Sell adds to his win total

No pressure there — Aragon was only hosting Menlo-Atherton in a Peninsula Athletic League team tournament semifinal with a Central Coast Section berth on the line.

Aragon’s regular coach, Dave Owdom, had to bow out of the match Tuesday because of illness, but the Dons still took care of business, beating the always-dangerous Bears 4-3.

While the final score was close, Aragon managed to clinch the match by taking a 4-1 lead before M-A won the final two matches.

“[Owdom] said he was a little upset with me because it took him nearly 20 years to beat M-A and I did it on my first try,” Sell said, jokingly.

Owdom supplied Sell with the starting lineup and unlike his years as a football coach, the Dons just rolled the ball out and played.

“I’m a coach at heart, so being around kids competing is just fun,” Sell said. “But it’s a different kind of coaching. You just make the lineup card and let them go. … In football, you’re so much more involved in the outcome of the game.

“I’m not the (regular) coach, but when I’m coaching for the day and the match starts, I’m certainly pacing. A couple of times I made some noises of frustration and celebration.”

And while Sell knows how to coach, in general, he knows his limitations.

“I’ve played enough tennis to make some observations,” Sell said. “But at this point, I don’t think there was anything to be gained walking out there and talking to someone on a changeover.”

This isn’t the first time Sell has stepped outside his football comfort zone. He was the Dons’ badminton coach during the 2006 season and helped lead them to the brink of a Peninsula Athletic League title, eventually settling for second behind perennial power Carlmont.

Sell recollected that season like it was last year.

“We beat Carlmont at Carlmont. it was super exciting. I knew enough (about PAL badminton) to know that we hadn’t beaten Carlmont in years,” Sell said. “But we lost to Westmoor. We were without this one kid. We could have been co-champs (with Carlmont).”

And while he was the coach, Sell still remained a competitor.

“The highlight by the end of the year was that I could beat our boys’ No. 3 singles player,” Sell said.

Second-seeded Aragon took on top-seeded Burlingame Wednesday for the second automatic CCS berth from the PAL. Both teams, however, have a good chance at making the CCS tournament.

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While flag football may be new to this generation of athletes, it is a sport that was originally played in the county back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I was aware of this fact, which is why I’ve referred to restart of the sport as the first in PAL history. Back then, it was the Mid Peninsula League.

But Simi Lee — a San Mateo County Sports Hall of Fame inductee for her decades of work at the San Mateo Times, PAL scorekeeper and unofficial historian of female high school sports in the county — gave me a little history lesson.

I’ve been saying Wednesday’s matchup between undefeated Carlmont and one-loss Mills was for the inaugural PAL title. Lee informed me that that is not correct.

While there were several seasons during which play was just in the MPL, during the 1982-83 season (flag football was a winter sport back then), two of the three leagues in the county — the Mid Peninsula and South Peninsula leagues — combined for one, 10-team league and competed under the “PAL” banner.

So let’s call the Carlmont-Mills matchup the first PAL championship game of the modern era.

Nathan Mollat is in his 24th year covering high school sports in San Mateo County for the San Mateo Daily Journal. He can be reached by email: nathan@smdailyjournal.com.