Date with Poly highlights year

Jeff Brinkley’s deliberate style might allow him to guide his football team through a season, “one week at a time,” but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to view it with the same steadfast conservatism.

Brinkley’s mind is on the Sept. 6 season opener against visiting Aliso Niguel, but be clear, there’s at least one date marked on the calendars of Newport Harbor High fans: Sept. 14, when the Sailors face Long Beach Poly for the first time.

Feared and revered in Orange County high school football, Long Beach Poly boasts a longer list of NFL players than any other school in the country.

But Brinkley doesn’t play into hype. In 22 years, he has seen too much to fall for it.

“We’re just worried about Aliso Niguel,” he said “We’re not really thinking about Poly. If we can beat Aliso, then we’ll start thinking about Poly the next week and see what [the Jackrabbits] have got.”

This will be the second season since league restructuring that resulted in a more difficult schedule than when Newport Harbor was playing in the Sea View League as a Division VI school.

Two years ago, the Sailors finished with an 11-3 record, were CIF Division VI champions, and shared one-third of the Sea View League crown. Newport Harbor finished with a 4-1 league record. But after division and league restructuring, that record dropped to a more sobering 6-4, and Newport Harbor finished fourth in the six-team Sunset League with a morose 3-2 record, and missed the playoffs after losing to Los Alamitos, 9-7.

Scheduling a game against an opponent as tough as Long Beach Poly was another way for Brinkley to season his team a little more as it continues to face upper-echelon opponents.

Poly was 11-2 last season and 6-0 in the Moore League. The Jackrabbits’ season ended in the Pac-5 Division (formerly Division I) semifinals after a 23-22 loss to Orange Lutheran.

“I think it was good for us last year to go through the Division I situation,” Brinkley said. “I think the kids are a little more comfortable with it, and hopefully we’ll be able to go out and compete again. Really, the key for us, this year, is keeping guys healthy. We’re playing a lot of guys both ways, so we need to keep guys healthy and on the field.”

It’s a year when Brinkley is hoping for a little more serendipity come game time — keeping his fingers crossed that players don’t get hurt in competition — and he’s also keeping a more watchful eye than usual to prevent practice injuries.

“We have to plan well at practice that we don’t beat guys up so we can make sure that we go out with our best 11,” he said.

Brinkley is hoping his tandem of running backs will be the elixir that’s needed to support new quarterback Andrew McDonald.

Ben Frazier, now a senior, was the featured back last season, amassing 695 yards rushing and six touchdowns on 148 attempts, while Michael Helfrich added 444 yards and four touchdowns with 70 touches.

“We’re going to try and get those two guys on the field when we can, you know the two running backs,” Brinkley said. “That’s probably a little different because we aren’t always going to be running with a true fullback. There are probably a couple guys that are more tailback-type guys. Other than that, we’re not really going to change a whole lot.”

But he has been cooking up some new schemes for the two-back sets, Brinkley said. The problems in staying competitive for Newport Harbor in the post-divisional shake-up haven’t really been associated with skill level, according to Brinkley, but depth.

“Where the other schools in the other divisions might have two guys, all of a sudden you’re playing a team that had three or four guys that are getting Division I [college] scholarships,” he said. “Guys like Orange Lutheran — which last year won the whole thing — [the Lancers] have got four guys going to USC. I just think there’s more of them.

“The other division was good and tough, but this division, the depth factor — it makes it a little tougher. I think every team you play has more athletes on the field and they have more of an ability to play guys one way.”