Ponderosa flag football denied a section repeat by a dominant Merced team
Not many flag football followers believed that the Ponderosa Bruins would replicate the dream season they had a year ago.
A perfect 25-0 record, a Sac-Joaquin Section Division II championship, a Sacramento Bee Player of the Year in Brooklynn Nordquist and Coach of the Year in Tyson Escobar all in Year No. 1 set the bar extremely high for the Bruins.
But even after limping out to a 2-4 start to 2025, Ponderosa finished strong as Capital Valley Conference champions at 11-1 in conference play and worked through the D-II bracket with wins over Lodi, El Capitan and Vista del Lago to get back to the title game Saturday at Cosumnes River College.
“I thought that our group losing who we had last year, there was no way this was even possible,” confessed Escobar. “If somebody told me at the beginning of the year, ‘You’re playing in the section championship game this year,’ I would say there’s absolutely no way that’s possible.”
While Ponderosa maximized their second season as a program, the Bruins ran into a buzzsaw in the top-seeded Merced Bears, who shut the Bruins out for all but 95 seconds of the D-II championship game and had four second-half takeaways en route to a 33-6 win.
“Our plan was don’t give them a chance, because we’ve seen they’ve come back and beat El Cap, which is one of our schools in our area, when they were down,” said Merced head coach Victor Nazario. “So we told them, no pressure, just stay on the gas.”
The Bears applied the pressure from both sides of the ball as the section’s leading touchdown passer, Antonia Lejarde, had four TD passes and one more on the ground. That gave the junior a section-leading 107 touchdowns on the year.
After a scoreless first quarter, Merced jumped in front first with a big 86-yard scoring connection from Lejarde to Ryann Perez to give the Bears a 7-0 lead on the first play of the second quarter.
Merced forced a Ponderosa punt on the ensuing drive and then capitalized with another Lejarde-to-Perez connection, this time from 4 yards away, making it 13-0 at the 3:11 mark.
Ponderosa had a scoring opportunity at the end of the second, driving all the way down to the Merced 4-yard line, but could not convert it into points, keeping the score 13-0 Bears at the half.
Lejarde had a 5-yard rushing score before two more TD tosses to Perez and Averie Steverson extended the lead to 33-0 by the 4:25 mark of the third.
The Bruins had four straight drives in the second half ending in turnovers. After marching down inside the Merced 5-yard line three times in the third, each possession ended with an interception by the Bears — one each from Samantha Barragan, Leanna Amado and Steverson. Barragan added a second interception later in the fourth.
Ponderosa’s only score came after a Madalyn Meier interception that set up a 57-yard pass from Aleyah Cruz to Rowan Thomas to make it 33-6 with 1:35 left in the game.
Merced finishes its season at 25-4, while Ponderosa closes at 18-7.
This story was originally published November 8, 2025 at 5:44 PM.