Baseball’s Jackie Robinson, basketball’s Bill Russell and football’s Tom Brady have all established themselves as icons on their sports. Photos: prospect.org & YouTube.org & golocalprov.com.
After Tom Brady of Serra High (San Mateo) earned a seventh Super Bowl title last week, we were inspired to write up our own rankings of the all-time greatest 100 athletes from California high schools. Based on CIF sanctioned sports only, we have Brady at No. 3 behind only Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell. McClymonds of Oakland also has two others in the top 20 after Russell.
Note: This is a post for Gold Club members only on CalHiSports.com. We’d love to get back to covering current accomplishments by players, teams and coaches on the field and on the court, and hope that happens very soon. To check out getting a Gold Club membership to see all of our state record updates (five sports), totally authentic historical features, recruiting ratings and more, CLICK HERE.
Notes: A version of these rankings were done in 2008 for our most recently printed Cal-Hi Sports State Record Book & Almanac. That one included high school accomplishments as part of it. This version has been done just looking at it for after high school. We know it is an apples and oranges type of comparison, but it’s still fun to learn about all of these people from so many different sports. For the record, sports included are football, water polo, cross country, basketball, wrestling, soccer, baseball, track & field, swimming, diving, golf, boys volleyball and tennis. Not included would be those from non-CIF sports such as auto racing, snowboarding, boxing, and more. We also did not include football’s O.J. Simpson for reasons you can guess. And yes, we also will be doing a top 100 list like this next week for women athletes from California.
