Quick-hitting, behind-the-scenes news and notes from the CalHiSports.com staff, including previews of upcoming content and events.
We are happy to announce that for the fifth straight year the CalHiSports.com web site and Cal-Hi Sports will be part of the weekly Final Quarter high school football show on Friday nights on the FOX 40 station in Sacramento.
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Kendall Jenner cheered at 2011 CIF Division IV state championship at the StubHub Center in Carson when her school from Sierra Canyon (Chatsworth) defeated LeGrand 34-13. She’s of course with father Bruce Jenner (now known as Caitlyn Jenner). Photo: celebuzz.com.
(If you have a name and a school of someone who should be on this list, just let us know by emailing markjtennis @gmail.com or responding with a comment)
Dakota Fannning enjoys the Friday night lights cheering for Campbell Hall High of North Hollywood. Photo: fanforum.com.
*In pictures of her, however, it looks like’s cheering for Torrey Pines.
**She wasn’t a cheerleader later at Hollywood High when famously discovered at local drug store.
We’re continuing our preseason football coverage for the 2017 season with a look back at the Cal-Hi Sports preseason overall No. 1 ranked teams and how they fared dating back to 1985. Mater Dei of Santa Ana is this year’s preseason No. 1 team in the state, the third Orange County program to earn top billing since we began a weekly and final Top 20 format over 30 years ago.
Sierra Canyon basketball star will reclassify to the Class of 2017, will likely play for Duke during the coming season and then enter the NBA Draft next spring. He’ll never be Mr. Basketball for California, but will count as being from California on all-time historical lists.
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Another editorial project that we’ve started working on in the last week and plan to have completed before the start of the 2017 football season is actually not from football. That will be the selection of the 25 greatest softball teams in state history.
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A GoFundMe account has been set up to help with medical costs for a high school football heat stroke victim from Stockton. The key for all to know is that many of these cases we’ve covered over the years are not necessarily for varsity football players. It’s for the younger ones on the freshman, sophomore and JV levels who may not know their physical limitations quite yet and may be more timid to tell their coaches they’re in trouble.
Jayden Jones, an incoming freshman at Lincoln High in Stockton, remained hospitalized on Sunday at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento after suffering a heat stroke injury at football practice last week. Jones was likely like thousands of incoming freshmen around the state as practices began last week, not knowing what to expect but interested in trying out for football.
As the CIF calendar has moved up one week earlier this year, however, the fears of heat-related football practice injuries are at an all-time high. And this first week of practice in the Central Valley was hot and humid.
The CIF itself has been sending out Twitter updates every day reminding all coaches and parents of heat-related health issues. We’re doing this post at Cal-Hi Sports as another reminder with the addition that a tale of an athlete suffering such an injury has already taken place.
Link HERE to a story on CBS13 out of Sacramento about Jayden’s situation.
Link HERE to a GoFundMe account set up by Jayden’s mother to help with expenses.
Have a great second week of practice everyone, but never lose sight of the health of all players and pay attention to all of the usual warning signs. Parents also need to tell their kids to never, ever be timid in asking for water breaks.
While updating the online portion of our state record book in the football team categories last week, we thought of going through the index cards we had in the office that contained all of the seasons played for Stockton High and Sacramento High.
A great majority of the school cards are in storage with managing editor Ronnie Flores, but we had the Stockton High and Sac High cards available and have always been curious whether Stockton High (which closed in 1954) had an all-time winning percentage good enough for the record book. For Sac High, since the school dates to the early 1890s, it was looking up a reported all-time win total.
Stockton did have some great teams — 10-0 in 1943, for example, with a lot of one loss squads — but a slow start prevented the Tarzans (yes, that was their nickname) from compiling an all-time record that makes the book. The record we came up with dating from the 1890s to 1956 was 246-166-31.
For Sacramento, the Dragons have been strong in recent years, including last year’s team that posted a win over Folsom, but they really struggled in the 1980s and 1990s. They do not yet have 500 all-time wins and still need a lot more 10-win seasons to reach .500. We figured out their all-time record to 458-488-34.
All of the index cards were compiled by our friend Bruce McIntosh. Several years ago, due a move, he couldn’t store them anymore where he was living so they went into storage. We can get to them through Ronnie and have used them as a service for schools interested in finding out about their football histories. It’s also possible to use them to look up win totals and sometimes those hunches turn out to be true (like with Pittsburg in Northern California). For Sac High and Stockton High, those are good totals to know but they don’t make the record book.
Nineteen players from California, many representing some of the highest-ranked teams for the preseason, have been selected for the first-ever Polynesian High School Football Player of the Year Watch List. The award will be presented annually to the most outstanding Polynesian senior high school football player in the nation.
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Thanks to research provided by Cal-Hi Sports intern Thomas Frey at the state library in Sacramento, we have determined that longtime Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks baseball coach Tom Dill has more than 400 wins in his career that began in 1993.
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Later this summer, the Pac-12 Networks will introduce a new series “The 12 Greatest” in which one football player from each of the conference’s 12 schools will be crowned as the greatest player from that school’s history. Here’s a look at each university’s top candidates who are from California high schools and who have been researched extensively for many of our Cal-Hi Sports state record lists:
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