Sonoma grid’s Reno connection

When the Sonoma Valley High School varsity football team opened its season Friday night at Arnold Field hosting Galena from Reno, there was the question of how did the Northern California versus Northern Nevada clash come to pass.

Well, it turns out that there's an SVHS alumnus whose on the Galena coaching staff.

Sonoma graduate and former standout Dragon gridder and wrestler Tony Edwards is the line coach for Galena, and also has a son, Nathan, who’s a junior standout for the Grizzlies.

In Friday’s showdown of evenly matched teams the gridiron battle turned into a chess match of big plays and breaks that ended up with Galena making that one extra big play, and getting that one extra break by way of a penalty, to edge the hard-playing Dragons, who provided some thrills to go with some early season mistakes.

When the game ended Edwards met the first of old friends in Sonoma head coach Bob Midgley and then crossed the field to visit with other friends and family, which included one of his younger brothers Kawika, who happens to help coach the Dragons and was a former standout SVHS player with their other brother, Elika.

I remember Tony, a very big man like his father, known as Big Al, well and had a quick visit with him, remembering when I did one of my first featured stories after becoming the I-T Sports Editor in 1991.

The story followed his storied prep career at Sonoma, which included making the state wrestling championships and going on to play professional football.

Along with Tony, another Sonoma graduate, Brian Moll, is on the Galena coaching staff as the Grizzlies freshmen head coach.

Brian’s first cousin is Tony Moll, who was a star player at the University of Nevada, Reno, before being drafted by the Green Bay Packers and just recently retiring from a near decade-long NFL career.

So there’s the answer to the question about the Reno-Sonoma connection that led to Friday night’s entertaining Nevada-California meeting.

Ciao!