Santa Margarita soars to Pac-5 championship

ANAHEIM - Santa Margarita football coach Harry Welch is among the most loquacious men of his profession.

Asked to summarize what he just saw his football team accomplish Saturday at Angel Stadium, all Welch could say was, "Wow. That was just ... wow."

Santa Margarita wowed the coach with a 27-13 victory over San Clemente in the CIF-Southern Section Pac-5 Division championship. The victory gave Welch his ninth section championship, including five at Canyon of Canyon Country and three at St. Margaret's.

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Eagles junior quarterback Johnny Stanton continued his string of great playoff performances. He rushed for 153 yards and one touchdown, and completed 9 of 14 passes for 92 yards and a touchdown.

Santa Margarita junior running back Ryan Wolpin rushed for 89 yards and two touchdowns, and another junior, receiver River Cracraft, had seven receptions for 71 yards and one touchdown.

It is Santa Margarita's third CIF football championship, following a pair of CIF-SS titles in the 1990s.

The Eagles are 12-2 – and perhaps on their way to one more game.

Santa Margarita is a candidate for a berth in the CIF State Championship Bowl Games that will be played Friday and Saturday at Home Depot Center in Carson. Only sectional division champions are eligible.

CIF-Southern Section Northern Division champion Westlake (14-0) almost certainly will represent Southern California in the state Open Division game. Southern California's Division 1 representative likely will be either Inland Division champion Vista Murrieta (9-5) or Pac-5 champion Santa Margarita. Vista Murrieta was 14-0 on the field, including a victory over Centennial of Corona in the Inland Division final Friday, but had to forfeit five victories because of a transfer paperwork error made by a school in Georgia.

Bowl game teams will be announced Sunday at 3 p.m.

San Clemente finished 12-2. The Tritons were in only their second CIF football final, having lost in a section championship game in 1979.

The Eagles had a 14-13 lead at halftime, and shut out San Clemente in the second half. They got a touchdown run by Stanton in the third quarter, and one by Wolpin with 3:09 left in the fourth quarter to put the game away.

"They took it to us in the second half," San Clemente senior quarterback Travis Wilson said. "They were definitely impressive."

A big play on the drive that led to the Wolpin touchdown was an apparent interception by San Clemente's Christian Tober that was negated by a pass interference penalty on Tober. Replays indicated the ball had been tipped at the line of scrimmage, which erases any pass-interference possibility, but the officials did not see it that way.

Both of those second-half touchdowns were the result of long drives, which were common in this game.

San Clemente, taking the opening kickoff, scored first on a 40-yard field goal by junior Bret Miller that finished a drive that started at the Tritons' 18-yard line and lasted six minutes.

The Tritons' 3-0 lead did not last long. Santa Margarita's first possession also was a time-consuming drive, one that took almost five minutes, but the Eagles got a touchdown on theirs when Wolpin burst through a hole in the middle for a 33-yard touchdown run with 34 seconds left in the first quarter. That put Santa Margarita on top, 7-3.

San Clemente, getting good field position on Tober's 46-yard kickoff return that started the Tritons at their 47-yard line, got another field goal, this one a Miller kick of 30 yards, with 8:44 to go in the second quarter to trim the Santa Margarita lead to 7-6.

The Tritons jumped ahead on their next possession. They started from their 38, got two first-down runs by quarterback Travis Wilson on back-to-back plays, and scored on a 3-yard run by Mike Elespuru for a 13-7 advantage.

Santa Margarita assembled a long drive to regain the lead. Starting from their 11-yard line with 3:42 remaining in the first half, the Eagles drove 89 yards on 10 plays with Stanton connecting with Cracraft on an 8-yard touchdown pass with 11 seconds left. John McGrory's kick for the extra point gave Santa Margarita a 14-13 lead at halftime.

The first-half statistics were about as balanced as the scoring. Santa Margarita had 10 first downs, to San Clemente's nine, and San Clemente compiled 185 yards of total offense on 25 plays while Santa Margarita totaled 172 offensive yards on 24 plays.

Saturday's game was only the third time the schools' football teams played each other, and the first time since 1999. San Clemente beat Santa Margarita in 1998, with Santa Margarita prevailing in '99.

Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregiste.com