With a plethora of returners on offense Justin-Siena looks for success in 2018 season
By Kyle Foster, photos courtesy of Dean Ruggiero and Don Lex
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
Just because Justin-Siena didn’t change sections doesn’t mean things won’t be different this football season.
The Braves will move from the Marin Catholic Athletic Conference to the newly established Vine Valley Athletic League this school year, which means no more Saturday football.
“I would say the best thing for me is that we don’t have to play Saturday football anymore,” Justin-Siena third-year coach Brandon LaRocco said of joining the VVAL. “I hate Saturday football; I just don’t like playing high school football on Saturday, so we’re all Friday night games this year, so that’s probably the number one thing. Number two would be getting to play local teams, which will be fun for the kids you know. We played good schools in Marin, we had good camaraderie and a good rivalry, but it’s just not the same you know? They don’t grow up with those guys, they don’t play youth sports or go to elementary school with those guys, so for our Napa kids that’ll be a good opportunity for them, and then we’re also playing Sonoma, so we have a lot of kids from Sonoma, and then we’re playing Armijo this year too, so all of our kids are going to get a chance to play schools with kids that they grew up with, schools from the communities that we draw from, so we’re excited about that.”
Competing against all the other Napa County schools in league play will also be something fun for the team according to LaRocco.
Justin-Siena will open up the season on August 17th at Piedmont; on August 24th they’ll host Healdsburg; August 31st they’ll host Armijo; finally they’ll host Hercules on September 7th to end the non league schedule.
“Well Hercules made the division four finals last year, so just based on who went the furthest in the playoffs Hercules went further than Piedmont did,” LaRocco explained of the two tough preseason opponents. “We lost to both of them last year, but Piedmont beat us worse than Hercules did, so I would say those two are probably the two biggest of our four preseason games.”
On September 14th Justin-Siena will open up Vine Valley Athletic League play at Casa Grande-Petaluma. On October 5th they’ll host Napa High; the following week they’ll host Vintage, and two weeks later on October 26th the Braves will end the season at American Canyon.
The Braves will return a good amount of starters from last year’s team that went 3-6 overall and 3-1 in MCAL. Most of those starters are on the offensive side of the ball.
Their key returner though is quarterback Barrett Donohoe, who will enter his senior season this year.
“Barrett got nine games of starting experience last year,” LaRocco said of his starter at quarterback. “You think he’s a very accurate quarterback and he reads the field very well we’d be really dependent on him for success this year, but we have other guys who can do things too, so we have nine returners on offense this year, which is a lot. And a lot of those guys and even the guys who are replacing the two seniors we lost all had significant playing time last year, so I’m excited to see how the offense together would gel and obviously Barrett’s a huge part of that puzzle; there’s a lot of support out there at wide receiver, running back, and up front for us to collectively get the job done.”
During the summer Justin-Siena also took part in the De La Salle 7-on-7 passing tournament. In that tournament there was a lot of traditional powerhouses.
They also faced all the other Napa County schools in weekly 7-on-7 matchups.
