When it comes to the Coliseum league in Los Angeles high school football, there are two givens: Dorsey and Crenshaw.
The two schools have a rivalry that goes back to 1968, when Crenshaw opened its doors. Each team has won at least four championships each under their current head coaches. Dorsey’s Paul Knox won City Section titles in 1989 (4A), 1991 (4A), 1995 (4A), and 2001 (Division I). Crenshaw’s Robert Garrett won titles in 1991 (3A), 2005 (Division I), 2009 (Division I), and 2010 (Division I) before adding another this past year. Both teams are represented well in NCAA Division I college football and the National Football League.
This year, the Coliseum league is no different. A homecoming crowd at Crenshaw witnessed a 41-0 drubbing of the Dons, then hit them with a 58-12 playoff loss en route to the city championship.
Coliseum League basketball final: Dorsey 66, Crenshaw 52. Payback for football. Well, maybe not.
— eric sondheimer (@latsondheimer) January 23, 2014
The rest of the Coliseum league is made up of the Locke Saints, the Rancho Dominguez Prep Lobos, the Manual Arts Toilers, and the West Adams Prep Panthers.
To say that those four schools have been uncompetitive might be giving them too much credit.
Locke (7-4 overall, 3-2 in league) has probably been the competitive of the four outliers; after all, they are still in Division I along with Crenshaw and Dorsey. They only allowed 19 points in a sloppy loss at home to Dorsey that featured multiple turnovers from both teams. Locke scored only three points in that game. That’s three more points than they scored in their Coliseum league opener at Crenshaw that saw them give up 42 points.
Rancho Dominguez Prep (5-7 overall, 2-3 in league) replaced Fremont last year in the Coliseum league and are still classified as Division III. When they hosted Crenshaw in November, a team they lost to 57-0 in 2012, they lost by a score of 69-0. This season, they hosted Dorsey on their homecoming night. They lost 39-0, in a game that had a running clock starting in the first half. It was a terrible game, one that saw Dorsey sophomore running back Maurice Blackwell suffer a season-ending ankle injury after a long second-half touchdown run.
Then there’s Manual Arts. The oldest school in Los Angeles still on its original campus, Manual Arts has struggled to be competitive this season, getting outscored 128-78 in four league games. That includes a 50-7 win at fellow Division II team West Adams Prep to open league play.
That brings us to West Adams Prep (0-8 overall, 0-5 in league). In 2011, West Adams was a playoff team after going 4-1 in the Coliseum league. They lost to Dorsey that year, but they nipped Crenshaw 26-25 and defeated Westchester in the first round of the City Section playoffs. Then-head coach Russell Shaw was let go as head coach at the end of the 2011 season. Shaw said that the school wanted to go in another direction, according to the Los Angeles Times.
That direction has been a wrong one over the last two seasons for West Adams. West Adams has an overall record of 0-17 and a league record of 0-10. West Adams has scored a total of 34 points over the last two seasons. Napoleon Banks quit as head coach after two games this season, citing a lack of support from the school’s administration. In their game at Dorsey, the Dons took a 28-0 lead at the end of the first quarter, and a 41-0 lead at halftime. Despite the deficit, West Adams ran the ball on just about every down with 5-foot-3-inch senior running back Kelvin Argueta. When Argueta left with an injury in the first half, West Adams slammed 5-foot-7-inch, 125-pound junior receiver Wayne Hill into the line on third-and-long. The loss of Shaw had a ripple effect on West Adams’ roster, as the school only dressed 20 players. Dorsey lists 48 on their roster.
“They shouldn’t be in the division,” a Dorsey coach said. “They’re getting kids hurt.”
The lack of competition within the Coliseum league is a major factor when consider Dorsey and Crenshaw’s schedules outside of the league. Dorsey played games at Santa Margarita and Serra this season. Both were losses, but both were games played to give the relatively young Dorsey squad a chance to play against tough teams with premier coaching (Santa Margarita, in head coach Harry Welch’s final season) and premier talent (Serra, ranked in the top-ten nationally by USA Today). Crenshaw had games at Long Beach Poly and the top-ranked school in California, St. John Bosco. Crenshaw took losses in both games. It obviously hasn’t mattered in the Coliseum league, as they have not allowed a single point in league play.
Last year, Crenshaw and Dorsey met in the quarterfinals, with Crenshaw defeating Dorsey 56-6. Crenshaw went on to the championship game, where they were shut out by Narbonne 25-0. Locke was a playoff team last year, but they haven’t won a playoff game since 2009.
Dorsey is a playoff team. Crenshaw is a champion. But it is a fair concern whether or not the weak competition both schools face for four out of five weeks will leave them at a disadvantage going forward.