Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Cory Schwaderer (left), a tight end and outside linebacker, and Mike Black, quarterback and free safety, anticipate their home games under the lights at Helm Field in Los Gatos.

Cleat Clatter

Tradition of silence precedes charge onto the field

By Dick Sparrer

The locker room was still and quiet. But there was nothing eerie about the silence. Rather, 40 young men sat quietly in anxious anticipation of what was about to unfold. Calmly, a single voice broke that silence. It could have been Pete Denevi or Charlie Wedemeyer in Los Gatos. It could have been Benny Pierce or Mike Machado in Saratoga.

In response, 40 chin straps snapped in unison, and shoulder pads creaked as the high school football players rose to follow their coach into battle.

Then the doors to the locker room swung open, and there it was before them: the powerful glow of the lights coming from Helm Field, the lights that served as a beacon to the community as if to say, "It's a Friday night in autumn, and time for high school football."

Just as the lights of the Christmas tree dance in the wide eyes of a child and add to the anticipation of a Christmas morning, the lights that hover above the field flash in the eyes of the football players and add to the excitement of the moment.

It's a unique feeling that only those young men who have been there can understand and appreciate--the young men who have played football at Los Gatos and Saratoga high schools.

It is a very special time. And it's that time again. The football players from Los Gatos and Saratoga will follow the same path into the same stadium that players have been walking for the past 412 decades.

"That was the biggest thing in the world," said Johnny Mesa, a graduate of the Los Gatos class of 1962 and the owner of Johnny's Northside Grill in Los Gatos.

"It was a big aspiration," he added. "You could hardly wait to get to that point. It was like, 'This is what I've been waiting for.' It was a dream to wait for that day to be out there."

The dream will come true for the Los Gatos and Saratoga football players of 1997 in the weeks ahead. And they'll share in that special feeling of playing before the home crowd at Helm Field.

"I just think it's a wonderful setting," said Scott Downs, a 1969 Los Gatos graduate who is now the head coach of the school's frosh-soph football team.

"Coming out, you can still smell the hot dogs. People are coming in, cars are coming into the parking lot. You take the short little walk to the field and hear the clatter of the cleats," he said. "I don't think there's anything like it."

Part of the tradition

Downs, who coached football at Saratoga from 1976 to 1978 and has coached at Los Gatos since 1986, considers the lighted field to be just a piece of the tradition of football at the two schools.

"The smell of the tape, the sound of the cleats on the pavement, the snaps of the chin straps--it is special," he said.

Butch Cattolico certainly knows how special. "It's a whole different atmosphere about getting ready for a night game," said the Los Gatos varsity head coach. "The energy level is so much higher."

But Benny Pierce, the longtime Saratoga coach, is a bit more pragmatic about night football. "The players seem a little faster at night, and the mental preparation is better," said Pierce, who coached the Falcons for 33 seasons. "But I don't know if playing at night was an advantage for us. The other teams would always feel so much fresher; I think it was an advantage for them."

The coaches certainly agree on one thing: They are not fans of Friday afternoon football.

"I think it's an advantage to some schools to play day games because they're more difficult to play," Cattolico said. "There's no question that our kids are always difficult to get up to play a day game."

"There's just more time to prepare for a night game," Pierce said. "I can remember playing Branham in a championship game over there. "We had a new bus driver who took forever and a day to get there. So we got off the bus just before the game started. Mentally, we were not ready to play."

Saratoga lost the game, and the championship, to Branham.

Pierce and Cattolico would get no argument on that score from former Los Gatos coach Pete Denevi. "It's harder to get the kids excited for afternoon games compared to a night game," said Denevi, who served two stints as the Gatos head coach in 1955-60 and 1966-70.

Night games an advantage

And the veteran Gatos coach liked the advantage it gave his clubs.

"I remember Junior Morgan, the coach at Del Mar, hated to come to Los Gatos at night because they'd play all their games in the day," Denevi said. "We'd run out in those black uniforms, and the kids came out five feet off the ground."

Mesa hopes they still do. "I think they get the same rush now in that element that we did," he said. "I really would be disappointed to think that they didn't."

Cattolico believes they do. "It's a tradition," he said. "Everybody in town is there. Other teams from other schools come down to watch you play. The community will follow teams that play night football."

That's a little more difficult for the Saratoga community than it is for Los Gatos. The schools share the same facility, but its location in the middle of town means an evening drive down Highway 9 to
get to a game for the folks from Saratoga.

"But they like the night games," Pierce said of the Saratoga community. "I know that over the years a lot of people would have liked to have had a lighted field at Saratoga."

So the Falcons must travel for a home game. "One of the interesting things was that for all those years, we used to have to pay for buses to get to our own home games," he said.

But Pierce built a tradition through the years that added to the mystique of night football at Helm Field.

"Normally, we'd meet the last period of the day just to make sure everybody was there," he said. "The rest of the time was theirs. Then we'd meet back at Saratoga--we always dressed at Saratoga. Not a word was spoken in the locker room once you came in," Pierce said of the Saratoga tradition. "That would build up the anticipation."

"Benny was always the last one on the bus," Downs said. "Everyone got on, then he'd walk on and ask, 'Is everybody here?' It was a silent bus trip over, building the anticipation," he added. "There was a special feeling, driving up over the hill--even for the frosh-soph team at dusk, it was the same aura."

The Falcons would continue their silent preparation at Los Gatos, and then, when the time was right ...

"Benny, in his own quiet way, would say, 'C'mon, let's go,' and the players would walk out in two rows behind him," Downs said. "It was all part of the preparation."

And it was Pierce's way of turning a possible disadvantage into an advantage for his teams. They were playing at Los Gatos, but it was unmistakably a Saratoga home game.

"It always felt like our field," Downs said. "They think of it as their home field."

Before the lights

Pierce and Denevi remember Los Gatos football before there were lights. They should; they both played for the Wildcats.

"I played on the lower field before the lights," said Pierce, class of 1951. "We played all afternoon games, but we'd get quite a few people--students and people from the community. They'd sit on the hills around the field."

Denevi, a 1944 LG graduate, remembers smaller crowds during the war years.

"We had small crowds, mostly the student body," he said. "Then it was different when we got under the lights. It was great."

But playing at night did cause some problems, as in the fall of 1966, when baseball star Roy Meisner turned out to give football a try as a senior at Los Gatos.

Meisner was an outstanding receiver in Gatos practice sessions, but when it came time for the opener at Helm Field, Denevi was surprised to see Meisner having trouble snagging the football during warm-ups.

The problem was simple: He couldn't see at night.

"We had several kids like that," Denevi said. "They wouldn't tell you, but after a couple of games you'd figure it out--they had night [blindness]."

But while baseball works well in the afternoon, football is meant to be played at night--at least as far as Cattolico is concerned. "In Pittsburg, where I grew up, we didn't know anything but night football," said the Gatos coach, who was an all-North Coast Section quarterback for the Panthers. "In our senior year, we had to play a day football game, and we'd never heard of that before."

"There's something about the adrenaline for the night game," Downs added. "Even for the frosh-soph. We may go out at 4 p.m., but when we go out for the second half, it's starting to get dark. There's that little buzz; the smell in the air is a little different."

A very special place

There's just something special about it.

"It was always special playing at home," said Ron Denevi, a 1969 Gatos graduate who played for his father in high school. "We had the biggest bleachers and the best facility, and the crowds were better.

"I grew up around it," he added. "I was on that field a lot before I was ever in the school. It was phenomenal. [Playing on that field] was something you'd always look forward to."

"It's amazing how many of the younger kids would go to the games," Pierce said.

And once they got a glimpse of the lights flashing off the shiny red helmets of the Falcons or the glimmering black helmets of the Wildcats, they knew that someday they wanted to be part of it.

The locker room will soon be still and quiet again. A single voice will break that silence--maybe the voice of Los Gatos' Butch Cattolico or maybe that of Saratoga's new coach, Tim Trapp. The doors to the locker room will swing open, and there it will be before them--the awesome glow of the Helm Field lights.

"It still has that traditional feeling," Mesa said. "I go to games now and still feel excited. You're part of it."

Falcons 1997 season

In the fall of 1953, the Los Gatos Wildcats were going under the lights for the very first time at the newly dedicated Helm Field. Forty-four years later, they're about to do it again.

But they'll do it a little differently than they did it 412 decades ago. Back then, the football players from Los Gatos and Saratoga joined together to make up one team. Now they form two--one at Los Gatos High School and another at Saratoga High.

Still, though the look may have changed, the tradition of night football continues for the football players from Saratoga and Los Gatos. And that tradition will live again in the weeks to come when both Los Gatos and Saratoga host games under the lights at Helm.

Gatos will open the home season on Sept. 12, when San Lorenzo Valley comes to town to face the mighty Wildcats, and Los Gatos will entertain Oak Grove on Sept. 19 under the Helm lights.

Saratoga will play its home opener on Sept. 26, when the Falcons host Leigh.

Falcons schedule

vs. James Lick (scrimmage) at James Lick
Sept. 5; 3:30 p.m. (F-S)

vs. James Lick (scrimmage) at Saratoga
Sept. 5; 3:30 p.m. (F-S)

vs. Soquel at Soquel
Sept. 13; 11 a.m. (F-S), 1:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Valley Christian at Townsend Field
Sept. 20; 4:30 p.m. (F-S), 7 p.m. (Var)

vs. Leigh at Los Gatos
Sept.26; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Palo Alto* at Palo Alto
Oct. 2; 3:15 p.m. (F-S)

vs. Palo Alto* at Palo Alto
Oct. 3; 3:15 p.m. (Var)

vs. Los Gatos* at Los Gatos
Oct. 10; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Wilcox* at Wilcox
Oct. 17; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Freemont* at Los Gatos (homecoming)
Oct. 24; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Lynbrook* at Lynbrook
Oct. 31; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Monta Vista* at Cupertino
Nov. 7; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

vs. Homestead* at Los Gatos
Nov. 14; 5:15 p.m. (F-S), 7:30 p.m. (Var)

* denotes league play

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