He said the fan group was booing the GHS team and engaging in other unsportsmanlike behavior during the game in violation of league rules governing such conduct.
According to Live Oak principal Nick Boden, one LO student, who was apparently the instigator of the incident, was subject to disciplinary action, although the administrator would not say what, if anything, was done.
Boden and Daley did say that officials from both schools discussed the incident the following day and formulated a plan in an attempt to head off any potential future problems. The additional security will be in place for just the LO-Gilroy boys game on Wednesday at 7pm, not the Acorn-Mustang girls game tonight at the same time.
In the past, such an incident could have been dismissed as the result of overzealous fans, but not these days. Not during a time when high school coaches are being threatened and games are being postponed as a result, as occurred before an Alisal-Monterey game earlier this year. Not during a time when a female fan of a visiting team feels entitled to scream at hometown fans during a game, “You’re pathetic. You’re all pathetic. If you have something to say to me, come here and say it,” as occurred at a recent Salinas-LO boys basketball game.
No one, it seems, is willing to take a chance that an incident could escalate beyond control, especially in a situation where no security is in place.
Can’t blame them, frankly. Sportsmanship, it seems, has become a lost art.
Jim Johnson is the Morgan Hill Times Sports Editor. He can be reached by phone at (408) 779-4106 (ext. 203) or by email at [email protected]
