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.
