LJ FB: 'Stuck in Lodi again'

Two of the 13 Viking "elevator bad boys":
Max Smith (L) and Devin Bale.
(Photo by Ed Piper) 

By Ed Piper

Now it can be told.

Just hours before the La Jolla football team was to board a bus for the state 4-A championship game at Escalon, 13 members of the Viking football team pulled a numbskull stunt in the team's hotel in Lodi.

These thirteen, including quarterback Jackson Stratton, receiver Diego Solis, linebacker/running back Max Smith, and kicker/receiver Devin Bale, boarded one of the hotel's two elevators and did the "jump".

They collectively rose up and landed inside the lift simultaneously. The result? The elevator, with an automatic mechanism to prevent safety problems, froze between floors--and the players were stuck.

It took a call to Lodi firefighters for the men and women in blue to come to the hotel, and free the wayward youth so they could go to their game.

The unlucky 13 stayed stuck in the cramped space for about an hour, a scant few hours before the 6 p.m. kickoff for the state title nearly an hour away in rural Escalon, north of Modesto.

At least one mom was freaking out, picturing the boys suffocating from lack of oxygen in the elevator. Another mother tried to calm her, assuring her the young guys were not in danger.

Carlos Ramirez, the senior backup quarterback, was the instigator.

Tyler Roach, the head coach, was aware of the situation during it. What could he do? Enter the elevator shaft and perform a Spiderman stunt, scaling down the walls inside the chamber to free his trapped boys? There is a video circulating of the boys, shirts off, sweating after an hour being confined in limited space, that has been shared with others.

Two and a half hours after being freed by the firefighters, the Viking football players boarded their motorcoach for the game--and a tough loss.

Commented one member of the group who traveled with the team Friday the 13th, from La Jolla to Lodi, the day before the game: "The athletes with the highest GPA's weren't there."

The incident gives new meaning to the lyrics by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Stuck in Lodi again."

"We came in on a Greyhound/We'll be walking out if we go
I was just passing through/It must be seven months or more
You know I'd catch the next train back to where I live
Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again."
       
                       --"Lodi"