For hard-knock McClatchy and Davis, prep football offers lessons in perseverance
Marc Hicks doesn’t have to do this. Quantrel Jackson doesn’t have to be here, either.
Both men coach high school football with all manner of bark and gusto because of the rewards beyond the pursuit of victories. Because of the bonds that the most grueling sport on the sporting menu can offer, and because there’s a lesson in perseverance of getting off the deck and hitting back after getting floored in a sport rooted in contact and collisions.
Hicks is a football lifer in Yolo County, the junior varsity head coach with the Davis Blue Devils and the program’s assistant varsity head coach under first-year man Roscoe Ahn. Jackson is the first-year varsity coach with the McClatchy Lions after serving as the junior varsity head man at the Sacramento City Unified School District program.
The teams met on Friday night at historic Hughes Stadium on the campus of Sacramento City College in a nonleague game pitting programs eager to rub away the bruises of recent lean seasons in an effort to recapture any measure of their glorious past.
McClatchy won 35-28 in a spirited, hard-fought and entertaining contest to improve to 2-0 as quarterback Josiah Hutchison ran for a score and passed for three touchdowns, including an 83-yarder to Robert Jackson III, and Jake Ferris scored twice. Davis dropped to 0-2 in a game it felt it should have won.
“I’m a Blue Devil through and through, and this is why I do this,” said Hicks, perhaps the greatest Blue Devil athlete of them all. He was a 6-foot-2, 205-pound prep All-American running back with Davis 40 years ago, and he was so sensational then that his prep coach, Dave Whitmire once described him as “almost not human.”
Hicks has coached various levels of the Davis program over the decades out of loyalty and the obligation to help mentor kids. Jackson is a graduate of Valley High in south Sacramento who has coached locally for years. Like Hicks, Jackson beamed before Friday’s game at the prospects of fielding a competitive and exciting team.
“I love these kids, love what football can do,” Jackson said. “We have a lot of positives going on. Football can do that. These kids and this school deserve it.”
Old schools stand tall in other sports
Davis opened in 1926 and won a string of league football championships or winning teams from the 1930s and into the 2000s. After some down times, including 1-9 or winless campaigns, Davis won its last league crown in 2018 under coach Steve Smyte. But the wheels fell off in following seasons with low roster numbers and dreadful defeats. Coaches came and went, and scores of students elected to break a sweat in other sports.
With 44 sports on campus, Davis with its robust enrollment of 3,038 students has been a CIF Sac-Joaquin Section powerhouse in athletics across the board for decades. Davis has won 171 section team championships, the most in section history. What’s more, and what’s most important, certainly, is Davis has towered as an academic school since it moved to its current campus in 1962.
McClatchy also has a sterling academic reputation. The school opened in 1936 and fielded good football teams from the start, including filling 22,000-seat Hughes Stadium in the 1940s, ‘50s, 60s and early ‘70s in the annual Turkey Day Game against Sacramento High.
But the school with 2,568 students has struggled to field good football teams in the last 20 years, undone by small roster numbers and injuries that generally follow. McClatchy last fielded a playoff team in 1996.
In other sports, such as baseball, girls basketball, softball and water sports, McClatchy has flourished. The school celebrated the opening of new on-campus baseball and softball venues last spring.
Avoiding a ‘death spiral’ in football
Administrators and coaches at Davis and McClatchy in recent years discussed the prospect of shutting down football. That talk has since subsided, but it would have been a topic had Davis remained in the powerhouse Sierra Foothill League for football, a league that includes Sacramento Bee No. 1-ranked Folsom, No. 2 Oak Ridge of El Dorado Hills, No. 3 Rocklin of Placer County and No. 5 Granite Bay, also of Placer County.
Davis was realigned out of the Delta League and into the SFL before last academic year, not to knock heads in football, but to continue to achieve in the other sports. Davis’ football team absorbed brutal defeats last fall in finishing 2-8, forfeiting a game against Folsom because injuries had reduced the lineman numbers to a handful.
Davis this fall, and for the next three seasons, has gone independent, meaning no league affiliation and no playoff berths. This allows Davis to schedule similarly struggling teams.
“There’s always talk with athletic directors (of struggling football programs) of what can be done with this sport,” Davis athletic director Mark McGreevy said. “Every team is important to me on our campus, but I acknowledge that football plays a special role in our culture, and everyone feeds off of that. It helps a campus and a community.”
He added that remaining in football in the SFL would have crushed the program and likely ended it for a spell, if not for good.
“It might have been a death spiral,” McGreevy said. “We’re trying to build this up again. Having our great hometown hero guy, the GOAT in Marc Hicks, helps. Kids need coaches like Marc. Same with Paul Hasson, another assistant head coach. Can’t give enough credit to those coaches. This isn’t an easy job.”
Davis and McClatchy more the norm than powerhouse teams
Davis and McClatchy represent the majority in local prep football. For every Folsom, Oak Ridge, Rocklin and Granite Bay, there are a great deal more programs like Davis and McClatchy, schools trying to hold onto the sport that generates the most spectator interest and revenue to help fund all sports on campus.
Often, there is a stigma that a struggling football team represents a sad-sack school of sagging morale. That isn’t the case at Davis or McClatchy. Football remains a hard sell on both campuses, but success, or just fielding a competitive team, tends to change perceptions in a hurry.
McClatchy plays in the best venue for a prep team in the region, if not on the West Coast. Hughes Stadium is located 1.3 miles from the McClatchy campus. On Friday, the vibe was on the McClatchy side with cheerleaders and the band on the track, a student rooting section and alums from recent years to past decades cheering.
“Great venue,” said Rob Feickert, McClatchy’s CIF-recognized and honored athletic director. “Visiting teams come in here, wide-eyed, and they go, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’”
As for the fortunes of these two programs, Feickert said, “it’s doable. We need football. I’m an old football coach. What’s homecoming without football?”
Said Hicks, the proud old Blue Devil, “Football is having a hard time everywhere. More teams are going to 8-man football to save their programs. We have to figure out how to bring football back here, to coach them up, to teach the game, to have fun. I believe it can happen. I know it can.”
This story was originally published August 29, 2025 at 11:30 PM.