Some record-breaking achievements we have seen in person, such as Pacific Grove’s baseball team completing 31-0 record in 2013 at CCS championships while others we have not, such as Destiny Littleton from Bishop’s of La Jolla becoming the state’s all-time scoring leader in girls basketball. Photos: Courtesy school & Mark Tennis.
Here at the early stages of the 2024 football season and for the 2024-25 school year seemed to be a good time to remind everyone about all of the content that has been researched on California high school football, boys basketball, girls basketball, baseball and softball that is on this site. It’s there so people can look up records at any time or get lost in all of the history.
Note: We hope you enjoy this free post on CalHiSports.com. After the preseason, all weekly and final state rankings in all sports are available only to our Gold Club members as well as our state record releated and state stat star of the week honor rolls. To check out getting a Gold Club membership to see all of those rankings plus all of our updated state record lists, totally authentic historical features, recruiting player ratings and more, CLICK HERE.
At the first football game of the season he covered on a Thursday night, legendary L.A. Times sportswriter Eric Sondheimer tweeted out that this is year No. 47 for him covering Southern California high school football.
In one sense, we can’t beat that as this is the 46th season for yours truly doing either a weekly newsletter (mailed to subscribers), weekly rankings (including a wire service in which those rankings were faxed to newspapers) or weekly reports on a website covering the top football teams in the state. We’ve also done the same for boys basketball and since Jackie White was starring at San Joaquin Memorial and Cheryl Miller was getting started at Riverside Poly right when we were it’s also been the same for girls basketball.
Bill Cartwright of Elk Grove captured the imagination of the entire Bay Area when he and his team played in the TOC at the Oakland Coliseum in 1975. Photo: Cal-Hi Sports archives.
The Cal-Hi Sports state football rankings, however, go back to an even earlier time than Mr. Sondheimer’s first season. That was 1975 when Nelson Tennis (my uncle) got inspired to compile rankings at the suggestion of several prep writers that he was corresponding with (including Ben Bodding of the Sacramento Bee) regarding state records he was looking up at the state library and San Francisco Public Library. I went to some Cordova High football games for that season to provide Nelson with some on-site observations, although my main focus at the time was being a high school school student myself and writing for my high school newspaper (at La Sierra of Carmichael, which closed in 1983). The Cordova 1975 team is still one of the best in Northern California I’ve ever seen and appears on our all-time list as 1975 State Team of the Year.
Earlier than the 1975 football season, I had helped Nelson with some state library research on boys basketball for the 1975 season since Elk Grove’s Bill Cartwright was pouring in points all over the place. Nelson had determined that Cartwright was on pace to break the career state record, sent the info through the mail to the Sacramento Bee and Cartwright broke the record during a playoff game at American River College that I attended. The game was stopped, and the crowd went nuts. That was Nelson’s work that helped create that moment, I realized, and I was hooked into helping him from that point on and by the 1979-80 school year while in college at San Jose State I was working toward creating our own publication.
In all of the years that have followed, including the 25 in which Cal-Hi Sports was partnered with Andy Bark (our publisher and the publisher of Student Sports Magazine), we have created myriads of lists and record charts not just in football, boys hoops, girls hoops, baseball and softball but for other sports we no longer cover (such as track and field) because others in those spaces only cover those sports and do a great job. In more recent years, especially after Nelson died in 2004 at age 67 from stomach cancer), Ronnie Flores (who began with Student Sports nearly 25 years ago) has helped tremendously in building all of our archives.
We’re not sure how many of our current subscribers or those perhaps interested in subscribing really know about all that we have done, how to find it on the site and some of the plans coming up. Therefore, here’s a quick-hitting series of summaries going through those archives.
All of our archived state records, lists of final state rankings and lists of all-state teams in the five sports we cover can be accessed through drop down menus from the top of our home page.
Max Venable was an MLB player for many years and was one of the top football players on Cordova of Rancho Cordova’s 1975 State Team of the Year.
Final football season state rankings go back to 1975 (which is the first one).
The football rankings in the early years were broken up into divisions, which in the early 1980s were done by AAAA, AAA, AA, A, and B. We added a State Top 20 overall in 1986 and in recent years have expanded that to 50 teams.
Final state teams of the year according to those five divisions continues to the present day. It’s just more challenging to place teams into divisions these days due to competitive equity seeding in the playoffs.
Under the Rankings tab for football, boys basketball and girls basketball, we also have lists of Public Schools State Teams of the Year. Those teams were just updated for basketball.
We have boys basketball final rankings archived back to 1976 (Ronnie has done some work going back to expand those to some earlier seasons), while for girls it goes to 1983. For baseball, it’s back to 1981. For softball, it’s back to 1985. Some of the earlier final rankings for baseball and softball are still being searched to find.
Each of our five main sports also has features in which we’ve done all-time greatest team rankings. We’ll be updating all of those all-time packages during the upcoming school year, beginning with football on the weekend of Oct. 4-6. That is the one week this year there will be no weekly football rankings due to travel.
Player rankings for recruiting are another part of our archived content. Most of these are for boys basketball by Ronnie. The football classes are only done three times for each group now, but may be expanded at a later date. We’re not trying to compete with any of the established recruiting networks, but either provide an experienced breakdown of each class (like when Ronnie does them) or a consensus outlook based on what 247Sports, Rivals and ESPN has done.
RECORD BOOK
All of the state record categories we have for all five sports are available through this drop down menu. All of the boys and girls basketball records are on one page of links. It is the same for baseball and softball. Football is the only one of the five sports we do that has a page by itself.
Football Records: Team and Individual categories are separated. Under the Team Records title, we also have lists of every undefeated team in state history with the NorCal and SoCal teams in separate links. Individual categories include scoring, rushing, passing, receiving, total offense, special teams and defense. We just added total offense last season and still have more categories to add, especially for kicking. There also is a link to our coaching state records page that has all-time win leaders for all five sports. The football records page also is where you would go to find all of our alumni lists. These would be all-time Super Bowl players, all-time college football award winners, all-time NFL First Round Draft picks and all-time NFL starting quarterbacks. The football records page also has our all-time player rankings for QBs, RBs, WRs, OLs, DLs, LBs and DBs. Those also will be updated soon from the last time we did them, but will likely still have Tom Brady, Marcus Allen, James Lofton, Anthony Munoz, Gino Marchetti, Junior Seau and Ronnie Lott at No. 1.
NBA, NCAAA all-time great Bill Walton still holds the California state high school record for most rebounds in one season. Photo: Cal-Hi Sports archives.
Basketball Records: Go to this page for both boys and girls basketball records. These are not updated yet prior to the start of the 2024-25 season but will be soon. Team, individual scoring, shooting, rebounding, assists and more included. Boys BB alumni lists are done for all-time NBA Draftees, Schools with the Most NBA Pros, All-Time NBA Award Winners, All-Time NBA All-Stars, and All-Time NBA Finals Alums. We don’t quite have the same number of alumni lists for girls, but do have WNBA All-Time Draft Picks. The basketball records page also has a separate place for boys-girls combo state records, including a list of each school that has won CIF state titles in boys and girls hoops in the same season.
Baseball/Softball Records: The way we have it broken down into categories is the same for both sports. Similar to boys/girls hoops, the all-time state lists have not been updated from the 2024 season, but will be done after basketball is done later this school year. For the individual records, we have all of the hitting categories in the same file. Leaders for RBI, Runs, Steals and Walks are in separate lists. And then all of the pitching records are in one place. We did a list of Opening Day MLB rosters for the pandemic season 2020, but have not done another one. We also have All-Time First-Round MLB Draft Picks and Recent World Series Alums (50 years plus) going back to 1968 (the first World Series that yours truly remembers). Another long term goal is to look up all of the World Series alums, but the World Series goes back to 1903 and looking up high schools for players who were born in the 1870s or even earlier may be impossible. There are no current softball alumni lists but when the sport is played at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028 we hopefully will have something added.
Coaching Records: All of our reported state leader lists for varsity wins can be accessed through the sport by sport records sections or through a separate coaching records page. The most media requests regarding state records by far are for coaching records. The coaches themselves while they are coaching aren’t very interested in them, but the school communities they are in are all extremely interested. They want to show their love and support to their coaches all the time.
Football Scores: There was a program we ran from around 2014 to 2017 and into 2018 when we did deals with schools to compile their all-time football scores with them. To be clear, each school that we did this work for paid a fee to have it done. We have all scores through a massive collection of index cards that were done by the late Bruce McIntosh. A school can still ask us to help them with this historical information, the last one was Los Gatos before the start of the 2023 season, but we’re not actively looking for schools to sign up.
Click onto the link that says “Honor Squads” and you’ll go to the page with all of the links to all of the all-state teams we have selected over the years in football, boys hoops, girls hoops, baseball and softball.
The late Junior Seau of Oceanside was on the very first all-state grid-hoop team. He’s still considered the greatest linebacker to ever come from a California high school. Photo: dignitymemorial.com.
The first all-state team in football we have is for 1980. We began to do medium schools and small schools all-state teams in football in 1989. The all-state underclass or non-seniors teams began in 1987. We broke that up into all-state juniors and all-state sophomores in 2010. We also now have players of the year for each position on the field (QBs, RBs, WR/Ends, Linemen, LB, DB, Offense, Defense) and we now have a NorCal and SoCal player of the year for each season going back to 1950. Later this season, we will be posting retroactive all-state football teams going back to 1960. All of our All-Decade All-State teams also can be accessed through this page of links, as far back as the 1950s. The preseason all-state team for 2024 still needs to be added but other preseason teams go back to 1983.
Grid-Hoop all-state teams began to be picked as a story idea for Student Sports Magazine in 1987 (led by Oceanside’s Junior Seau). They have continued for every year since other than the one during COVID despite a lot of the top football players graduating early before they can play a senior season of hoops.
Boys basketball all-state teams were first selected in 1980, but before that season a group of all-state teams for every year of the 1970s and 1960s and also back to 1955 was added on by Ronnie Flores. We also have an all-state underclass team for boys basketball that was done for the first time in 1982. The all-state teams according to CIF divisions were begun in 1990.
Our other main site contributor, Harold Abend, has been the leader of our girls basketball all-state teams and state rankings in the last 20 years or so. The first girls all-state team was done after the 1980 season. Just like the boys, all-state girls teams for underclass and divisions started at the same time (1989 for underclass and 1990 for divisions).
While we have been gender equal in all boys-girls hoops coverage over the years, that’s not quite true for baseball and softball. There are players of the year in softball as far back as possible, but the first all-state team was selected a few years after baseball had its first all-state team chosen in 1980. The all-state softball honors for medium schools, small schools and underclass also were added a couple of years after those teams began to be chosen in baseball (which would be 1996 for both).
The only all-state teams during the COVID-19 pandemic that were not selected in any of our sports was baseball and softball for 2020.
We still have lots of starting points for all-time state lists that can come from the last printed state record book and almanac that we produced (thanks to being part of ESPN). We also stand ready and interested to help with anyone on the outside who may want to collaborate on possible upcoming Hall of Fame projects, Hall of Fame nominations, CIF section record books or anything really in the big, wide world of California high school sports.
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.
