Prep football: Foresthill gets back to games after Mosquito Fire evacuation

With the faint smell of smoke in the air as the Mosquito Fire remained burning miles away, Valley Christian’s head coach Doug Williams did something out of the ordinary late Friday night at Foresthill High.

He called over to his opponents after a hard-fought high school football game and asked them to gather together. Two teams, Valley Christian and Foresthill, met at midfield and Williams offered some emotional words to players that were his group’s opponents seconds earlier.

“Hold your heads up high,” Williams said to the Foresthill players. “That was one heck of a fight.”

Foresthill was emotional after a heartbreaking 22-14 last-minute loss. Some had tears in their eyes while most wore faces of dejection. But the football game was a small, tertiary source of those feelings.

Friday night was Foresthill’s first football game in three weeks because of the Mosquito Fire that burned more than 77,000 acres and destroyed 78 buildings in the Sierra foothills of Placer County. The fire has been quelled and Foresthill resumed school last week. Friday’s football game offered a semblance of normalcy to a community that wasn’t sure it would remain intact after evacuation orders were given the week of Sept. 6, when 11,000 residents were at risk.

“It was a blessing to be able to play,” said Williams, who lives in Foresthill but coaches at Valley Christian in Roseville. “We weren’t sure we were going to be able to play. There was a lot of adversity. We didn’t know what was going on. The fire was crazy. We thought the town was good, then the winds picked up.”

Foresthill students and faculty don’t have to go far for a reminder of the fire put everything at risk.

“That was the hardest part, was our students watching the news broadcasts and being able to recognize their town and their home and seeing the flames, and trying to stay as positive as they could when they knew it was literally right across the street,” Foresthill assistant principle Jeff Walters told The Bee.

Just across Foresthill Road from the main entrance to the school is a lot with burnt cars and trees and ash covering the ground. There are signs throughout the area thanking firefighters and first responders, and reminders from the local ranger station that the area remains at extremely high risk for fires. The nearby forests remain closed to hikers and campers while authorities continue to fight a fire that was 90% contained a few miles to the east as of Friday.

Oddly, the nickname for the Foresthill’s teams is the Wildfires.

“These kids and this community have been through an event that no one could ever plan for,” Walters said. “To be back in school this week and out here on a Friday night doing what kids do, it’s just a testament to the strength and fortitude of this community.”

Walters said one of Foresthill’s 180 students lost their home to the fire while a handful of others dealt with significant damages. A pair of brothers on the football team, Brennan and Vincent Navorro, are still without water and electricity as the fire damaged a significant portion of their home.

“We thought our house was gone because it was in the red zone,” Brennan Navorro said. “And then we came to find out it was still standing, but our neighborhood was gone.”

Navorro said his house is one of the roughly five in his neighborhood still standing; some 25 others burned to the ground. He, his brother, mother and stepfather bounced around from multiple hotels and friends’ houses before returning home last week.

When asked about how much football has helped, Navorro said, “A lot. I’ve loved it all my life.”

The football team regathered Sept. 16, after Foresthill had been evacuated for more than a week, at LeFebvre Stadium in Auburn. They didn’t resume practicing until the week of the Valley Christian game, but it was apparent the emotions were high throughout Friday night’s contest.

Foresthill, which began the season 0-3, had a 14-8 lead in the second half thanks to sophomore Travis Pisarek’s long touchdown catch from junior quarterback Ben Mercado. The team appeared on its way to an uplifting victory when junior linebacker Hunter Castillo intercepted a Valley Christian pass in the end zone in the fourth quarter.

But Valley Christian scored 14 unanswered points thanks to substitute quarterback Thomas Rominger, who hit Chase Clary for a go-ahead 35-yard touchdown on a fourth down with 1:13 remaining.

In this case, being back on the field playing football was more important than the result of the game for Foresthill.

The team’s head coach, Mark Tumminelli, hasn’t been a stranger to adversity. After dealing with the pandemic in 2020, his team didn’t make the postseason last year despite an 8-2 record. The section deemed its schedule wasn’t difficult enough despite another team in the Metro Athletic League making the playoffs with a worse record and losing to Foresthill in the last game of the regular season.

With school back in session and the fire mostly contained, Tumminelli and the Wildfires are getting back to normal, even if there’s still not much that’s normal around Foresthill.

“We tried to get the kids together one day (while the town was evacuated) just to tell them how much we love them,” Tumminelli said. “I’m very, very proud of the effort. I think my kids played great ball tonight. Just wasn’t in the cards.”

This story was originally published October 1, 2022 at 12:56 PM.