Cordova of 1975 quarterback Scott Jenner (10) leads team on a runout before one of its games. The Lancers from 50 years ago this season are still ranked among the greatest in state history. Photo: YouTube.com.
Cordova High of Rancho Cordova not only had perhaps the best team in the state for the 1970s but its 1975 squad is still among the greatest in state history. That part is common knowledge among anyone who knows history of Sacramento area football, but the Lancers also were inspirational toward the formation of Cal-Hi Sports, weekly state rankings, state records being compiled and a journalism career for a local teen at the time at a nearby school.
TO CHECK OUT THE FIRST 10 TEAMS IN OUR RANKINGS OF THE 75 GREATEST TEAMS IN STATE HISTORY IN A FEATURE LAST DONE ABOUT A YEAR AGO, CLICK HERE.
We hope you enjoy this free post on CalHiSports.com. All future game stories this regular season are going to be for our Gold Club members only. This is the 47th year that editor Mark Tennis has been covering the state and his insights after going to games will be the ones that will be Gold Club. All regular season State TOP 50 rankings also will be Gold Club posts plus state record updates and state stat stars. You can sign up today to get all of our Gold Club content right now for a special 2025 football season rate of just $12.99 for four months. A three-month sub is what we normally offer. A four-month sub will take all new members to December 15 or later, and that would be after the 2025 season is over. For details, CLICK HERE.
CHECK OUT CALGAMESWANTED.COM
Created for Coaches by Coaches for California Varsity High School Head Coaches and Athletic Directors, Start building your schedule with CalGamesWanted.com.
User friendly to take the stress out of scheduling.
It has been documented that the first-ever weekly state football rankings for California were the ones that were written into letters that were sent to a newspaper writer at the Sacramento Bee and a couple of other newspapers during the 1975 season by a hobbyist and former USDA chemist living in San Francisco named Nelson Tennis.
Why would Tennis even think about doing state rankings that season and why would anyone ask him about doing them? The main reason for that is that in that 1975 season there was a team in the Sacramento area — Cordova of Rancho Cordova — that was dominating most of its opponents with a wishbone option offense and hard-hitting defense.
I was a junior at the time attending now closed La Sierra High in Carmichael (not far from Rancho Cordova) and had just gotten a driver’s license. I was doing work for the school paper, but Nelson thought it would be good for me to go see the Cordova team play. I had been lucky enough earlier in the 1975 calendar year to go see the Elk Grove boys basketball team, which won the famed Oakland Tournament of Champions that season and had one of the best players I have still ever seen in center Bill Cartwright. Just a few months after Cartwright, here came the Lancers.
One of the Cordova football team’s early opponents was Bella Vista of Fair Oaks, a rival of La Sierra’s, that was the top team in our league at the time. The Broncos had good running backs in those years and excellent linemen. One of them from my freshman year, Gordon King, later became a first round NFL draft choice and played 10 years in the league.
Cordova played its home games in those years on Saturday afternoons and I drove across the American River for the first time to see the 1975 Lancers play Bella Vista in their third game. There was a large crowd since Bella Vista also was the No. 2 ranked team in the area that week, but the Lancers were crisp in their execution and they had game-breaking speed at every position. They rolled to a 38-7 victory over Bella Vista. They scored on their first four possessions and led 32-0 at halftime.
That turned out to be one of several impressive outings for head coach Dewey Guerra’s squad. The very next week Cordova faced longtime area powerhouse Grant of Sacramento and beat the Pacers, 40-14. The Lancers were in the old Delta League in those days and I remember going to another game at Cordova on a Saturday afternoon to see them beat Vacaville, 43-13, to complete a perfect regular season. Vacaville also was one of the other top teams in the region at the time.
There were no CIF Sac-Joaquin Section playoffs until 1976 but in 1975 there was a Sacramento area championship and in the semifinals the Lancers had to play Bella Vista again and won again, 27-12. In the championship game, the opponent was Highlands of North Highlands, which in those years like Cordova got a ton of talent from a nearby air base. It was like a game between Mather Air Force Base (Cordova) and McClellan Air Force Base (Highlands).
Highlands actually scored first in that game (it was the third one I saw the Lancers play that season), which was the first time that they had trailed in a game all season. Cordova quickly answered on its next series, then took the lead on a 71-yard touchdown run by Max Venable. The lead went to 20-6 before halftime on a 9-yard TD run by sophomore Reggie Young and it was over not long into the third quarter on a 51-yard TD run by Kenny Bowles. The Lancers’ speed and execution of the wishbone was just too much in a 36-6 victory.
Guerra announced soon after that game that he was leaving for American River College, but the program kept humming along for the rest of the decade under the next head coach, Ron Lancaster. The 1979 team won the section title, finished 13-0 and was ranked No. 2 in the final state rankings.
Cordova of 1975 also represents the best team from a decade of greatness at a school that produced a 102-6-1 record, which was the best record in the state and the nation. It can be said that the Lancers were the Concord De La Salle of NorCal football for the 1970s.
Senior quarterback Scott Jenner ran the option offense and was so good at it that the University of Oklahoma recruited him. The Sooners, along with Texas, were doing the wishbone at the time so if one of them was recruiting a quarterback, then it was a quarterback who was really good at running it. Jenner later played at Oklahoma, but did not have a pro career. Jenner scored on a 81-yard run just 8:28 into the very first game vs Rio Americano of Sacramento and he had the first TD on a run in the last game.
Max Venable (44) makes a big hit on an opposing running back for Cordova’s unbeaten 1975 team that stands as the best example of the Lancers going a national best 102-6-1 for the decade of the 1970s. Photo: YouTube.com.
The Lancers’ best player since he also played on defense was senior fullback-linebacker Max Venable. He crashed into the line on every play as the tip of the three-back backfield, and often with the ball. He also was one of the team’s leading tacklers. I’ve always thought Max could have been an NFL player, but he was even better in baseball and he would later play in the major leagues (mostly known for playing for the Giants). His son Will also later made it to MLB (he played in high school at San Rafael) and is currently the manager of the Chicago White Sox.
Max’s younger brother, Darrell Venable, a player who was recruited by D1 colleges the next season, also was in the backfield, along with Young, the sophomore. Young was a three-year starter who went 35-1 in his career and is still regarded as one of the best running backs in Sacramento area history. He has since passed away.
Guerra didn’t pass much, but found ways to get the ball into the hands of speedy receiver Bowles. He was voted Superior California Player of the Year and later played at UNLV. The Venable brothers and Bowles all averaged more than 10 yards per carry for the season.
A lot of these all-time great teams also have at least one NFL player. At Cordova for 1975 that was defensive back Jeff Allen. He was picked in the 1980 draft by the Miami Dolphins and played one season for the St. Louis Cardinals before playing several seasons in Canada. The team’s top lineman was Brian Bailey, who was later signed by Cal and was a four-year starter for the Bears.
In an article I wrote in 1979 about top teams in Northern California in the 1970s, I also listed Andy Graves and Bernie Bozek as three-year starters. They, along with the Venables, Jenner, Allen and Bowles never lost a game in their three seasons. I’ve also later learned that also attending those Cordova games was another young journalist and Lancers’ student the same age as me. He was Class of 1977 grad Lester Holt, who became the longtime anchor of NBC Nightly News, and an inductee into the California Hall of Fame. Holt did his last broadcast as the lead of NBC Nightly News last May.
Jenner later had a son who played at Folsom and it’s the Bulldogs’ 2014 team that is often considered the best ever from the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section. They went 16-0 and set numerous state records for scoring, including a 68-7 win in the CIF D1 state final vs Oceanside. That Folsom team, however, was not No. 1 in the state like the Lancers of 1975 were. It had to be behind CIF Open Division state winner De La Salle since DLS had beaten the Bulldogs in the previous two seasons. Ranking Folsom of 2014 higher has merit and it would be the best for sure if it had played and beaten DLS that season, but that didn’t happen. Still, the Lancers of ’75 were an awesome group in their own right.
There was an end-of-season national ranking at the time (National Sports News Service) that had Loyola of Los Angeles, the CIF Southern Section top divisional champion, at the No. 1 spot. But in those years the NSNS hardly ever listed any NorCal schools (we think because they never checked) and Uncle Nelson was following everything every week very closely. He ranked Loyola second. Since the NSNS listed Loyola first and we had Cordova higher, the Lancers have also claimed a mythical national title for 1975.
The NSNS rankings began being done in the 1980s by Barry Sollenberger of Arizona, who always went by the Cal-Hi Sports order. Nelson had been asked for the 1975 season to do rankings by sportswriter Ben Bodding of the Sacramento Bee based on state record research that he had sent to Bodding previously about Cartwright in basketball.
Other sportswriters around the state also were interested in state rankings so that’s when Nelson started doing them. Of course, he didn’t just stop at Cordova and Loyola. He would eventually start listing teams in divisions, which he did then for AAAA, AAA, AA, A and Class B (for the smallest schools). In those days, he couldn’t get scores from MaxPreps or the internet but there were newsstands in San Francisco that carried the L.A. Times, Sac Bee and other newspapers from around the state. A quick trip to the library on a Monday morning to look at newspapers with other scores filled in the gaps and he put the letters in the mail to the reporters interested in them by the end of Monday.
All of this was happening 50 years ago this season and Nelson (who died in 2004 of cancer) always maintained he thought Cordova of 1975 was the state’s No. 1 team for that season and one of the top teams he had ever followed. Thanks, Lancers, you really did have a big impact on everything that we ended up doing all these years later.
Mark Tennis is the co-founder and publisher of CalHiSports.com. He can be reached at markjtennis@gmail.com. Don’t forget to follow Mark on the Cal-Hi Sports Twitter handle: @CalHiSports
One Comment
Great article. I remember playing against La Sierra before it closed.