Game of the Week: NBL showdown features St. Vincent vs. Montgomery

At 6-0 and 1-0 in league, St. Vincent is currently the favorite to win the North Bay League-Redwood title and is on track to bring home its first section title since 2008.|

THIS WEEK’S GAMES

THIS WEEK’S GAMES

St. Vincent at Montgomery, 7 p.m.

Healdsburg at Piner, 7 p.m.

West County at Windsor, 7 p.m.

Maria Carrillo at Cardinal Newman, 7 p.m.

Ukiah at Rancho Cotate, 7 p.m.

Sonoma Valley at Petaluma , 7 p.m.

Casa Grande at Napa, 7 p.m.

Middletown at Willits, 7 p.m.

Kelseyville at Cloverdale, 7:30 p.m.

Fort Bragg at Lower Lake, 7:30 p.m.

Clear Lake at St. Helena, canceled

(Bye: Santa Rosa)

When Trent Herzog arrived at St. Vincent in 2018, the football program was in serious need of an overhaul.

Before his arrival, the Mustangs had won a combined six games over the last three seasons and hadn’t won a league game in two consecutive years.

“Our first meeting that we called, there were 18 kids in the school that wanted to play football,” Herzog said. “It was kind of grim when we got there.”

He remembers clearly what he told his staff after that meeting.

“I told our coaches, ‘Hey, this is a three-to-five-year project,’” he recalled. “And right now, we’re in year three and a half.”

So, what is the state of the St. Vincent football program three-and-a-half years into Herzog’s rebuild? Pretty far ahead of schedule if you ask him.

“I don’t know if any of those coaches would have believed me if I would have said, ‘Hey, in our fourth year we’re going to be undefeated going into a huge game against Montgomery with a chance to win a league title if we can beat Monty and Santa Rosa,’” he said.

At 6-0 and 1-0 in league, St. Vincent is currently the favorite to win the North Bay League-Redwood title and is on track to bring home its first section title since 2008. The Mustangs, the top-ranked Division VII team in the North Coast Section, face off against one of their biggest league foes in Montgomery on Friday in The Press Democrat’s Game of the Week. Kickoff is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Montgomery.

Heading into league play, the Vikings (3-3, 0-1) were projected to be in the running for the Redwood Division title alongside the Mustangs. But a 28-14 loss to Santa Rosa last week makes this game a must-win for Montgomery if they want any chance at the league crown.

The Vikings know what’s at stake and responded to arguably their worst performance of the year with a strong week at practice.

“We know we have a big task in front of us,” said Montgomery head coach Vertis Patton. “We’re ready for it. Our guys are ready to get back to normal and we know that we are not the team that played last week. We are way better than how we played, and we want to show that. You’re going to see a different Montgomery team from last week, 100 percent.”

It’ll be the biggest test of the fall so far for St. Vincent, and that’s not to say the earlier portion of their schedule was easy. A missed field goal as time expired was the difference in their 21-20 win over St. Bernard’s to open the season and they barely got past Ukiah 15-8 and Division VII rival St. Helena 14-13.

Regardless of Friday’s result, St. Vincent has been building toward a season like this for the last several years. It’s nice being 6-0, Herzog and his team say, but the work is in no way finished yet.

The Herzog era

Herzog actually never formally applied for the St. Vincent job after his dismissal from Casa Grande in 2017. It was a recommendation from John Antonio, Casa’s current head coach, that first got him in contact with Pat Daly, St. Vincent’s current principal and the man who ultimately hired Herzog.

“I said, ‘Well, I’ll go talk with Mr. Daly and maybe I can give him a name or two he might want to interview for the job,’” Herzog recounted. “I go and talk with him and two hours later he offered me the job. I told him, ‘I’m not going to say no, but I need to think about this.’

“We went back and forth for about six weeks. We started talking before Christmas and I didn’t take the job until February.”

Daly has an extensive background growing athletic programs at Catholic schools in the North Bay. He was a coach and administrator at Cardinal Newman and then later helped develop Marin Catholic’s athletics into the powerhouse they are today.

“Athletics plays such an important role in the experience of a high school student and the life of a campus,” Daly said when he was hired in 2017.

It was that commitment to athletics that ultimately got Herzog on board.

“Mr. Daly is the reason I took the job,” he said. “His support and him wanting to build up the athletic program at St. Vincent and knowing that athletics is so important to academics and school spirit and keeping everyone involved.”

Herzog had been witness to a rebuild before, back during his early years coaching at Casa Grande in the mid-’90s, but had never attempted one himself.

The task of doing so at a small school with less than 300 students was a bit different from one with around 1,700.

“I didn’t treat it like a small school,” Herzog said. “I made it big, I didn’t look at it like we only have 18 players in our first meeting and I didn’t make any excuses. I just said, ‘This is what we have, and this is what we’re going to do,’ and we just took it day-by-day and just built it. … I realized it was a small school, but it was a big challenge and something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Championship aspirations

St. Vincent’s goal coming into the 2021 season was to win a section title, and that appears to be well within reach.

Thanks to a core group of star players, the Mustangs are arguably the favorite to bring home the section banner in Division VII. It would be their first since 2008, the last time they started a season 6-0.

Junior running back Kai Hall and senior do-it-all athlete Dante Antonini are the headliners and should be playing on Saturdays in a couple years, but players like Nathan Rooks, Riley Gilfillan, Cameron Vaughn, Dominic Minton, Jake DeCarli and Jaret Bosarge have also been big contributors to their success this fall.

The tough part now, Herzog said, will be sustaining the program’s success in the coming seasons.

“As far as depth, we’re still not where we need to be competitive year in, year out in a league with schools that are 10 times bigger than ours, but we have a special group of kids in our senior and junior class that are super talented and hard working,” he said. “You get three or four of those kids in your program and everyone follows them and their leadership.”

This is St. Vincent’s first full season in the NBL-Redwood after playing as a freelance team in 2018 and 2019. It went 2-2-1 against Redwood teams in the abbreviated spring season and could all but wrap up the league title with a win over Montgomery on Friday.

Santa Rosa (4-3, 1-0) still looms on the schedule on Nov. 6, but the Mustangs’ attention is firmly on the Vikings at the moment. Expect the hosts to come out fired up on Friday. They’re coming off their worst showing of the year against Santa Rosa and know a win over the Mustangs would get them back in the league race.

“It should be a really, really good game,” Herzog said. “Definitely going to be a championship game and we’re going to need to have a championship effort. I think the team that makes the least amount of mistakes is going to win the game.”

You can reach Press Democrat Staff Writer Gus Morris at 707-304-9372 or gus.morris@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JustGusPD

THIS WEEK’S GAMES

THIS WEEK’S GAMES

St. Vincent at Montgomery, 7 p.m.

Healdsburg at Piner, 7 p.m.

West County at Windsor, 7 p.m.

Maria Carrillo at Cardinal Newman, 7 p.m.

Ukiah at Rancho Cotate, 7 p.m.

Sonoma Valley at Petaluma , 7 p.m.

Casa Grande at Napa, 7 p.m.

Middletown at Willits, 7 p.m.

Kelseyville at Cloverdale, 7:30 p.m.

Fort Bragg at Lower Lake, 7:30 p.m.

Clear Lake at St. Helena, canceled

(Bye: Santa Rosa)

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