COMMENTARY: Times change, but Clark, Rancho pride still strong under Friday Night Lights

In a perfect world it would have been cool and crisp for what essentially was opening night of the high school football season on Friday, because high school football — and football in general — is best enjoyed when those two adjectives are applied.

Alas, it rained around the outskirts of town for much of the day. So it was cool, for us, but it also was humid. It sort of felt like St. Louis.

When I got in the car, the Beach Boys were singing “Be True to Your School,” because the people at Little Steven’s Underground Garage on SiriusXM 21 knew it essentially was opening night of the high school football season, too. Then it sort of felt like Texas, or Ohio, or one of those grimy mill towns near Pittsburgh where high school football under Friday Night Lights still is a pretty big deal.

I’ll let Brian Wilson and Mike Love take it from there:

“When some loud braggart tries to put me down ... and says his school is great ... I tell him right away:

“Now what’s the matter buddy ... ain’t you heard of my school? ... it’s number one in the state ...”

I was headed for the middle of the city, where Clark would host Rancho.

It has been a long time since the Chargers and Rams were number one in the state.

Some of us remember when.

In 1988, which was my second year in town, Rancho won state in football. This was the Rams’ fourth state championship.

Five years later, in 1993, Clark won state in football. That was the Chargers’ fourth state championship as well.

Rancho opened in 1954; Clark in 1965. These are schools with proud traditions; first, because that is the word, “proud,” that is almost always used with “tradition.” And also because guys like Mike Pritchard, who played at Rancho, and Nick Bell, who prepped at Clark, went on to play at Colorado and Iowa, respectively, and then they went on to play on Sunday.

Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night talk show host, also prepped at Ed W. Clark High School, as did Robert Gamez, the pro golfer, and Ronnie Vannucci Jr., drummer for The Killers.

But that was before urban sprawl, before the attendance zones for Rancho and Clark were redrawn with an Etch A Sketch. The rectangles were much smaller this time.

Whereas urban sprawl is good for business, and for developers and landscapers, it generally is not good for high school football programs in the middle of town.

And so now most of the good players are playing toward the edges of town, and so now Rancho and Clark aren’t very good in football anymore.

Last year, they combined for one victory.

Clark, which a few years back endured a 42-game losing streak, even has dropped down a classification to Division I-A.

Rancho still plays with the big boys, due to its success in other sports such as baseball and soccer. But before its new school opened, Rancho practiced football in a public park, and sometimes homeless men would wander onto the field when the Rams aimed field goals at makeshift goalposts of PVC pipe.

(Maybe this was what happened to UNLV before it went to Minnesota.)

As the color guard marched off the field and a gust of wind blew the big American flag over the head of the young man holding the rifle, I counted the players. Clark had 37, Rancho 35. But you could tell that Clark’s were bigger, and when the game started, you could tell the Clark players were faster, too.

It took the Chargers just four plays to score a touchdown.

Clark scored six touchdowns; Rancho did not score any. Clark won, 39-0. Rancho, which scored only 40 points all of last season, got as close as the 2-yard line in the second quarter, when the score was 12-0.

I know that media people are not supposed to do this, but I was sort of hoping the Rams could punch it in, because lord knows those kids need something to hang their helmets on.

After the game, after the undefeated Clark players jubilantly skipped off the field, some with a cheerleader on an arm, Tyrone Armstrong, the first-year Rancho coach, gathered the Rams on the far end of the field. He told them to get their heads up.

Somebody already had shut off the scoreboard, so maybe that made it a little easier.

The grandstands were empty when I started for my car, and the Rancho players were chanting R-A-M-S in strident voices, and they were doing wind sprints and jumping jacks and other calisthenics out there in the middle of the field.

They still were being true to their school.