Rain, thunder and lightning causes havoc with Orange County football schedule; games rescheduled Saturday

Woodbridge football coach Rick Gibson (left) and Beckman Coach Marcello Giuliano meet with game officials to determine what will happen next. (Fernando M. Donado, For OC Sports Zone)

About this time, OC Sports Zone was expecting to provide you with full coverage of several high school football games and updating our scoreboard ticker.

Instead, we’re telling you about the postponement of at least five games in Irvine and Santa Ana and we’ve heard of many more in the county. Looks like Orange and Estancia was one of the few games played with Orange Coast co-leader Orange winning 49-18.

The chaos all started about 6 p.m. when the rain and lightning began at University High and other venues.

Players from University and Irvine were told to seek cover when numerous lightning strikes happened. Fans were kept out of the stands and asked to take cover.

Officials waited about 20 minutes, then there were more strikes so the game was postponed.
“I’ve been coaching for a while (about 30 years) and I’ve never seen anything like this at all,” said University Coach Scott Meyer. “We played in some pretty big rain storms throughout the years but never had a game postponed for lighting like this. It was pretty wild.

“It was the lightning (the reason for the postponement) and I was told any time there was a new flash,  we would have to wait another 30 minutes without lightning before the game would go on again. Every five or 10 minutes, another flash would hit.  We talked about pushing the start time to as late as 9 o’clock then talking with our administrators and Erik Terry (the Irvine coach) we thought it would be best to come back tomorrow afternoon.”

The Uni-Irvine game will be made up Saturday at 4 p.m. at Uni.

There was a much more bizarre development at Tustin, where Woodbridge was taking on Beckman. After a 15-minute delay, the Warriors jumped out to a 21-0 lead but with 2:31 left in the first quarter, there were more lighting strikes and the game was called.

It’s not known what will happen to this game, according to Kyle Smith who covered the game. We won’t know until Saturday.

So, either the game will be picked up where it left off or Woodbridge awarded the victory and inch closer to the league title.

This reporter has been covering high school football for 34 years and we’ve never seen anything like this with so many games postponed in one night.

Imagine the scheduling nightmare for Saturday, getting scorekeepers and officials with different kick-off times. Northwood and Portola are supposed to play at 2 p.m. at Irvine Stadium and University is scheduled to meet Irvine Saturday at 4 p.m. at University.

We’re still waiting to hear when the Saddleback-Santa Ana game will be made up while Segerstrom will meet Marina Saturday night at 7 p.m.

Don’t trust the weather forecasts. Last we heard, the rain was supposed to come in around midnight.

We will provide some coverage of the Saturday games so please check back.

In the end, it was the right decision to postpone these games. Rain is one thing, lightning is another and you don’t want to take a chance with the safety of players, fans and officials.

We will remember this night for some time!

-Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com