HOLLYWOOD — The Hollywood High School Sheiks lost their opener two Fridays ago by a touchdown, and their head coach spent the following week telling anyone who asked that it was the best thing that could have happened to a team this green.
“We’ve got maybe six kids who took a meaningful snap last year,” said Marcus Trejo, in his third season leading the program. “Everybody else is finding out in real time what varsity speed feels like. You’d rather they find out in September than in a playoff game they’re not ready for.”
The Sheiks, whose campus sits on Sunset Boulevard and whose century-old teams have sent a handful of players to college ball over the decades, are rebuilding this fall around a sophomore quarterback, Deon Whitfield, and a line that Trejo describes, with affection, as “young, light, and getting knocked around into shape.” The offense is new, a spread look the staff installed over the summer, and the players are still learning where to be after the snap.
What the program does have, for the first time in a while, is numbers. Roughly forty players turned out for the varsity and junior varsity rosters combined, up from a low point a few years ago when the coaching staff worried aloud about fielding a full team. Trejo credits a middle-school flag program the school helped seed and, more bluntly, a run of good weather at spring practice.
“When kids see their friends out here having a decent time, they come,” said Paula Sandoval, the school’s athletic director. “We lost a generation of players to other schools and to nothing at all. Getting them back onto the field is half the job.”
The early schedule has not been kind. The Sheiks drew two of their league’s stronger programs in the opening weeks, and the coaching staff scheduled the games on purpose, wanting the young roster tested before the games that decide seeding. Whitfield threw two interceptions in the opener and also drove the offense eighty yards in the fourth quarter, which Trejo said told him more than the final score did.
Booster support has been thin but loyal. Rosa Iglesias, whose son plays on the line, runs a small group of parents who sell water and snacks at home games and pool gas money to follow the team on the road.
“These aren’t kids with private trainers,” Iglesias said. “They practice, they go to class, some of them work. When they win one, it means something, because nothing about it was handed to them.”
The Sheiks host their league opener next week, and Trejo is refusing to predict anything beyond it. He wants his sophomores to learn how to protect a lead before he talks about November. Ask him where the season ends and he shrugs, then points at the practice field, where a coach is walking a freshman through the same three steps for the tenth time.