Esparto High football measures success in first downs and games completed
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Esparto football plays with undersized rosters after injuries and ineligibility.
- Coach Ron Cristian prioritizes completion and effort over victories or final scores.
- Players work to regain eligibility while team eyes 8-man football in 2026.
His football team had to wave the white flag twice this season, unable to finish a game in progress, but Ron Cristian will never label his guys as quitters.
Others have, and Cristian said that description is not fair. Cristian is the varsity head coach for the Esparto Spartans in an agricultural town of some 3,500 in rural Yolo County.
Athletics inspire the young in places like this, where half the town packs into stadiums to cheer them on. But in this sport, roster numbers are paramount, and Esparto has lost that battle before the first game even kicked off last month. Esparto’s roster has been thinned by injuries and academic eligibility issues.
Cristian said he expects to have a team of 24 or so players when players can be cleared academically on Oct. 10, “and that’s when our season can really start,” the coach said.
Esparto’s Aug. 29 season opener at Lower Lake High ended in the second quarter at Cristian’s urging to the referees. The Spartans started the night with 14 players and lost some in action. Lower Lake was awarded the 22-7 victory.
Esparto’s Sept. 4 game at Los Molinos did not happen because the Spartans were too thin on players to give it a go with player safety in mind. On Sept. 19, a game against powerhouse Woodland Christian ended in the second quarter. The Spartans were reduced to 10 able players at one point in the contest in a sport that requires 11 on the field.
Woodland Christian won 28-0 and might have scored 70 had the game continued. Some fans from around the greater Sacramento region went to social media to call Esparto out for being quitters. Cristian bristles at that notion.
“It’s been really, really hard, but the kids have been great, the administration and the community has been great,” Cristian said. “We’ve had to put running backs in at quarterback during a game because of injury, or a lineman to running back. We want the kids to have fun because that’s what this is all about, but it’s no fun when you’re going through this.”
He added, “Against Woodland Christian, our guys tried. They came up to me, we’re down to 10 guys, and they said, ‘Coach, we can’t go on.’ It becomes a safety issue. I couldn’t let them continue.”
Esparto does not measure football success by victories. It does so by first downs gained, touchdowns scored and games completed. On Friday, Esparto played Mesa Verde of Citrus Heights in a Sierra Delta League game, dropping a 53-14 contest, but there was pride in the voice of Cristian.
His gritty Spartans finished the game.
“We started with 14 players and we finished with 14,” Cristian said. “Iron man football. The crowd was great and cheered the kids on the whole time. Tiny steps. I was very proud of the kids’ effort. It would’ve been very easy to just roll over and quit, but we never did.”
The Spartans aren’t just trying to finish games as their record dropped to 0-4. They are still fine tuning the fundamentals of the sport. Six Esparto center snaps went over the quarterback’s head, and the Mavericks scooped up two of them for touchdowns. Two other high snaps gave Mesa Verde the ball inside the Esparto 20.
Why not 8-man?
A longtime assistant coach with Esparto now in his first year as the head coach, Cristian said he anticipated having a 25-man roster this fall. But 11 players have been working on their grades to become academically eligible, a carry-over from the 2025 spring semester.
The ineligible players have attended early morning tutoring sessions to catch up. Most of those students have participated in practices but cannot be in gear on game night.
Scores of teams in the Sac-Joaquin Section this season went with the 8-man football route in an effort to save their programs. Cristian said 8-man may be the right call for his program starting in 2026.
Esparto won nine games and reached the playoffs in 2022 under coach Chris Carr, and then dipped to 2-7 in 2023. The Spartans went 6-5 last season and reached the playoffs with a roster of 22, so this has not been some sort of sad-sack program. It is a school of 250 students, and it is a school where the football roster has not exceeded 30 players since 2022.
The football tradition at Esparto includes championship teams dating back to the 1950s under coach Jack Walker, who wore a suit on the sideline and took drags of a cigarette in an era when such things were allowed. Walker’s son, Paul, is a longtime Spartans assistant coach. The staff includes other former Esparto players.
“Football means something to our coaches and to a lot of people here,” Cristian said.
Cristian said Esparto’s school administration did not want to fold the junior varsity team so those players could be elevated to the varsity roster. None of those JV players wanted to move up, including just three sophomores.
Cristian doubles as the JV head coach in an effort to keep everyone on the same page in practice and to keep everyone united. The JV team has 15 players and has played just three games because of roster numbers.
Cristian raved about the grit of his varsity leaders. This includes Ethan Guillen, a senior running back and linebacker, AJ Campos, a junior linebacker and running back, and Landon Yanez, a sophomore receiver and safety. The coach described all of them as hard-working, dedicated and bright.
Why do this?
Cristian in 2019 retired as a physical education teacher after a 31-year career in the Sacramento-based Twin Rivers Unified School District. He started coaching football as an assistant in 1978, and got hooked. He was a longtime junior varsity coach at Foothill High in Sacramento, forging a lifelong friendship with famed Foothill varsity coach Frank Negri, a 200-game winner.
Cristian talks to Negri regularly about X’s and O’s and especially in how to soldier through challenges.
Cristian’s wife, Janice, is a teacher at Esparto Middle School. She has bought into this challenge, too.
“She’s my rock,” Cristian said.
Cristian is so dedicated to the Spartans that he made sure he had his prostate removed after a cancer diagnosis on Sept. 8, an off-week for the football program.
“It’s not the year I imagined,” Cristian said. “We’ve been looking forward to this season for a couple of years, thought we’d be competitive and have a chance to be really good. I have a great staff of dedicated coaches. It’s been a struggle, but I really have faith that if we can get all of our kids’ grades straightened out, this can be a very good team. Fortunately, I’m an eternal optimist.”
Cristian said football teaches life lessons, and not all of them easy.
“The football field is my classroom,” Cristian said. “We’re teaching kids about life, how to succeed. This is great stuff for life. You get knocked down, so what do you do? Keep going. Success is in the effort, in coming back, in always trying. Our kids, they get beat up in games, get hurt, and they persevere. I have some ineligible kids who are mad at their teachers. Why be mad at the teacher? The grades are on you. We’ll get through it.”
The coach added, “We want to make our school and community proud. Our kids have endured a lot, including a lot of heat at school from kids who don’t play sports. Each Sunday, we have players who will help give food to the needy. That’s real life.”
This story was originally published September 27, 2025 at 11:28 AM.