LCA only drives a football nail in their coffin

Lighthouse Christian Academy had won only one game in the last two years, so they weren't interested in showing mercy to Bellarmine Jefferson High School, which played its last football game ever Saturday. The storied Catholic school from Burbank is shutting down because of slumping enrollments after 73 years.

The Saints of Santa Monica drove the last nail into the coffin winning 50-28 at 8-man football. It was all conquest and no compassion.

Lighthouse brushed with closing its doors during the recent recession but managed to hang on. The sophomore team, well accustomed to taking drubbings, seemed to want to revenge all their previous losses with a resounding season-ending victory.

“It was a good fight in the heat,” said Coach Zach Scribner. “There were a lot of tired boys on both sides. Both teams have players playing both sides of the ball the whole game. It's really hard to do that in this heat. We were just able to move the ball better than them, and we got a few stops that were important to just kind of push ahead. We limited our mistakes.”

Designed for smaller schools who can recruit less players, 8-man football is Iron Man football. There are players who are on the field the entire game giving their all on both offense and defense. Strength and speed are not enough. You must have stamina – and an unfathomable drive to dig deep and muster the will to play one more down.

Despite the uneven final score, LCA's season closer with an evenly matched affair, with Bell-Jeff scoring a touchdown on their first drive. Towards the end of the second half, the Saints were leading only 20-14 when Levi Photenhauer, as he had done all season, burned his coverage and caught a hallucinatory pass and kicked it into high gear to widen the gap.

Still, the Guards came out after the half, hungry to end their season – and their school's history – with a respectable win. The Guards themselves have gone six years in football with only one win, according to a reporter who covered them regularly.

But the Lighthouse line, which could be accused of gentle hitting all year, fired off the line intensely at season's end to suck the spirit out of the Guards. Bell-Jeff scored, but as the the fourth quarter rolled around, with the sun beating down unrelentingly, it looked increasingly like a depleted force.

Meanwhile, the Saints played like bulldogs. They had suffered an agonizing fourth quarter defeat earlier this season in which they squandered a 15-6 lead in 7 minutes to lose to Corona Crossroads 25-30. The Santa Monica Christian school wanted to safeguard against any late game horror stories. It was only their second win this year, their second in tow years.

As much as Lighthouse loves football, the life lessons are the real benefit.

“This season, I learned endurance, endurance mentally and physically, to keep pushing,” said QB Brandon Montes. “You have to want to win in life, you have to want to be great. That's how you're successfully. We kept saying to ourselves, 'Don't roll over. We have this game in the bag. We just need to keep pursuing it.'”