Prep rout affects both sides

ESTERO, Fla. – The Estero High football staff gathered in head coach Rich Dombroski’s office late Friday, almost in stunned silence.

Earlier that night, Estero lost to Naples High by 13.

Not by 13 points. By 13 touchdowns. That’s right: Naples 91, Estero 0.

The rout fallout has been growing since the game ended.

“Hey,” offered Estero defensive line coach Pat Hayes after the one-sided affair, “I didn’t even know 91 was a multiple of seven.”

With that, the coaches all got a much-needed laugh.

A half-hour away in Naples, Eagles coach Bill Kramer – the man on the winning end – could use one of those.

He looked at the scoreboard late in the game, saw 91-0, and said he felt sick to his stomach. Kramer’s team ran only 31 plays and he kept most of his best players on the sideline – for the entire game in some cases. But still Kramer knew what was coming.

Soon after the game ended, his inbox began filling with angry e-mails, some from Estero parents wondering why so many points were necessary, some from Naples parents wondering why their kids didn’t play more.

“There’s only one way to describe it,” Kramer said. “Just bizarre.”

The schools aren’t far off in size: Estero has about 1,400 high schoolers, Naples roughly 1,700.

But the pedigree of the football programs couldn’t be more different.

Estero is rebuilding from the lowest level, with Dombroski in his first year at the school and having inherited a program that had simply crumbled. Naples is the reigning state Class 3A champion, and a contender to win the title again. Naples has players committed to Division I schools like Ohio State already and a roster filled with talent at every position. Estero has no college prospects and only about 25 healthy or so players remaining on its roster.

“Some of us, most of us, well, all of us were intimidated,” said Tyler Eastridge, a free safety who may be exaggerating when he says he weighs 150 pounds.

Naples led 70-0 at the half; only four of the 1,420 games reported by member schools to the Florida High School Athletic Association this season have seen teams score more than 70 points.

“It was David versus Goliath, and David didn’t have a stone to throw,” Dombroski said.

The national record books are incomplete, but a score such as 91-0 won’t register a blip on the list of all-time defeats. It wasn’t even the most lopsided score in the country this weekend – in Ohio, Beechcroft beat Centennial 96-0, taking knees on plays in the fourth quarter to avoid triple figures.

According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, five teams have scored more than 200 points in a game, with the record believed to be 256 by Haven (Kan.) High in 1927.

Dombroski isn’t blaming Naples.

“Naples did absolutely nothing wrong,” Dombroski said. “We just didn’t do anything right.”

Kramer has been in this spot before.

In 2001, the Golden Eagles scored 63 first-quarter points and beat Lely High – where Dombroski’s girlfriend teaches today – 85-0, and Kramer suddenly became the target of perceptions that he intentionally ran up the score.

“We’ve been through it before and you never want to go through it again,” Kramer said. “There were people ready to burn my house.”