Beware of the team meal

Team meals are something sports teams of all age groups have been doing for years. What better way to bond and enjoy each other's company over a good plate of food? Oak Ridge's varsity football team, like many high school football teams, has a team meal once a week on Thursday nights. Bishop Manogue, the team the Trojans were to play last Friday, also has this tradition. Bishop Manogue's team had tacos, according to Oak Ridge coach Eric Cavaliere, and ironically, that's what his team ate during their team dinner too. Whether it was bad meat or salsa or whatever, something in them didn't sit well with the Bishop Manogue football team. Cavaliere was told the whole team was sick and wouldn't be making the trip to El Dorado Hills for the game on Friday night. "We have a team meal every Thursday night," Cavaliere said. "If the freshman team is away, we have the dinner in the cafeteria. When the freshman team has a home game like they did last week, we eat out by the snack bar so we can watch the game." Cavaliere and his coaching staff don't get involved in planning the meals. The meals are handled by the parents. Sometimes the dinners are held at a player's house with a meal cooked by the host family or sometimes many families contribute to the meal. Other times the food is bought from a restaurant. "I literally don't know what we're eating until we get out there," Cavaliere said. "It's crossed my mind many times before, if something goes bad, it's going to go bad for everyone because we're all eating the same thing." While the Trojans lost a home game and will not be able to make it up, team dinners aren't going away. "They're too much fun not to do, but it does raise awareness that we need to be careful," Cavaliere said. Instead of having a game last Friday, the Trojans got together and watch the junior varsity team defeat Bishop Manogue, 48-27. With no game this week either, as it's their scheduled bye week, the team will work on individual skills, as the players run through position-specific drills. "We'll cut our practice times down this week, and work on individual skills," Cavaliere said. "I looked on the CIF website to see if any other teams had an opening Friday for a game, but I couldn't find one other school. The chances of finding an opponent at this point aren't good. If I did find one, it would probably be a very small school, and it wouldn't be a competitive game. I would have tried to work something out where we would only play our first-string a couple series just to get some time playing against someone else, but I couldn't find a team with an opening."