Bill Plaschke - Paradise Found: A High School Football Teams Rise from the Ashes

For the Marvelous Mary Plaschke

Thanks, Mom

Contents

The e-mail hit my in-box on January 31, 2019. It was from Gary Pine, athletic director at Azusa Pacific, a small Christian university located just outside Los Angeles.

Bill... I have a story idea for you to chew on for a while and see if you want to follow through with sometime this winter/spring.

Rick Prinz is the head football coach at Paradise High, which, as you know, was the city that was destroyed by the Camp Fire back in November. He has a connection to some people at Azusa Pacific, and weve asked him to come speak to about 1,000 high school students in March to tell his story.

In preparation for his March speaking, I spoke with him yesterday and realized he may have a story for you, kind of a rest of the story concerning his football team, the devastation, and his own personal story.

As a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times who has long loved telling these sorts of stories, I was immediately entranced by this one and quickly e-mailed Rick Prinz with a request to chronicle the comeback of his team. I didnt hear from him for three weeks.

Hey, Bill, sorry Im just getting back to you, Prinz said when he finally called. The last couple of months, Ive been busy just trying to live.

PARADISE WAS, FOR MANY, PARADISE . The tiny Northern California town, located eighty-seven miles north of Sacramento and fifteen minutes northeast from Chico, is nestled amid the tall pines and sweeping vistas of the Sierra Nevada foothills. It was mostly a bedroom and retirement community; a quiet, picturesque place to raise a family or spend ones golden years. The median age was fifty, with folks scattered in both small cabins and expansive ranch homes tucked away on winding, wooded streets.

The main drag, Skyway Road, was lined with an eclectic collection of small businesses and shops. There was a hospital, and there was a Starbucks, but folks would drive down to Chico for the serious shopping, and they liked it that way. Paradise was a wondrous daily escape. It was a sharp and steep turn off the beaten path, and the townspeople loved and cherished its isolation and its privacy. Their only nagging fear, because of the many trees and high winds, was always fire. Over the years, there had been many small fires, many evacuations, and many worries that one day they would be burned by a big one.

That day was the morning of November 8, 2018. In the deadliest and most destructive blaze in California history, the Camp Fire roared through Paradise, killing 86 people and virtually leveling the city.

Paradises population before the fire was 26,800. Its population after the fire was approximately 2,034.

More than 18,800 structures were destroyed, including nearly 14,000 homes. Roughly 30,000 people were left homeless.

The fire was caused by an aging and faulty electrical transmission line owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The utility would reach a $13.5 billion settlement with residents and later plead guilty to eighty-four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

The above paragraphs do not come close to addressing the true horror of the situation. The flames took all of four hours to engulf the town. Residents literally ran for their lives. Their cars jammed Skyway Road, the main artery out of town, causing a flaming traffic snarl in which some were burned alive in their vehicles. On this day, it took more than five hours to drive down to Chico, as honking cars full of screaming people rolled slowly between two walls of fire under a midmorning sky that was as black as midnight. Prinz was one of those people. Most of his teenage football players were, too.

When the smoke cleared eventually, one of the few remaining major structures in town was Paradise High School. It is a wooded campus of several main buildings that slopes down to a number of sports fields. Somehow it mostly escaped the flames. And somehow, sitting virtually untouched two levels below the classrooms, was the schools crown jewel: a sixty-year-old football stadium named after a former legendary Paradise High coach from the 1970s and 1980s, the unflinching Om Wraith Field.

Was that a sign? The current coach didnt think so. Two months after the fire, sitting at a cluttered desk in a cavernous concrete wing of the schools temporary home in a warehouse at Chico Airport, Rick Prinz calculated loss. Of the 104 players in his program, 95 had lost their homes. All of his eight coaches lost their homes. His varsity squad had been whittled from 76 players to 22 because the majority of families had either left the area or enrolled in schools closer to their temporary homes. The boys equipment had melted, their uniforms burned. They didnt even have a football.

When we finally connected over the phone in the spring of 2019, Prinz told me, I dont know how were going to have a team, I dont know how were going to play a schedule, I dont even know if Im going to have a job.

But he knew what he had to do. From that lone remaining field, he would rebuild. With his devastated team, he would try to resurrect the spirit of his destroyed town.

We dont have a choice, he said intently. The kids need this. The town needs this. Everyone around here needs hope. Were going to try to give them football. Were going to try to be that hope.

So, in the face of unrelenting obstacles and against all common sense, they tried to play football.

This is their story.

Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

The plan is to practice at 3:00 today. If it is to Smokey, we will modify our activity. I will keep you informed if anything changes.

The text was sent on Thursday, November 8, 2018, at 8:10 a.m. from coach Rick Prinz to the seventy-six members of the Paradise High Bobcats varsity football team. It wasnt his finest literary moment. There were misspellings. There were typographical errors. He hoped his team would forgive him. As he typed, literally all hell was breaking loose.

Prinz had followed his usual routine that morning, the same sort of routine that had marked the sixty-year-old former high school middle linebackers twenty years as the leader of the football team representing Paradise. His simple, scheduled life suited him well in this mountain village of about twenty-five thousand people. The locals would bring him their young men, he would teach them all the same and treat them all the same, while relying on the same playbook for twenty years, the same fighting drills, the same climb-on-the-goalpost-for-thirty-seconds punishment if you took off your helmet, and the same hugs when he would send them off into the worldwhether to community college or fire school or apprenticeship as an electrician.

And the same style of winning, too. In the last two decades, Coach Prinzs Paradise Bobcats had claimed ten league titles, six sectional championships, and an overall record of 166-54.

On that chilly November morning, Prinzstout, balding, white goateed; the portrait of stabilityfigured he knew exactly what he was doing because he had done it for so long.

He awoke in his cedar home at five thirty in the morning, drove his Toyota Tacoma truck ten minutes down a winding, narrow road to the cluttered campus of about a thousand students, parked in the back next to the gym, stepped into the small fitness room, and, by six, he was working the elliptical machine while reading the Bible on his smartphone. With his steely eyes and soft smile, the former youth pastor often coached through inspirational sayings, and it was from one of those Bible mornings that he was inspired to type a pep talk to his team three days before. The previous Friday might, they had finished the regular 2018 season with a 386 trouncing at the hands of rival Pleasant Valley High School, and so even though they were 8-2 and entering the playoffs against the relatively weak Red Bluff Spartans, they looked tired and beaten and needed a jolt. Rick gave that to them with an eloquent note on the Hudl sports sharing app.