All the rage in Wasco
| Thursday, Oct 22 2009 09:41 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Oct 22 2009 09:41 PM
Images
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Wasco High backfield from left, Rene Medina, Quentin Cheatham, and Jacob Salinas has helped established Wasco as one of the teams to be in the running for the SSL title. They play Taft High Friday night. Both teams are 5-1.
WASCO
If you drove by Wasco High's football stadium down Fifth Street this week, you might have seen a television camera and a newspaper reporter there at the same time.
"I've been here seven years, and I've never seen anything like it," Tigers coach Russ Prado said. "It's exciting. It's a great feeling for our boys; they've never seen anything like this."
What you wouldn't have seen is what earned the Tigers all this attention.
You wouldn't have seen Quentin Cheatham and Jacob Salinas running the bleachers after everyone else went home.
You wouldn't have seen Prado with his coaching staff, including first-year defensive coordinator Edward Moreno, meeting on Sundays to go over film and make a new gameplan.
And you'd have to have a time machine to see the weight-room work Wasco was putting in in February and March, the dead middle of the offseason for high school football.
"We don't hide it: Every single day we go to work," Prado said. "It starts at 6:30 in the morning with weight training, from January to January. We don't take months off, we don't take weeks off. We don't believe in that."
What you can see is Wasco play its biggest game in years, a 7:30 homecoming kickoff with Taft tonight that will leave one team at 6-1 and unbeaten in the rugged South Sequoia League. Both teams still must play Tehachapi.
"Truthfully, we didn't know what to expect," Cheatham said. "But we stuck with all our training and everything coach told us to do, and it's working so far. I never imagined it to go this well. It's a true blessing."
Tonight's game will feature Kern County's top two running backs, Wasco junior Cheatham (1,142 yards, 12 touchdowns) and Taft senior Cody Shirreffs (1,056 yards, 12 TDs).
"It's not going to be a surprise to anybody," Taft coach Steve Sprague said. "It's going to be 'here we come, see if you can stop us,' and here they come, see if we can stop them."
Taft has been in this position before. The Wildcats won SSL titles in 2000 and 2004 and are consistently in the top half of the league standings. Wasco is breaking new ground -- and that's not a reference to the new athletic complex going up on the other side of Palm Avenue.
The Tigers haven't been a regular factor in the South Sequoia League race since the early 1990s, when they reached the Sequoia Division Central Section championship game three times in the days of running back Nacho Martinez and quarterback Brent Paul. But it's been since 1961 that Wasco has gone all the way to win an SSL title or a section title.
This year's team just might have what it takes to break the nearly 50-year drought. Prado, who's in his third year as head coach, has implemented a year-round lifting program that he thinks has helped Wasco catch up to typically bigger teams at Taft and Tehachapi.
"Chemistry starts in the offseason," said Cheatham, who Prado said is a notoriously hard worker. "Then you start winning games and it grows stronger."
After a couple of building years, the strategy has bore fruit this fall. Wasco's double-wing offense is thriving behind a veteran offensive line that's led by 330-pound tackle Nick Sanchez.
The defense, the team's weak link for the past several years, has been rock solid in 2009. Moreno, who previously was an assistant at Bakersfield College, came to town and made a few adjustments, many of them with the defense's attitude.
"We're just working more together," said Sanchez, who also plays on the defensive line. "There aren't as many arguments. He didn't change too much; he just got everybody on the same page."
All of it has Wasco buzzing about football for the first time in a generation. Tuesday, while the football team was practicing and basking in its rare attention, Wasco athletic director Raul Rangel was sitting in his office.
In walked Nacho Martinez.
"He says, 'Rangel, what do you think?'" Rangel recalled. "And I said, 'Well, there's a lot of buzz in the air.'"
Martinez went on to say that in his playing days, there was a core group of Wasco citizens who attended every Tigers game, home or away. After that run ended in 1992, the football program faltered and so did the fan support. But Martinez said he's seen some of those same fans in attendance again.
"They're back," Rangel said. "The excitement in the community is back. It's taken 20 years, but it's exciting. In 20 years, we've had nothing even close to it."
