The Moorpark Raiders will once again take the field this Saturday in a game against the Ventura College Pirates. The Raiders are coming home after a devastating loss against College of the Canyons, bringing the Raiders to 1-5 in the season. Meanwhile, the Pirates are riding high after a win against Bakersfield which brought them to 5-1 in the season.
Head coach Mike Stuart talks about the upcoming game against Moorpark College’s rival Ventura who beat the Raiders 62-7 last season.
“This is the one game I think we all circle on our calendar, as far as what we are looking forward to in the year. We can go 1 in 9; As long as we beat Ventura I’m a happy guy. We have put a lot of focus on this week at practice and also in the meeting room we have been preparing since Monday and we don’t usually practice on Mondays, but we took the extra day,” said Stuart.
Stuart’s goal for the game is that the team can play four outstanding quarters, but the Raiders don’t have the luxury of being able to rotate players like the Pirates can, considering the Pirates have a roster of over 100 players.
“If you watched our past six games we played a really good three quarters, including the College of the Canyons game. But whatever it is, we start fast like in the Glendale game but we don’t finish, we could have beat them by more,” Explains Stuart. “We started fast against El Camino but we couldn’t finish in that fourth quarter, we played a good three quarters but that fourth was a mess. So we haven’t had a complete game in that sense to buy actually playing four outstanding quarters.”
The rivalry between Moorpark and Ventura can be dated back all the way to 1968 at the 1st Citrus Cup. The game also comes in a time of crisis as red flag warnings for extreme fire danger plague Ventura County, but the game on Saturday is expected to be in the 70s with light wind.
For more information you can visit the Moorpark Athletics website. Tickets are available at the stadium and the game is free for students with a Moorpark College Student ID card.
