Spring football is here: Teams return to fields in pads and Cordova starts new era
Niko Santana hustled over to chat Friday afternoon, defined by his Cordova High School football coaches as the guy who is all business when the situation calls for it, but all grins otherwise.
The late-afternoon sun splashed across Santana’s practice jersey and pristine white helmet, and it glistened the school’s famed red-and-black colors that mark the field. Want to talk football and all the benefits of school engagement, young sir?
He was all in. Santana lives for this sport, strives to pull perfect grades and digs his social life. He is a senior fullback and linebacker for the Lancers, a team leader who sounds like a coach.
Santana did all he could to keep his team bonded through nearly a year of no campus sports, no on-campus learning and, for too many weeks, not much hope of much of a regular routine. The coronavirus turned lives upside down, shut schools down and put prep sports on a long, long pause. Santana helped organize workouts with fellow Cordova seniors Isaiah Curtis and Dumaurier Hackett, and he kept in touch with teammates to check on their emotional well being.
Football is back. Prep sports is in go mode, and the spring weeks figure to add a jolt of excitement after months of a dull pace.
“It just feels so good to be out here practicing with all the stops and starts we’ve had,” Santana said, beaming. “We started to lose hope, but not now.”
On Feb. 19,. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Department of Public Health announced the latest guidelines for youth and high school sports, in effect leaving it to school districts to let student-athletes resume seasons after nearly a year on hold because of COVID-19.
Cordova is within Sacramento County, which Tuesday expects to be under the state’s suggested threshold of fewer than 14 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents. That would allow the Lancers and dozens of other schools to join those in Placer, Yolo and El Dorado counties, as well as others, with pads in their practice and a chance to zero in on a four- or five-game schedule in March and April.
There will be no playoffs — not enough time — but no one at Cordova or anywhere was complaining. Not long ago, there was nothing. This is better than nothing.
Scores of football programs across the state on Friday, in the 33 counties that hit the allowable case-rate threshold, pulled on pads and unleashed on blocking sleds. Football is a fall sport, certainly, but the governing body California Interscholastic Federation and its 10 member sections across the state pushed fall sports into the spring months in an effort to regain seasons that were nearly lost.
“We’re ready to go,” Santana said.
The double-bonus for Cordova is it hopes to return to on-campus hybrid learning in the coming weeks, maybe just in time for a Friday kickoff.
Legacy Lancers and ‘I can be positive all day’
The Lancers were a good starting point for to visit leading up to the return of games.
Cordova was the regional standard bearer of gridiron greatness a generation ago. The Lancers led the nation in victories in the 1970s and the region in wins in the 1980s, when “Big Red” trotted out the best player in the region, from Jerry Manuel to Reggie Young to Kevin Willhite to Troy Taylor and James Montgomery and bus loads of others.
By the 1990s, the dynasty dimmed due to changing demographics on campus and in Rancho Cordova, declining enrollment and the closure of Mather Air Force Base. Cordova in 2016 won a league championship for the first time in 25 years. The Lancers aim to end a trend of coaches and kids coming and going. To succeed, one must be stable.
Marque Willis is in his third year as a Cordova campus counselor and first year as head football coach. He coached the junior varsity squad in 2019. He said these boys are his boys. Willis grew up in Stockton, where he embraced sports and father figures after losing his own father to a rare illness. He played football at Sacramento State, graduated and got into education.
This is his calling, he says, a Black man leading a roster full of diversity.
“Football opened so many doors for me, gave me an education,” Willis said. “I’m proud of all our kids here, for hanging in there, and kids all across the region and across America. This is all unprecedented. We can be stronger and better.”
Said Santana of his coach, “We love him. He cares. He loves football and he believes in all of us.”
Willis is aware of the Cordova legacy, and he embraces it. A spring season is a jump start to more work and progress over the summer and next fall.
“How do we rebuild it here? We’ve got to start from scratch, one day at a time,” Willis said. “It can be done. I hear how it was back in the day here, the stories, football players as celebrities signing autographs.”
On his plan in general, Willis added, “The great thing about being a counselor and a coach is I can be positive all day. I love it. Be positive.”