Hollister Pop Warner’s newest team will be playing at Monster
Park tonight at halftime of Niners game
Not many athletes get the opportunity to play their first-ever competitive game on the same field that spawned some of their sport’s biggest modern-era stars.
Well, the Tiny Mites of Hollister Pop Warner are on their way to San Francisco today for just such a momentous occasion.
The newest team to be added to the list of Hollister Pop Warner squads was recently chosen by the league to be one of two teams to kick off their seasons in dramatic fashion. By playing a full half of football at Monster Park, home of the San Francisco 49ers, in front of thousands of fans.
“I don’t think that the kids realize the magnitude of it,” Head Coach Ted Nicolette said. “It’s not just any field that they’re going to be playing on. They’re going to be on the same field that Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and Steve Young used to play on, and they get to play there at five years old. I mean, who knows, we could someday have one of these kids go on to play in the NFL. But still, when will they ever again have this chance? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
The new, up-and-coming team in the Hollister Pop Warner program is made up of boys from the ages of 5-7 years old and is called the Tiny Mites. The Peninsula league asked Hollister to get together a Tiny Mites team.
So they are a new division all together in the Pop Warner League. The parents were just as excited as the kids to be able to play football at such a young age. They started practice on August 1st at R.O. Harden school and have been practicing hard five days a week, two hours a day learning the fundamentals of the game and doing the same drills as all of the other divisions in the Hollister Pop Warner system.
Coach Nicolette, along with his staff of six volunteer coaches, hopes that at least two-thirds of the team will gain more knowledge that they already know and go an to play more football in the future. Also, when asked if he saw any talent on the team he chuckled “yeah” and added that they have room to grow.
The Tiny Mites play in the Monterey Peninsula League, which is made up of ten teams coming from all around the Monterey and Bay Area. There are 34 Tiny Mites teams throughout Northern California and they play an eight game, round-robin schedule with home games being played at the San Benito High School Andy Hardin Stadium. Their first league game is against Campbell this Sunday at home
“My goal for the team this season is to have the kids come back and play next year,” said Nicolette.
