Prep Football : All Thursday City Games Are Postponed After Quake

Many high school sports events were affected by Thursday morning’s earthquake, with some being canceled and others postponed.

Twenty-six football games were scheduled, a larger Thursday night lineup than normal because of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement that begins tonight at sundown and ends Saturday at sundown. Many were switched to this afternoon or to Saturday at 8 p.m., after dark.

All six games involving City teams were rescheduled in a blanket ruling announced by Hal Harkness, the director of athletics for the section. Other City events--girls’ volleyball, cross-country, B and C boys’ basketball--were canceled.

“It had to do with the uncertainty and conditions around town with the earthquake,” Harkness said. “We felt the fewer activities outside school the better.”

Three football games scheduled for today were postponed indefinitely because of structural damage at the schools: Lincoln at Wilson, Bell at Garfield and Belmont at Huntington Park. The Roosevelt vs. Franklin game at Wilson on Saturday also was postponed. All the sites are on the Eastside, the area nearest the quake’s epicenter.

The Southern Section allowed individual schools to decide if games should be played, and several were. The same went for other sports, such as tennis, water polo, volleyball and cross-country.

“We had no damage,” said John Reich, Calabasas athletic director, whose Coyotes played host to El Segundo Thursday night in football. “Basically, we’ve got a good situation from a safety point of view. We checked the light structures and we checked the stadium structure, and there was no problem at all.”

Two games involving teams in The Times’ top 15 were rescheduled because they were playing City teams--No. 2 Encino Crespi at Woodland Hills Taft and No. 9 Beverly Hills at Palisades.

In the revised schedule, Crespi will give up the home-field advantage to Taft for a Saturday night game and Palisades will do the same to Beverly Hills for a 2 p.m. start today. As for the teams in the City top 10, No. 5 Granada Hills will play at Chatsworth Saturday night but Monroe at No. 8 Reseda was canceled.