Barber: Cardinal Newman water polo back in the pool

SACRAMENTO - Sunday they would return to the bad air, the uncertainty and the weariness, and the strange flip sides of anxiety and boredom. But on Saturday they jumped in the pool.

The Cardinal Newman boys' varsity and junior varsity water polo teams left behind the fires that have ravaged the hills of Wine Country all week, playing a tournament at Kennedy High School here and River City High School in West Sacramento. It didn't erase the nightmares of the flames and smoke, but the competition provided something underappreciated in times of disaster: normalcy.

“What grounds kids are their home and their school, and that's their community,” said Cathleen Stafford, mother of sophomore player Bennett Stafford. “I mean, Bennett, by Day 2 or 3, he's like, ‘I never thought I would say this, but I want to go back to school.'?”

The Staffords had lost both home and school. Their house in Fountaingrove went up in flames in the wee hours of Monday morning.

As for their school? Every student in Sonoma County has been affected by the fires to some degree, but Cardinal Newman was one of only a handful directly in the path of the Tubbs fire. Half of the campus is leveled.

Principal Graham Rutherford doesn't know when kids will be allowed back, but figures the time away will be measured in weeks. In the interim, his students are likely to take classes online and/or use portable classrooms set up on other campuses.

Cardinal Newman's athletic facilities were mostly spared from the carnage. The football/soccer stadium, gym and tennis courts are all usable. Yet none of the sports teams has been able to practice before this weekend.

That included the boys' water polo squad. The team's primary practice pool is at the Finley Community Center, which has been turned into an evacuation center. The Cardinals also use the pool at Santa Rosa JC two mornings a week, but the air had been too foul for outdoor swimming.

The team was scheduled to play in the Dixon Round Robin on Saturday, but the week had been chaotic. Several families had been evacuated from their homes. The Staffords lost theirs, as did the family of a junior varsity player.

Cathleen Stafford, the team mother, had been up later than usual Sunday night. She was drafting an email to the team. It was a long one, because there were many items to discuss - Senior Night, a bake sale, a JV tournament, etc. Her husband, Chris Stafford, who had helped found the first Cardinal Newman water polo team when he was a senior there, nagged her to get to bed.

Cathleen sent her note at 11:01 p.m., just before the power went out. She walked to the family's big barrel-window bank, which was rattling in the powerful winds, and saw a deep orange glow behind Riebli Ridge. The Staffords proceeded to wake up neighbors and warn them of the fire that started to spread before their eyes.

“I think sending out that email saved our life,” Cathleen said.

The family watched in disbelief as the flames jumped the ridge and began creeping down the hillside. Cathleen left about 1:30 a.m. to get her mom, who was being evacuated in Oakmont. Chris and Bennett took off around 2:30 a.m. One of the last things Bennett grabbed was the Brian Ohleyer Memorial Cup that the Olympic Club had awarded his older brother Jack when he played at Cardinal Newman. (Jack Stafford is at UC Davis now, and the parents got to see him play water polo on Saturday, too.)

Using data their next-door neighbor received from his home security system, the Staffords figure their house was destroyed about 3:45 a.m.

They vacated to a hotel in Petaluma, and moved to a rental house in Bodega on Friday.

With stories like these, and with the boys not having touched a pool in more than a week, it would have been reasonable to forfeit Saturday's tournament. But coach Matt McDowell began getting texts from players, “Are we doing this?” “Can we play?”

The Staffords urged Cardinal Newman athletic director Jerry Bonfigli to give his blessing. He did, and McDowell was supportive. Eventually, 19 of 21 varsity and JV players signed on.

Cardinal Newman had invited all of its families to a Mass at St. Rose School on Tuesday. Beyond that, many of the students hadn't had much contact with one another. It was especially disorienting for the water polo boys, who spend as many as seven practice sessions together in the pool each week, and who have experienced a renaissance in 2017. The Cardinals were 4-17 in the Marin County Athletic League last year, McDowell's first as coach. This year they moved to the North Bay League, and carried a 13-4 record into the weekend.

With school and outdoor activities taken from them, the kids were moping.

“I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house, sitting on my phone,” senior Nick Hernandez said. “And then every time you look at your phone, it's like you're seeing sad (stuff).”

So they wanted to play. But even that was complicated. McDowell learned midweek that Dixon could no longer host the tournament.

The Atlas fire had jumped from the Napa side of the Vaca Mountains to the Solano side, reducing the air quality in the big valley. The Dixon coach had to scramble to find pools elsewhere.

Finally, on Friday morning, the move to Sacramento became official and McDowell sent out another email. And then the winds came up again in the North Bay, and the evacuations started all over again.

Hernandez's family had already been forced to flee their Rincon Valley home Monday morning around 2 a.m., when Nick got out with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing. He and his sister, a Newman sophomore, had spent a few days with their grandmother in Sacramento, then returned home when they got the OK.

Friday morning, on his father's birthday, they were out again. Hernandez decided not to play in the round robin, but some of his teammates called him and insisted.

It wound up being a nice reprieve for the 15 boys who made the trip. The drive on I-80 was in bright sunshine, and it was glorious at the Kennedy pool.

The Cardinals played well, too, considering their lack of practice time. The varsity team beat Roseville and Rio Linda handily in the morning before losing to host Kennedy in the afternoon. McDowell admitted that his boys looked spent in that final match.

“I can accept that loss, but you shouldn't,” he told them afterward.

No one knew when the Cardinals would be able to practice again, or whether they'd get a chance to face Marin Academy for a share of the NBL title this Wednesday. And yeah, some kids didn't know where they'd be sleeping Saturday night. But the Newman coaches, players and families were upbeat as they made plans to sit down together for a nice meal in Sacramento.

Then they would drive back to the smoke. Cardinal Newman has a small fleet of vans that the sports teams use for away games. Under normal circumstances, the water polo teams would have borrowed a couple of the vans. But no one could start the vehicles. The fire had melted all the keys.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.