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The Berkeley Unified School District has killed plans to reschedule today’s beleaguered Berkeley High-Oakland Tech football game amid continuing questions as to why the game was put off in the first place. 

In a prepared statement released through the BUSD information office, Berkeley High School Principal Jim Slemp said a plan to hold the game at one of the Peralta Community Colleges came “very close...but all of the publicity about the game may have interfered with our options.” 

Slemp unilaterally canceled the BHS-Tech game last week after Berkeley Police warned him of reports about possible violence planned between non-students at the game. Oakland Tech Athletic Director Karen Jones later complained that Slemp had not involved her in the decision to cancel the game, nor had she been included in discussions about where and when the game might be rescheduled. 

BUSD Public Information Officer Mark Coplan said that the Peralta Community Colleges “gave us a field” for the game, but efforts to reschedule the game ultimately fell through “because of all the logistical nightmares of pulling it all together.” 

Coplan said he also worried that numerous broadcast vans from local television outlets would show up at the game, much as they showed up on Berkeley High’s campus last Friday following announcement of the game’s cancellation. 

“We were trying to keep this as low key as possible,” Coplan said, adding that there was no possibility that the BHS-Tech game could be rescheduled for later in the year. 

Coplan also took issue with the charge, published in last Tuesday’s Daily Planet, that Oakland Tech officials had not been included in the discussions to reschedule the game. 

He said that earlier this week, BUSD administration officials, along with the athletic directors of the two schools and Oakland Tech Vice Principal Marty Price, all participated in a meeting with Peralta Community College officials to secure a Peralta field. 

However, that meeting took place after the complaints from Tech Athletic Director Jones were published in the Daily Planet. 

Also this week, a South Bay athletic director revealed that at least two other local schools were involved in an attempt to help BHS and Tech play someone this week, if not each other. Neal Fromson, athletic director at James Logan High School in Union City, said that “McClymonds High School made a call to our school seeing if we would want to play Berkeley and if [McClymonds], then, could play Oakland Tech. It was an informal conversation between my football coach and the coach at McClymonds who played college ball together to see if they could make it work.” 

Logan and BHS last played each other in 1996. 

Fromson said that the arrangement was eventually nixed by Logan athletic officials because they did not have enough time to scout the Berkeley High team. 

Meanwhile, an Oakland Athletic League (OAL) coach (Oakland Tech is an OAL member), said he was “shocked” when he read about the cancellation in last week’s San Francisco Chronicle, and did not agree with the cancellation. The coach is not affiliated with Oakland Tech. 

“Canceling the game makes no sense to me,” the coach, who asked not to be identified, said in a telephone interview. “If you can’t have a secure game at Berkeley with the police department across the street...I’m sorry...there’s something just not adding up.” 

He said he didn’t understand why a game between Tech and Berkeley would be more dangerous than games regularly held between Tech and McClymonds and Skyline and Castlemont, which involve East Oakland-West Oakland-North Oakland community rivalries that are far older and have generated far more violence than has occurred recently in South Berkeley-North Oakland. 

The coach said he could only think of two OAL football games in recent years that had to be canceled because of violence. 

“One involved a series of fights among the players,” the coach explained, “one involved a series of fights in the stands. Both times, the game was almost completed before it was called, and one of the teams was far ahead.” 

Asked what would cause his team to cancel a game in advance, he said, “we would if there was a series of actual incidents leading up to the game, involving student bodies. Not peripheral violence, and not just kids talking smack. Kids in Oakland talk smack all the time. 

The coach also said that the BHS-Tech cancellation was already having a ripple effect on Berkeley High. “I was talking with a number of other coaches down in the South Bay after the Chronicle article came out, and they were all asking, ‘Is Berkeley that bad?’ And I had to tell them no, it wasn’t.”