With the Monrovia High School football team now a perennial favorite to win the Rio Hondo League and CIF-Southern Section Mid-Valley Division, most area fans believe they can get a better gauge of the Wildcats’ mettle by how the team fares in the nonleague.
Wildcats head coach Ryan Maddox beefed up his team’s nonleague schedule last season with mixed results. Sure, the Wildcats beat St. Francis, but took losses against Ayala and South Hills.
Monrovia hosts Ayala tonight at 7 for a chance to avenge one of those setbacks and prove to the area that it can, in fact, bang with upper-division opponents.
“Our players feel like beating them is definitely a possibility,” Reams said. “But I don’t think last year’s game will have anything to do with rolling over into this year. We’re both two completely different football teams.
“We had Jordan Robinson and Dane Cruikshank and they were two explosive players last year. We don’t have them this year. And likewise, they had two big physical linebacker who made things difficult on us and they don’t have those guys this year.”
Ayala opened the season last week with a solid win over El Dorado. Monrovia will be playing its first game on Friday. Reams thinks his team having already played a game should provide an advantage.
“If you’ve got a game under your belt, you’ve got a little bit of a edge,” Reams said. “It helps us out a little bit. You’ve got some of the kinks and bugs out that you can’t get in practice.
“We played well against El Dorado. El Dorado is a solid football team and we did what we as a program expected to do. With Monrovia, we have a different test. El Dorado was bigger but not as fast as Monrovia. Monrovia’s speed factor is going to give us the biggest test.”
Monrovia was considered by many to be solid favorite going into last year’s game. The Wildcats were loaded with several returning starters from a CIF-SS championship team, but never got going in a 16-15 loss.
The Wildcats will be breaking in several new players and one of them will be a familiar face for the Bulldogs. Running back Kurt Scoby transferred to Monrovia this offseason and will make his Wildcats debut.
Ayala, which shares space in the Sierra League with Scoby’s former team Charter Oak, has plenty of experience against the explosive back and Reams knows stopping Scoby is a key to victory.
“We saw Kurt Scoby when he was a freshman and a sophomore over at Charter Oak,” Reams said. “Very, very good football player. Solid. He’s definitely got to be one of the focal points.
“If we can’t slow him down, it’s not going to give us much of a chance at winning the game. A guy like that you’re not going to stop completely, so we have to do our best to slow him down.”
