Granite Bay leads big early but drops crusher to St. Mary’s in CIF football finals
It looked like the Granite Bay Grizzlies were well on their way to the school’s seventh CIF Sac-Joaquin Section championship.
Dominic Cattolico had a perfect passer rating at one point in leading his Placer County team to a quick 21-point lead over the St. Mary’s Rams of Stockton. Isaiah Ene ripped off a 69-yard burst for the first score. Cattolico hit Izaiah Galovich for a 69-yard scoring toss and then hit his favorite receiver, Darnell Turner, for a 19-yard score on a beautiful fade after the Grizzlies recovered an onside kick.
A victory would have given the Roseville Joint Union High School District three section victories at Hughes Stadium over the weekend, after Roseville and Woodcreek won the Division IV and Division III titles, respectively.
Things were going great, until they weren’t.
The Rams used a goal-line stop on fourth down just before halftime and then scored on a three-play, 99-yard drive to wrestle control of the game and then dominated from then on to take the Division II title, 38-24, on Saturday night at Sacramento City College.
The key play of that drive for the Rams was a 78-yard pass from their own 7-yard line from Jaden Galvan to Jeremy Krause. Two plays later, Galvan hit Ivan Huerta for a 9-yard score, and the Grizzlies were gutted, but still led 24-21. They never recovered.
“I think they were running out the clock, and we let them throw a 5-yard pass, and he runs 70 yards with it,” said Granite Bay coach Joe Cattolico. “That makes a big difference at that point of the game. But that happens in high school football.”
Dominic Cattolico, the coach’s son, was 8-for-10 for 270 yards and the two scores in the first half. But the Grizzlies were held to three drives in the second half that ended in a punt, an incompletion and an interception. The junior completed 16 of 20 passes for a single-game school record 357 yards.
Ene had 16 carries for 98 yards and a score in the first half, but the powerhouse fourth-year varsity starting running back tallied only 4 yards after that.
“They did an excellent job,” Cattolico said of the Rams defense. “They’re good, and they pushed us around a little bit. But our kids played really hard and battled. Credit to (St. Mary’s). They’re good. They’ve been good for a long time, so it’s no accident.”
St. Mary’s (11-2) started wearing Granite Bay (9-5) down in the third quarter, and their final punishing drive in the fourth quarter lasted just under 8 minutes and went 72 yards on 13 plays, capped by a Galvan 1-yard carry. Moses Alexander keyed the drive with nine carries for 65 of the 72 yards. He finished with 199 yards on 25 carries.
It was Rams coach Tony Franks’ third section title at his alma mater and 246th career victory. In his 25th season with the Rams, Franks is the section’s winningest active coach. St. Mary’s last won a section title in 2016. Granite Bay’s last title came in 2017.
St. Mary’s will advance to a CIF Northern California regional title game while Cattolico and the Grizzlies will bid farewell to a solid senior class that includes Ene and Turner, the latter of whom started from his sophomore season.
Granite Bay finished third in the strongest league in Northern California behind five-time defending section Division I champion Folsom and Oak Ridge, which lost to Folsom 21-14 on Friday night at Hughes Stadium.
Cattolico this season won the 200th game of his coaching career, which has included stops in San Jose, the Elk Grove Unified School District and at Roseville.
“Just great, great ball players, great leaders,” Coach Cattolico said. “I can’t say enough about our seniors. Our senior group is a group that really, really struggled all the way up through JV football. There are guys that transferred out of that class to seven different high schools in Sacramento to play instead of finishing and playing with us. So, really proud of these kids and our younger kids, and for staying and staying the course.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2025 at 11:12 PM.