Reseda Upends San Pedro, 3-1, for First Soccer Title

The rogues of Valley soccer have become the City Section champions.

Reseda High, after rumbling through a West Valley League tiebreaker and three playoff games, defeated San Pedro, 3-1, Friday night at Westchester High.

“Everybody makes us out to be bad guys,” Reseda fullback Terry Davila said. “They said we shouldn’t have made the playoffs, that we’re a bunch of misfits. But, hey, I guess the bad guys won. Nobody expected us to win.”

Nobody except for John Bellows, who scored Reseda’s third goal, Davila, and the rest of the Regents, who earned the bad rap by playing a physical brand of soccer that intimidated opposing teams.

Reseda scored three first-half goals to win its first City title.

San Pedro, seeded No. 1 in the playoffs, lost a chance to become the first team to repeat as City champion since 1978-79, when Poly won back-to-back titles.

The Regents, of the West Valley League, also became the second team to win the championship after finishing second in its league. Jefferson accomplished the feat in 1983.

“It feels unbelievable,” Reseda Coach George Hull said. “It’s like a Cinderella dream.”

But Cinderella never started as fast as the Regents did Friday night.

Reseda (13-4-2) scored the game’s first three goals and threatened on several other occasions to blow the Pirates out.

The Regents’ Eyal Rapoport scored the first goal 5:31 into the game, when he took a pass from Paul Vargas and beat San Pedro goalie Kip Bennett low to the right side.

As the Pirates tried to regroup, Reseda struck again one minute later, this time on Vargas’ high lob from the right side that sailed over Bennett’s head.

Bellows then drilled a shot into the left side of the goal off a Vargas header with 27:20 left in the first half.

“The early goals hurt us,” San Pedro Coach Hank Nozaki said. “Those kind of goals happen so quickly. It’s one of those things where the ball bounces the wrong way and they knock it in.

“Sometimes it bounces for us. But tonight it just wasn’t.”

San Pedro (14-3) retaliated when Anton Spanjol scored to the right of Reseda goalie Danny Keeva on an assist by Benning Mortensen.

Reseda had a 3-1 advantage at halftime, but perhaps the most telling play of the game was a miss by Raul Haro, San Pedro’s City player of the year last season. Haro, whose 38 goals this season were more than Reseda’s team total, hit the side of the net with an open-goal opportunity.

“They were the better team,” Haro said. “They killed us in the first 10 minutes. Three guys were on me all the time.”

The scoring chance was one of few by Haro, who spent most of the game sandwiched between Reseda defenders Terry and Teddy Davila.

“I’m not trying to take anything away from Haro,” Hull said, “but I don’t think he’s met anybody as good as the Davila brothers.”

The Regents continued to pressure San Pedro’s defense in the second half, something they failed to do with large leads earlier in the playoffs.

As it turned out, good things do indeed come in threes for the Regents, who scored three goals in each of their four postseason wins.

“We did nothing different,” Hull said of the strategy in the championship game. “We played the same way all year.”

Only this time, instead of coming up rogues, the Regents came up roses.