Saints March Toward National Championship

On Friday a group of 9 to 11 year olds from Watsonville spent the day at Walt Disney World in Florida. On Saturday they play for a national flag football championship.

The Saint’s are one of eight teams to qualify for the NFL Flag National Tournament of Champions in the coed 9- to 11-year-old division. They did so by winning the regional tournament held in Oakland in November.

Sending a team to the national tournament is nothing new for this local flag football team. This is the fifth year in a row a Saints team qualified for nationals in one of the three divisions of play. Four players from this year’s group—Isiah Rocha, Drew Arroyo, Caleb Martin and Christopher Glum, played in last year’s national tournament.

With that history behind them, getting back to the nationals was the team’s main objective for this season.

“This was a realistic goal for these kids and we set our sights pretty high,” said head coach Nathan Arroyo. “The four kids that I brought back we very good players, major contributors for our team last year. We were pretty confident we could get to where we’re at now. It’s taking that next step that they’ve got to get past.”

That next step would be playing in the championship game—last year’s team lost by only two points in their semi-final game. With the four returning players and Arroyo having made the trip last year as an assistant coach, the team knows what to expect on Saturday. And there are some significant differences in the game’s format. The players call all their own plays and make their own substitutions, something they do not have to do in their league or even the regional tournament.

“When we get the national tournament of champions they get the keys to the car,” Arroyo said. “They call all their own plays. They do all of the subbing. Everything is done by the team themselves. I’m actually standing on the other side of their (the opposing) team and their coach is standing on the other side of our team and there’s absolutely no communication between coach and player unless I call a timeout. It caught us off-guard last year. Last year we thought we were pretty hot stuff and we got smoked in our first couple games.”

Assistant coach Luis Rocha is confident the team is ready for those changes because they have been working on getting ready for that all season long.

“They know what to expect already so I think they’ll do well,” Rocha said. “Most of the year they’ve been calling their own plays. Nathan has a lot of faith in the kids and most of this year, including the big tournament in Oakland, they’ve been calling the plays.”

The Saints begin their drive for the championship with three pool play games Saturday morning. Based on those results the championship tournament bracket is seeded and it’s single-elimination tournament play to crown this year’s championship team. That means the final two team’s play six games Saturday in Florida’s heat and humidity. But Rocha thinks the Saints can handle it.

“Most our kids play multiple positions and they can all sub for each other. So it’s not like we’re just going to depend on five kids the whole time. We’re 10 (players) deep,” said Rocha. “There’s a lot of talent here in Watsonville.”