Granite Bay devours Pleasant Grove in playoff opener between longtime coaching pals
On the track beyond the end zone an hour before kickoff on Friday night, the opposing coaches of a CIF Sac-Joaquin Section Division I playoff opener chatted up football, life and sweets.
Josh Crabtree of the Pleasant Grove Eagles of Elk Grove and Granite Bay’s Joe Cattolico have been good friends for years, making this a clash that went beyond X’s and O’s and blocking and tackling.
The guy who goes by “Crab” and the one known in coaching circles as “Cat” are lifers who pour themselves into teaching and coaching because of what football has given them — and because the lasting rewards of molding teams are meaningful. The same goes with helping students on campus in offering a reliable ear or a nudge and reminder that, yes, grades last longer than any social media drama moments.
Before the coaches left to warm up their teams, the topic turned to JR’s Donuts in Elk Grove. Years ago, when he coached at Pleasant Grove, Cattolico ordered up boxes of tasty treats for his football team on Saturday mornings for a Friday night well done. He still does this in Placer County at a local eatery. Crabtree has continued the tradition in his three seasons at PG, and to be sure, the owners of the mom-and-pop joint appreciate when the Eagles are triumphant.
“I went in there after a three-game losing streak, and she pretty much shouted, ‘You need to win more!’” Crabtree said pregame amid laughter.
On Friday, Granite Bay earned some treats, punctuating the motto of “To the victors go the spoils.” Seeded fifth in the large-school bracket, Granite Bay delivered a 42-0 decision over No. 12 Pleasant Grove as Isaiah Ene powered and sprinted his way to 133 yards rushing and three scores.
A standout junior and third-year varsity player, Ene had touchdown runs of 9, 2 and 43 yards. Gabe Smyth also benefited from Granite Bay’s superb line play, rushing for scores of 3 and 9 yards.
Coach Cat’s football family
The coaches will talk about this one because that’s what coaches do. They share, they vent, they problem solve. They’ll also talk about their families, their wives who back their coaching ambition and the peaks and valleys that go with all of this, including dealing with expectations and with parents who understand the reality of scholarship offers, and those who don’t get it at all.
Cattolico has two sons on his team in starting receiver Joseph “JoJo” Cattolico and sophomore reserve quarterback Dominic Cattolico. JoJo hauled in a perfectly thrown 45-yard touchdown strike from Nick Harris to make it 21-0 in the second quarter, and he made an interception on defense.
The coach is delighted to coach his kids and all of their teammates. There is no Daddy Ball here. The Cattolico players have to earn their keep, and it goes by in a flash — from ball boys to varsity players in an instant.
“It’s an eye blink,” Cattolico said. “They’re little, and all of a sudden, they’re big and you can’t figure out where the time went.”
What’s more, Cattolico’s father, Butch Cattolico, is an assistant coach on the Grizzlies staff. Father, son and grandsons share the same demeanor of calculating and cool as smooth operators.
Butch Cattolico is a household name in Northern California football, a 266-game winner when he led Los Gatos High School of Santa Clara County to record success in the Central Coast Section. He led his teams to 17 CCS title games, winning 12 banners and 16 league championships in 27 years as head coach.
“It’s a neat deal,” Cattolico said of having family so involved in football.
The sons are terrific students on a roster where the team GPA this fall was a program all-time best 3.65. Cattolico was always a fine student, graduating from Princeton of the Ivy League. His aim was to help shape lives as a high school history teacher, and then he became a head coach at San Jose’s Overfelt High in his early 20s, winning a CCS crown in 1998.
“What I saw in San Jose was that, for so many of the young men, sports was their reason for attending school, their reason for keeping their grades up,” Cattolico said. “That’s what kept me coming back to football as I’ve continued to maintain the notion that I can use football as a way to help kids at any school.”
Crabtree boosts PG
Crabtree embraces the same notion in the Elk Grove Unified, that academics open doors after they close in athletics. Only about 2% of high school kids across the country land a full football scholarship.
And this: athletes at any school and in any part of the state need positive male role models in their lives. Crabtree lost his beloved father, Bruce Crabtree, to cancer in 2012. He was a mountain of a man whose considerable white beard had scores of children in the holidays wondering if this was Santa Claus. Bruce Crabtree grew up in rural Elk Grove in the 1950s and ‘60s and worked 35 years in agriculture sales in the valley. The son thinks of his late father regularly.
Doughnuts and humor can be ingredients to success. Cattolico had Granite Bay in a section final two years ago at a program that has won section crowns with previous coaches Ernie Cooper and Jeff Evans. He has maintained that tradition. He started Pleasant Grove’s program as a new school in 2005, winning a section banner in 2010.
Pleasant Grove football crashed with 0-10 seasons in 2016 and 2017, well after Cattolico had moved on. Crabtree’s first Pleasant Grove team two years ago won just once, then produced four victories last season. The Eagles finished with six this season, a few bounces away from winning eight games. Players remained with the program in an era of transfers because they like the coach beyond the doughnuts and believe in Crabtree’s method and approach.
This season was a mark of progress when not long ago there was despair. The last PG doughnut moment was the benefit of a spirited victory over Elk Grove late in the Delta League season, though his daughter, Nari, didn’t know her father had won initially.
A 4.5 student at Christian Brothers who plays soccer, Nari was brushing her teeth the next morning and told her pop that she was sorry about the loss as it was incorrectly inputted into the MaxPreps scoreboard. When he told her that Pleasant Grove had in fact won, Nari was so ecstatic that she shrieked with joy, toothpaste spraying every which way.
Coaches praise each other’s impact
The coaches didn’t just speak glowingly about each other’s teams, they did so about one another, too.
“In many ways, Joe Cattolico is the glue that holds the Sacramento football coaching community together,” Crabtree said. “His cellphone contact list must have 10,000 names of football coaches throughout Northern California. He gives his time to other coaches in the most altruistic of ways. There is never an agenda.
“When I got the head football job at Sheldon in December of 2009, the first congratulatory phone call I got was from the guy over at Pleasant Grove, Joe Cattolico. And I’d never actually met him at that point. He has helped shape my approach to being a head coach more than I think he knows. I’m not sure he realizes what his impact has been in this community. Obviously, being a Princeton guy puts him in the top 1% of the top 1%, but he has a unique way of meeting everyone where they are and making all of the coaches in his sizable orbit feel special when they interact with him. I tease him sometimes and tell him. ‘Joe, you do a great job of making us peasants feel smart.’”
Said Coach Cat of his friend Coach Crab: “Josh is great for kids and great for the profession of teaching and coaching. He is a really great person, a really great family person. We share stories, looking for a sounding board. Josh and I have talked about this: Hopefully, we’re preparing kids for life.”
They are, and those are the victories most worth celebrating.
This story was originally published November 8, 2024 at 9:29 PM.