Pizzella, Simi Valley roll to rout of rival Royal to improve to 3-0 on season

Steele Pizzella thought he was making a business decision.

Simi Valley High football was nursing a six-touchdown lead late in the first half, so the sophomore quarterback turned down an opportunity to run the ball into open space on a rollout.

But when he couldn’t find an open receiver, he took a hit deep in Simi Valley territory, drawing the ire of head coach Jim Benkert.

“I was trying to be conservative because of the score,” Pizzella explained. “Coach was like ‘You should have run.’ … So I was like, ‘You know what? I’ll run it. I’ll show you.’ ”

Given the opportunity on the next possession, Pizzella flew around left end and trucked a cornerback into the end zone for a 15-yard touchdown run, putting the punctuation mark on Simi Valley’s 49-12 win at rival Royal on Friday night.

“So I showed it,” Pizzella said. “That’s what happens. … I’m not going to do that very often, but when I need to, I’ll do it.”

The dynamic sophomore threw for four touchdowns to four different receivers and ran for two more as the Pioneers (3-0) won the Simi Valley’s intercity rivalry game for the third straight year.

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Benkert explained that he was just telling his prized leader to get out of bounds.

“We don’t really want him to do that,” Benkert said. “But he’s a competitor and he’s a football player. I told him, ‘Run out of bounds,’ but that’s not what he’s going to do.

“He’s a great leader for our team. He wants to make things happen and that’s what he did.”

Pizzella completed 10 of 11 passes for 265 yards, senior Caleb Alvary had 173 yards from scrimmage and two touchdowns and senior Carson Mott had a hand in five different sacks to lead Simi Valley.

“It was the way we wanted it to go,” Benkert said.

Senior Gunner Osborne ran for 81 yards and a touchdown on 21 carries as Royal (2-1) suffered its first loss under first-year head coach Mike Puopolo.

The two teams may have entered the game a combined 5-0, but, realistically, the matchup was the equivalent of a set of before and after photos.

While the Highlanders are just starting under Puopolo, the Pioneers are a finished article.

“We’ve had a really good start, no doubt about it,” Puopolo said. “We realize that we’re starting behind a group like that. We’re in a process right now where we’re in a rebuilding kind of mindset. That’s the bar. Now we have a sense of what we need to improve to eventually start to compete with teams like that.”

Simi Valley took control from the outset, building a 28-0 first-quarter lead.

On the third play from scrimmage, Carson Mott’s strip sack was recovered in the end zone by Royal lineman Sergio Isirdia for a safety.

On the first play after the free kick, Alvary took a Pizzella pass in the flat and went 42 yards for a score down the right sideline.

Four plays after a short punt set up the Pioneers on a short field, Pizzella’s 1-yard QB sneak made it 15-0.

“When you have a rivalry game like this … it’s great for the kids to stay focused on what we needed to do as a football team,” Benkert said. “To come out and execute and really jump all over them on both sides of the ball.”

Royal’s initial first down of the night came on a pretty 8-yard touch pass on the run by quarterback Evan Nagy, who flashed the ability to make plays on the run, despite being inundated with Pioneers pressure.

“He did a tremendous job extending plays with his feet,” Puopolo said. “We were asking him to do a lot. It’s hard to get in a shooting match with these guys. … They are able to get to the quarterback really fast. (Nagy) really didn’t have any time to operate.”

Alvary capped a four-play, 65-yard drive with a 17-yard run around right end and Pizzella found Dominic Demaio for a 44-yard scoring strike down the right sideline for a 28-0 lead with 3:12 left in the first quarter.

“They’re systematic,” Puopolo said of Simi Valley. “They don’t make mistakes. They’re going to exploit all your weaknesses and they absolutely did that for us tonight.

“We’ll really benefit from it, in the sense that we get to go back now, watch film and address those things.”

Pizzella hit Nico Vacca for a 60-yard TD pass and Sean Brown for a 37-yard TD pass to build a 42-0 lead with 7:17 left in the half.

“That was his first varsity touchdown,” Pizzella said of Vacca. “I was so happy for him.”

Royal had some moments on special teams, forcing a fumble on a punt in the first half and recovering a kickoff in the second.

The latter allowed the Highlanders to string together a couple late touchdowns, the first two TDs allowed by Simi Valley this season, against a running clock in the fourth quarter.

Nagy’s 26-yard run set up Gunner Osborne’s 1-yard TD run. Junior Johnny Sandwick also ran in a 1-yard TD as time expired.

The late response was a silver lining for Puopolo.

“It’s fun to watch a team fight from the start to the finish regardless of what the score is,” Puopolo said. “It says a lot about the character of our guys and the resiliency of our group that they continued to just battle. That game’s far out of reach. But we’re still fighting.”

After outscoring its first three opponents 149-15, Simi Valley will prepare itself for Marmonte League play with potentially tougher nonleague matchups against Saugus and Yorba Linda in the coming weeks.

Benkert called them “stepping stones.”

“We haven’t been challenged,” Benkert said. “We didn’t get challenged tonight. We’d like to play four quarters. We haven’t played four quarters yet.”

Joe Curley covers high school, collegiate and professional football for The Star. He can be reached at  joe.curley@vcstar.com. Follow him @vcsjoecurley on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Pizzella, Simi Valley roll to rout of rival Royal to improve to 3-0