‘De La Salle is coming!’: Storied Spartans, with legacy of greatness, visit Folsom
Paul Doherty’s phone has blown up this week, texts pouring in from near and far, everyone offering a morsel of insight.
The Folsom High School football coach appreciates the input from assistant coaches, alumni, parents, neighbors and even the guy who shouts at his TV every Sunday when the 49ers play.
The topic: De La Salle. The Spartans are coming to town.
That’s De La Salle, the program that has cranked out 12 or more victories a season pretty much for 40 straight years now. It’s the program that has been called the greatest high school dynasty ever. De La Salle went on an unfathomable 12-year, 151-game winning streak, ending in 2004. You follow prep sports and you know this brand: DLS — or De La Stomp.
It’s also a program that showed last month it is a bit human, at last.
De La Salle had the audacity to lose to an opponent north of Fresno for the first time in 31 seasons, or over 318 games with two ties. There are no typos here. That’s how good the Spartans have been.
The Spartans come to Folsom on Friday in a titanic showdown of nationally ranked programs with a great deal more than bragging rights on the line. This is especially true for Folsom, which has conquered a lot of programs since rising to state-level prominence in 2010, but the Bulldogs have not solved DLS. They’re hardly alone.
Top-ranked by The Bee pretty much since the start of the 2012 season, Folsom could register as big of a thunderbolt in regional history with a triumph over De La Salle, and everyone has a suggestion on how to handle the Spartans and their lineup of national recruits on offense, defense and in the trenches.
“I’m reading texts of what they see on film, looking for holes on De La Salle, things like, ‘Oh, you’ll take it to them!’ or ‘You’ll kill them with this or that!’” Doherty said with a laugh. “Really? Send me the film you’re looking at. I want to see what you see.’”
The coach paused and added, “I know this: De La Salle has been better than us and everyone else around here and Northern California for a long, long time. They always have good players, great players, but the same thing remains the same over the decades: They execute, and their fundamentals and their blocking and tackling are just better than anyone. Just a great program with a great defensive line and guys all over.”
Doherty grew up in the Bay Area and heard all about the DLS legacy. He attended the Sept. 10 game in Mountain View when storied St. Francis of the Central Coast Section toppled DLS 31-28 to end that NorCal run. St. Francis players cheered when they weren’t crying. They’ll remember that feat for the rest of their lives.
Doherty came away awed by the Spartans anyway.
“De La Salle is still incredible, another great team,” Doherty said.
Eric Eklund also feels the buildup. He’s the assistant principal at Folsom and the father of Bulldogs linebacker star Justin Eklund. All 3,500 tickets for Folsom’s home side sold out Monday evening. De La Salle gobbled up its 1,500 seats in quick order. The game will be aired online on the NFHS Network.
“Everyone’s asking me if we have tickets, tickets, tickets,” Eklund said. “As a dad, I try to tell my son Justin not to make a big deal out of this game and don’t treat it any bigger than any other game, but that’s easier for adults to say, right? It’s De La Salle. What a great opportunity and experience for our kids, our school and our community to have De La Salle come in on a Friday night.”
DLS’s streaks include rolling Sacramento’s best
De La Salle’s run against NorCal teams hit a snag, but it still owns the North Coast Section and the local Sac-Joaquin Section. The Spartans have not lost to a North Coast Section program in the Bay Area since 1991, and they have gone 44-0 against the local section since 1982, when the Spartans fielded their first perfect season.
Since 2012, De La Salle has gone 19-0 against the best the Sac-Joaquin Section has to offer: 7-0 against St. Mary’s of Stockton, 4-0 against Folsom, 3-0 against Del Oro, 2-0 against Jesuit, 2-0 against Central Catholic of Modesto and 1-0 against Granite Bay.
De La Salle emphatically ended Folsom’s 14-0 seasons in 2012 and 2013 with devastating line play and defensive speed when the CIF held a NorCal Open Division game. That game concept was scrapped after two seasons when the CIF conceded that DLS was just too good for the NorCal field and declared that if the Spartans continued to win the North Coast Section championship, they would continue right on to the CIF Open state finals without having to play a NorCal title game, like all other divisions. DLS has reached a CIF State final a record 13 consecutive times, or every time since the CIF State championships were introduced in football in 2006.
Folsom lost once in 2018, at De La Salle, 14-0 in a season opener, and then the Bulldogs blitzed their way to a CIF State Division I-AA championship repeat. In 2019, De La Salle jumped on Folsom for a 28-0 lead and won 42-27. Give DLS an inch, and the Spartans take a yard.
DLS is the hurdle the Bulldogs aim to clear and have to clear to continue its rise, to be the best in Northern California. Even when Folsom won its four CIF State titles — in 2010, 2014, 2017, 2018 — it was not ranked higher than De La Salle in any final NorCal rankings.
Folsom is capable of clearing the DLS hurdle now, given its 6-0 showing this season and its array of skilled players. The fireworks start with quarterback Tyler Tremain, who has 31 touchdown passes to eight different receivers, and national recruit targets in receiver Rico Flores Jr. and tight end Walker Lyons. The Folsom defense is a tough and tenacious lot, headed by linebackers Justin Eklund and Josh Tremain.
‘People forget we’re still coaching teenage boys’
The program admiration goes both ways between coaches who see the same vision of molding young lives through sports.
“I see film and I see Folsom, a great high school football team,” DLS coach Justin Alumbaugh said. “Their quarterback is awesome, their offensive line does a great job, their receivers get open, and they play good defense.”
In this age of everyone being an expert on social media, DLS has taken shots, unfairly, of not being good enough to stand up to its lofty reputation at 3-2 this season. The other loss was last week to the top-ranked team in Maryland in St. Frances Academy, 42-2. DLS schedules monsters to challenge itself, too.
“People forget that we’re coaching teenage boys — they’re kids,” Alumbaugh said. “You’re going to lose games. Doesn’t mean we have a bad team or bad kids. Can we get better? Absolutely, and we need to get better. I’m a competitor, and we have expectations here, and were we happy to lose to Saint Francis of Mountain View? Of course not. But the sun came up the next morning. My kids still love me. We still had another practice. That’s how it goes.
“And losing to that great team from Baltimore? Just a better team. People told me, ‘Well, those kids looked like a college team. Our kids could’ve been hurt.’ We’re just fine. The training room isn’t overflowing.”
Alumbaugh bristles at criticism of high school teams and players, saying, “Any talk of, ‘Well, they didn’t earn it or deserve it,’ that’s asinine, to be honest. It’s kind of lame.”
Folsom’s rise to power
Folsom is No. 1 ranked in Northern California for the first time since it capped the 1962 season at 9-0, when there were a great deal fewer schools around, well before the playoffs were introduced and before football became the popular entity it is now.
Folsom was a small school in the 1960s, with 500-600 students, and it was a town surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of wide-open grassy seas. That space is filled now with housing and businesses, and it’s reflected in the campus growth. Folsom is bursting at the seams with nearly 3,000 students, and it has become over the past 10 years a destination school for parents who want their sons to experience top-level football, though the core of the program remains rooted in the junior Bulldog programs, which the Tremain brothers grew up in.
Since 2010, Folsom has won eight section titles and those four CIF State crowns.
So yeah, a win over DLS would register.
“This is the next step for us as a program, to play De La Salle, to beat them at some point, and they’ll make us better,” Doherty said. “I know everyone’s excited. I’ve even got more texts coming in.”