South City coach Jay Oca carving niche as comeback kid

After dropping his first five games at the varsity helm in 2014, the then rookie head coach led South City to four wins in its final five games, including a shot at the Peninsula Athletic League Ocean Division championship with a showdown with the Dons in the final league game of the season, a game Aragon narrowly escaped with a 25-17 victory.

This season has run parallel to Oca’s rookie campaign, with the Warriors dropping their first three games of the year. But last Friday at Burlingame, South City overcame an early 21-7 deficit to rally for a 49-40 win, its first of the year, and against a PAL Bay Division opponent no less.

“It’s just a good win for our program and I’m just hoping to continue,” Oca said.

After trailing at the half, the Warriors scored five times in the second. It was a back-and-forth battle with the Panthers that saw senior running back Carlos Solis rush for four touchdowns and senior Jeremiah Lupe rush for three.

Solis gave South City its first lead of the game at 28-27 with a 1-yard run. After Burlingame answered right back, Lupe capped a drive with a 22-yard dash to put the Warriors up 36-28. The two teams traded scores once more to put the Warriors up 42-40 before they recovered a critical Burlingame fumble, then got some breathing room on a 20-yard score by Lupe to close out the night’s scoring.

South City had just 23 players on its active roster, compared to 44 for Burlingame. The Warriors’ low turnout has been one of their biggest obstacles this season in that the endurance simply wasn’t there through the first three weeks. But striking a balance to find the right game-day endurance is something Oca was able to institute in 2014; and he was is confident the team will only improve in this respect going forward this season.

“We’re just in better shape,” Oca said. “After that game the kids really focused on conditioning. … We’re looking for that fine line and we found it. It just took some time.”

The comeback momentum South City’s teams have established under its third-year coach is the result of a bigger issue, according to Oca.

“My kids right now — it might be a South City thing because it’s just the kind of problems we have — I have a lot of kids that don’t really believe in themselves,” Oca said. “I’ve said it before, I’m not really coaching football here. … It’s about teaching them that they can go on, that they can succeed.”

A special education teacher for history and government as well as a physical education teacher at South San Francisco High School, Oca said the family stability of many of his students is devolving in a hurry. Many of his students and student-athletes come from broken homes, he said.

Oca pointed to a recent murder at Orange Park — one block from the SSF campus — in which 20-year-old Nicholas Gomez was shot and killed Monday, April 25. Nineteen-year-old Cristian Cruz-Partida was arrested and charged with the murder and has a court date with the San Mateo County Superior Court scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 27, according to country records.

Both Gomez and Cruz-Partida are former students at SSF. Cruz-Partida even tried out for South City football but quit the team and stopped going to school in the spring of 2014, according to Oca.

“Our kids are either killing people or getting killed,” Oca said. “It’s kind of crazy.”

Oca said the backdrop of dysfunctional families from which many of his players come is one of the main factors in why his teams tend to start slow. The home situations shift his role from being a mere coach, he said. He instead many times finds himself playing the role of mentor, big brother and even father figure.

“It takes time and that’s what I’m combatting,” Oca said. “I’ve got kids who are 400 pounds, who can run 4.6 (second) 40s and can block someone. It’s more a problem of them believing in themselves. A lot of these kids don’t have the support at home. But that’s what we’re dealing with. They’re believing in themselves now and that’s what’s similar to the 2014 team.”