Four Sacramento-area high school football teams to play in NorCal championships. Here’s who
Football is a thing to behold at Folsom High School, located up Highway 50, and it is a big deal for the Grant Pacers, the pride of Del Paso Heights, where mom-and-pop shops up and down Grand Avenue celebrate their own.
Blocking and tackling and touchdown drives matter just as much at small-school campuses at Twelve Bridges in Lincoln and at Winters in Yolo County, albeit on a smaller stage.
These are the last four programs standing in the greater Sacramento area, each of them anchored by players who need each other to make it all work. Each of these teams extended seasons to this weekend for CIF Northern California championships, with Folsom and Grant visiting Bay Area powers while Twelve Bridges and Winters host at home sites.
A victory advances the survivors to a season that started in the heat of July with practices to the CIF state finals less than two weeks before Christmas, Dec. 13-14 at neutral sites in Southern California.
The coaches for each of the local programs are lifers. Each of them looks spent, exhausted, from pouring themselves into this craft to build teams, to build bonds and to build memories. Each of these coaches said they would be burned out — cooked — if not for the support of their wives who cheer just as much as the coaches in victory and hurt just as much in defeat.
Three of these four finalists have been around so long as schools that they have become part of the regional fabric. And then there is Twelve Bridges, the new school with the cool mascot of Raging Rhinos nestled in the sprawling growth of Placer County. Twelve Bridges is three years old, but like aging-nicely Folsom, Grant and Winters, a varsity football ticket is a hot item to have, all of it rooted in youth feeder programs bursting at the seams as kids grow up eager for a shot to bask in Friday Night Lights.
“I think we all see it in movies growing up, a high school team that says, ‘We’re going to state!’” Winters coach Daniel Ward said. “Well, that’s us. If we win this week, we can really say that. Mostly, it’s just a dream.”
Winters High was established in 1891 and its campus and playing fields stand as a beacon of civic proud in a rural town that hasn’t lost any of its old-time appeal. The Warriors fielded powerhouse teams in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s under coach Jack Delbar, who looked the part of throwback coach with his bounce-body build and the intensity of a drill sergeant. The 12-0 Warriors of the Northern Section, with an enrollment of 460, on Friday night host 11-1 Arcata of Humboldt County in the Division 6-AA title game. This is small school ball to the core.
Bulldogs uprising
Folsom opened in 1922, rose to football power in 1962 as the top-ranked team in Northern California under famed coach Dewey Lancaster and then really rose to power in 2010 with the first of five CIF state championships.
Folsom has gone from small-school football bruiser from a small town to a large-school heavy in a fast-growing city. Folsom has gone from 600 students in the 1980s to 2,900 now, the growth reflective at the view of housing and shops off Highway 50.
Fresh off the program’s 13th Sac-Joaquin Section championship and 11th since 2010, Folsom (12-1) heads to Contra Costa County on Friday to take on the Pittsburg Pirates of the North Coast Section for the Division 1-AA final. Folsom is coached by the tireless Paul Doherty, who replaced coaching titans Kris Richardson and Troy Taylor, now coaching college ball, and has won four consecutive section banners. He seeks a CIF state championship repeat with a roster full of kids who got their start in Folsom youth ball and by teammates who transferred in for a piece of the action.
Doherty said he especially appreciates the offseason, where he is in his element of strength and conditioning, more than the game season because “you try to do so much to help so many people that it can be a grind,” he said.
That includes satisfying parents, some of whom transfer their sons into Folsom for a shot to earn a college football scholarship. Doherty scrambled to get all 84 players into playoff games, mindful that if he can’t get everyone involved, parents may send their boys somewhere else.
Folsom on Wednesday afternoon will have five players sign full athletic scholarships to Division I college programs as part of the early signing period. They are: lineman Josiah Sharma to Texas; running back Carter Jackson to Nevada; tight end Nela Tupou to USC; and defensive backs Kam Totton and Jaron Hill to UC Davis and Sacramento State, respectively.
Sharma, Totten and Hill transferred into Folsom as seniors from other regional schools. Jackson returned to Folsom after two seasons at Granite Bay. Doherty bristles at any notion that his staff and program recruit players, that they bend or shirk rules. The governing body CIF would nail any program in the state to the wall if any such rumors that have circulated for years were true.
Doherty said Folsom has become a “destination school” for sports and academics across the board. If the player clears CIF transfer policies, Doherty will play them.
“It bothers me because the people who don’t know and don’t work have no idea what they’re talking about,” Doherty said. “I put in more hours than anyone in the room. I started at the bottom. Coached at Sacramento High School where we got beat by 50 by Del Oro, got beat by Grant by 50. I learned how to run a program, how to run a team, and it takes a lot to be good. The people who aren’t willing to work as hard are the first to take shots.”
Doherty added, “The amount of time and energy it takes to make it work, with the parents, community and the school, we’re all grateful. They’re enjoying it, and that matters to me. I don’t enjoy it as much because I stress so much so that they can all have a good experience. But football is the real thing here. It matters. We get exited for high school football.”
Pacer power
Grant opened in North Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood in 1931, and it has a blend of an old-school look with fresh upgrades across campus, be it classrooms or ball fields. The relic that is Rutherford Stadium has housed a lot of great football.
Yes, it’s a tough part of town, but the Pacers embrace their hard-boiled roots because they are tough-minded kids coached by tough-minded people, a good many who are former Pacers who embrace the longstanding motto of “Pacer4Life.”
Grant (10-3) on Friday plays at Saint Francis of Mountain View (10-3) in the Division 2-AA title game. That Grant is traveling for the third consecutive season for a NorCal final adds to the Pacers’ cause. Players, coaches and community members feel slighted with another road trip, but fueled to three-peat as a NorCal champion for a program that for decades has had the backing of Sacramento in general.
When Grant became the first (and, to date, only) section team to win the elite CIF State Open finals in 2006, Sacramento had a parade to honor the Pacers. Grant rose to football prominence in 1992 under coach Mike Alberghini, becoming The Sacramento Bee’s Team of the Decade for the 1990s and 2000s in stacking championships before Folsom earned that honor for the 2010s.
Grant kids crave football and structure, and athletics can be a ticket out. But that ticket is not a one-way trip. Grant’s co-head coaches, Carl Reed and Syd Thompson, are Grant alums who returned to give back.
Brutal non-league scheduling, challenges at home, NorCal road trips — the Pacers feed off of a challenge and charge ahead.
“We come through adversity,” Reed said. “We’re built through adversity. Our kids now how to handle it. When we have a staff like this, a program that we’ve rebuilt like this, and the culture that’s there, this is what happens. We win. The key is to overcome and adapt. It’s an amazing thing that’s happened.”
Reed had the unenviable task four years ago of replacing Alberghini, the region’s winningest coach with 282 victories and seven section banners. Reed’s first Pacers team went winless, an unheard-of thing at Grant, and fans let him know about it. They wanted him to move out of town. Where? Anywhere but Sacramento.
Reed weathered the storm and has been at the forefront of the program’s revival. He has lost some 75 pounds with a better diet — so long, Starbucks! — but he hasn’t lost an ounce of perspective. He appreciates every bit of Grant’s success, and he’s become a beloved figure again in Del Paso Heights.
Raging in Lincoln
Twelve Bridges coach Chris Bean said he has to pinch himself to see if it’s really true. Has he really gone 25-1 the past two seasons with just the school’s second senior class? He has.
Isn’t this highly abnormal for new schools to become great so fast when history shows it often takes years to become decent? Also true.
It takes a special leader to lead the way, and that’s Bean. He was a quarterback in the early 1990s at small-school Colfax, and he thought he’d coach forever at nearby Bear River, or at Lincoln High. Then Twelve Bridges opened and it was a match. Bean’s energy, attention to detail, superb staff of coaches and a roster of eager go-getters have created a powerhouse.
At 13-0, Twelve Bridges will on Saturday night host Wilcox of Santa Clara in the Division 2-A title game. People line up to get into this splashy new venue as if they’re scrambling for concert tickets.
Bean reminds his players that this game, for all the stress, is still about fun and the love of the sport and one another. A year after suffering heartache at Sacramento City College with a last-second championship loss, Bean was beaming in victory last Saturday in the same venue.
“I can’t even explain what I just witnessed,” Bean said. “Our kids eventually said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re going to put some demons from last year’s playoffs away for good. I couldn’t be more proud of our program, top to bottom.”
Bean said he could not sleep, eat or comprehend what happened after the loss a year ago. Now he’s light on sleep and meals for better reasons: preparing for a NorCal game that no one dared dream about four years ago when the shovels hit the ground to open a new school.
Winters riding high
Ward, the Winters coach, said he enjoyed the view of a roller working over the school’s grass/dirt field on Tuesday morning. That old field will be ready for Friday, he said, even if he has to do the job himself.
Football is such a big deal here that Ward’s mother, Robin, still attends games in her son’s letterman’s jacket. Ward is approached regularly in town by “old timers” from decades past who applaud the coach for keeping tradition alive. This is his best team in his 17 seasons as head coach and it’s an all-timer for the school, the old timers tell him.
This was the only teaching position Ward ever applied for, securing the job at 24 with no visions of leaving. This is home. This is the good life, with his three young kids enjoying the ride.
“We win, we go celebrate with the band, and it’s as cool as it gets,” Ward said. “We’re a small team, but we have great athletes and a lot of speed. We’re Winters football. We get after it.”
He added, “We’re all about small town. Spots is what drives this town. Sports and our Ag programs, that’s Winters in a nutshell, and we love it. But what separates us from Folsom and Grant and other schools is a lot of kids go to those schools to play college football, to get scholarships, so they worry a lot about that kind of thing. At Winters High, the peak of our athletic career is usually playing here. For 99% of our kids, this is as far as we go as an athlete, and we’re okay with that because high school football is still the coolest thing in their lives.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2024 at 2:41 PM.