De La Salle High sports win state, national accolades

By Jay Bedecarré 5 years ago
De La Salle High sports win state, national accolades
De La Salle High’s traditional school site football facility has always caught out-of-towners off guard for a nationally-renowned program that has had a major motion picture and multiple books published about it. Well now the Concord school does have an eye-catcher with a new fully digital video scoreboard that will get its first glimpse to the public next Friday, Aug. 23, as the Spartans host St. Thomas Aquinas of Florida. Besides showing all the regular game details at Owen Owens Field, the new scoreboard (the same size as the former board) will feature “hype videos” before the game, interviews with coaches and replays of “cool touchdowns and plays,” according to assistant athletic director Derricke Brown.

De La Salle has a well-earned reputation for its historically successful football team, but the Spartans 2019 baseball team actually went a step better than its football brethren to finish their season No. 1 in California. DLS was also named the best boys program in California again for the 2018-19 season year.

Coach David Jeans’ DLS baseball team ended the 2019 season with a 29-1 record and was named team of the year by CalHiSports.com.

De La Salle football racked up a pair of honors from MaxPreps, being named the team of the decade for the USA and California. The Spartans won four National titles in past 10 years and went to the CIF Bowl championship game every year. Legendary coach Bob Ladouceur turned over the reins of the football program to hand-picked successor (had his former player) Justin Alumbaugh after the 2012 season.

Most impressive takeaway from the ranking is that the Spartans played five of the other top 10 football teams in America during the period, including Southern California powerhouses Centennial Corona. Mater Dei and St. John Bosco as well as Las Vegas’ Bishop Gorman and Ft. Lauderdale’s St. Thomas Aquinas (the Spartans 2019 season opening opponent next Friday night in Concord).

Behind DLS in the decade’s top California’s Top 10 football listings were Centennial, St. John Bosco and Mater Dei as well as Folsom and Servite, all opponents multiple times of the Concord parochial school this decade.

The boys state school of the year award went to De La Salle for the fourth time this decade (2011, 2012, 2015, 2019) for its overall athletic program in 2018-19. De La Salle was top five in California football, baseball and golf this past year. This is the seventh time DLS has been state school of the year for boys sports since 1985.

Regionally, it was even more pronounced as DLS won North Coast Section team championships in football, baseball, golf, wrestling, basketball and lacrosse and was second in cross country and soccer.
DLS has also earned overall California school of the year four times (1995-96, 1999-2000, 2003-04 and 2011-12), even given that it is an all-boys school and doesn’t earn points for girls programs like the majority of schools in the state which are co-ed.

Ygnacio Valley High was the California state school of the year in 1971-72.

De La Salle baseball was second to no one in baseball as the 29-1 Spartans were named state team of the year. They won their fourth straight NCS title and came within one run (3-2 loss in second game) of going 30-0, ending the season with 28 wins in a row. Junior pitcher and UCLA commit Kyle Harrison and graduating senior Chris Santiago were the team’s top honorees.

The third DLS team to get a top five in the CalHiSports evaluations was boys golf. That was based on their fifth-place showing in the CIF state golf championships after taking first at NCS and second in NorCal. Longtime Spartans’ football defensive coordinator Terry Eidson is the head golf coach.

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