Schedule quirks confound coaches

Spencer Patterson

Thursday, Sept. 16, 1999 | 2:38 a.m.

Palo Verde opens with nine straight league games; Chaparral didn't play a conference game until week three.

Eldorado has five of its first six games at home; Foothill plays its first four games on the road.

Green Valley plays only eight games this season; Desert Pines just seven.

Long after division, zone and state champs have been crowned, the 1999 prep football season may ultimately be remembered as much for its quirky schedule as for the play on the field.

Caught between last year's addition of Mojave and Palo Verde to the varsity ranks, and next year's realignment from two conferences to four divisions, this season presented schedule makers with some significant obstacles.

"The cleanest way to do this would be to have a stagnant number of teams, where you could switch the schedule each year so you'd play a team at home one year and away the next year," said Clark County Athletic Director Larry McKay, who sets the conference schedule for all Class 4A schools in Southern Nevada. "But the league was different this year than last year, so that didn't happen."

With Mojave and Palo Verde moving in, the west side's Sunset Division now features nine teams, giving each club eight league contests. With the regular season just nine-weeks long, that meant each team could play just one nonconference game.

And with the league's lone bye rotating on a weekly basis, it also meant that eight of the Sunset's nine teams played a critical conference game their first night out.

"It would have been nice to have our bye the week before conference play to get some of the kinks worked out," said Mojave coach Mike Gutowski, whose club instead played defending state champion Cimarron-Memorial in week one, losing 29-0. "Instead, we open with four conference games off the bat, and you can't make any mistakes."

Palo Verde coach Darwin Rost knows that only too well. His club had the unlucky distinction of drawing the conference bye for week nine. Combine that with a first four-week schedule that pits the Panthers against 1998 playoff qualifiers Bishop Gorman, Cheyenne, Western and Cimarron, and Rost's club is left hoping it can just keep its head above water this year.

"It's been really tough," Rost said. "All four of those teams were playoff teams, and all four won their first-round game last year. It would have been nice if we could have opened with Foothill and figured some things out in that game, but we don't play them until week nine."

As for who drew up such tough schedules for the division's newest schools, Mojave and Palo Verde can only blame a computer -- the one McKay uses to create schedules in every varsity sport.

"It was completely random, done by computer and alphabetically." McKay said. "That takes all the guesswork out of it."

In the east side's Sunrise Division, most teams had two weeks to work out any glitches before getting into league play. But with eight schools in the division (each playing seven conference games), that means that certain teams play four games at home, while others play four on the road.

For Green Valley, playing league games on the road proved to be the least of first-year coach John Culver's problems.

After taking over for ousted coach Larry Thomas late last spring, Culver inherited open dates during the season's first two weeks. With local teams booked solid and few out-of-town takers, Culver managed to schedule a road game at Utah power Snow Canyon for week one but was ultimately forced to keep week two open.

But after seeing his team lose 63-0 to Snow Canyon in the opener, Culver now looks back at the bye fondly.

"We have a young, inexperienced team and it gave us a week to clean things up," Culver said.

As for the area's three new schools -- Centennial, Desert Pines and Foothill -- schedule quirks are entirely of their own doing. Coaches and athletic administrators for those schools were in charge of filling their own slate, the same way Sunset and Sunrise Division teams are responsible for setting up their nonleague games.

"In football, with only a couple of nonleague games, I don't want to schedule mismatches," McKay said. "The schools prefer to do it on their own."

Come next year, however, that may change. With the area splitting into four five-team divisions, teams will soon find themselves with five nonconference dates to fill -- a tall order for even the most experienced coaching staff.

"We'll meet with the schools soon, and they'll decide what they want to do," McKay said. "I can help schedule (nonleague) games against teams from the other divisions if they want me to. That's what I do in all the other sports."