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Sports

Prep Football: La Cañada Playing Catch Up

Spartans opt out of most summer passing league tournaments.

Generally most high school football teams in the early part of the summer try to see where they stand by participating in passing leagues.

La Canada High is not the norm. Since the Spartans run an option offense, there isn’t a need to spend too much time on throwing the ball.

“Our philosophy is that those have a lot of benefits, but they also have some drawbacks,” third-year Spartans head coach Dan Yoder said. “We have some informal passing league stuff in July. Spring ball started as soon as baseball season got out. Both of our quarterbacking candidates were baseball players. We’re a little slower than some schools getting into our passing game because we want to encourage them to be competitive in other sports too.”

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Yoder said his team, which finished 5-6 last season, will still throw the ball even though the option is the main focus of the offense.

Juniors Matt Jones and Grant Owen are currently in a battle for the starting quarterback position.

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“It’s a pretty good contest going on,” Yoder said. “They’re both pretty athletic. We’re an option team, so they can take it and run.”

Yoder said he graduated 31 seniors from last season and will have a lot of holes to fill this fall. But he likes certain aspects of this year’s team.

“We are very young, but we actually got bigger in size,” Yoder said. “Our front line is significantly larger than in the past.”

Senior Marty Vardanian is a key returner to the offensive line. Top candidates to join him include senior Brendan Daly and junior Tanner Massimino.

Because the Spartans have yet to participate in a passing league, Yoder said he has been able to work on other aspects of the game.

“We’re getting everything installed,” Yoder said. “It’s lifting and fundamentals. We’re getting our assignments down and working on technique stuff. We’re going to make sure we’re fundamentally sound.”

Yoder is looking at senior running backs Franklin Cervenka and Kevin Stoner to be competing for the bulk of the carries. Last season Cervenka played wide receiver in addition to being the kicker.

On the defensive side of the ball senior linebacker Kyle Herron and safety Derek Georgino are the key returners.

“By the end of the summer, we’d like to have our base offense in and have everyone on the same page, so we can come back and just do some fine tuning,” Yoder said, referring to the CIF dead period at the beginning of August.

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