CIF Open Division football championship preview: Serra vs. St. John Bosco

The shaken-up Salinas player would eventually walk off the field under his own power, with a row of Padres lining up to pat him on the back. But just a few minutes earlier, Latu and the Padres celebrated the hit, perhaps for a few seconds too long, while medical staff jogged onto the field and attend to the player.

“It was clean,” Serra head coach Patrick Walsh said following the game. “It’s a tough game, it’s a hard game, and he’s a hard hitter.”

The violent tackle was indeed a clean play. And in defense of the lingering celebration, it was, in a way, a response to the Padres playing against their own demons all season. Those demons were borne from the final day of the 2021 season. A historic day for the storied Serra program, the Padres advanced to the CIF Open Division State Championship Bowl, only to suffer a 44-7 loss to Southern California powerhouse Mater Dei.

This season, Serra vowed to return to California high school football’s the grandest stage and have indeed played like a team on a mission.

The Padres (13-0) opened the year by defeating three of Northern California’s best programs in non-league play, including a 24-21 win Sept. 2 over De La Salle to seize Nor Cal’s No. 1 ranking. They went on to run the table in West Catholic Athletic League play to claim the region’s most contentious league championship and marched through the CCS Division I playoffs to claim their third straight section crown.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s 13 straight wins. And Latu’s pulverizing hit in the Salinas game was a step along the way in Serra’s mission to play a level of football they weren’t ready for last season in taking on Mater Dei.

“We’re a very physical team, and we love each other,” Serra junior safety Joseph Bey said following the Salinas win. “So, someone makes a play, we’re going to go celebrate, we’re going to be happy for them. We understand Mater Dei down south, they have very good players, they’re very physical, big, and we know that we have to match that. And it starts here.”

Serra didn’t get its rematch with Mater Dei. Instead, in qualifying for the CIF Open Division State Championship Bowl, the Padres will face St. John Bosco-Bellflower, as the Braves snapped Mater Dei’s 29-game winning streak with a 24-22 victory in the Southern Section Division I championship game Nov. 25, at the same time Serra was defeating Mitty 41-14 in the CCS Division I title game.

But the demons of the Mater Dei loss remain.

“I definitely think having that opportunity last year was good for us,” Bey said. “Because we got to feel everything. We got to experience everything. Big stadium, big crowd, great players on the opposite side. So, we match the physicality and we’re excited this year.”

Saturday night, when Serra meets St. John Bosco at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo for an 8 p.m. kickoff, the matchup will have a sense of familiarity in more ways than one. Braves head coach Jason Negro’s right-hand man is offensive coordinator Steven Lo, who served on Walsh’s staff at Serra from 2013-17.

Lo’s tenure with the Padres includes a historic 2017 season that saw Serra’s offense rewrite the school’s record books. This en route to winning the only state championship in program history at the Division 2-AA level, three divisions under the Open Division tournament.

Since Lo’s departure from Serra, offensive coordinator Darius Bell has reinvented a spread offense that has been dynamic in the hands of junior quarterback Maualiuaki Smith this season. The Padres have been pass intensive, totaling 4,260 yards of offense, 2,491 of them from the arm of Smith.

“I think everything’s different,” Walsh said. “Coach Bell is entirely different than Coach Lo. To be honest with you, if anything, Bosco’s offense looks more like Serra’s offense when he was here.”

St. John Bosco (12-1) has dynamic playmakers, including quarterback Pierce Clarkson — who threw three touchdowns in the Braves’ win over Mater Dei — and wide receiver DeAndre Moore, both senior commits to Louisville, 6-2 junior running back in Cameron Jones, and 6-5 senior playmaking tight end Matayo Uiagalelei.

Serra will counter with a sense of belonging.

While the Braves have been here before — winning state championships all three times they reached the CIF Open Division bowl game in 2013, ’16 and ’19 — the Padres have now climbed to the CIF mountaintop two years in a row. And unlike last year, when they maneuvered into Nor Cal’s No. 1 ranking only after the CCS championship game, this year the Padres have resided there since their Week 2 win over De La Salle.

“I feel better just in the sense where last year’s team laid the foundation for this, we were one of three teams that could have been selected for this game,” Walsh said. “This year we were one of one teams that could be selected for this game.”

And, as exemplified by that Johnny Latu hit against Salinas, the Padres are certainly hungry.

“They brought home the desire to go back,” Walsh said. “And as we look at it now, 14 weeks of the season, this is where this group of kids wanted to be.”