In the Bay Area the past two high school football seasons, nobody has scaled the heights of San Mateo powerhouse Serra. The Padres were great in 2022. They’re even better in 2023.
They’ve beaten De La Salle and Folsom. They’ve overpowered their West Catholic Athletic League rivals. They’ve breezed through the section playoffs.
But even for a team as dominant as Serra, one in which second-half running clocks spared eight of its 12 opponents further despair, there is one more level on the ladder. There is a team waiting to do to Serra what Serra has done to others in its rise to the top of Northern California and that is the team the Padres will play Saturday night.
Southern Section champion Mater Dei-Santa Ana is bigger and stronger than Serra. Its resume is more impressive. Its list of college prospects is stunning.
When the teams meet for the California Interscholastic Federation Open Division state championship at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Mater Dei can seemingly pick its score.
Calpreps.com’s computer projects the Southern California superpower to win 44-8. It gives Serra a 1% chance at an upset.
Can that be right?
Didn’t the computer take note of Serra’s routs of Archbishop Riordan, St. Francis and St. Ignatius? Didn’t it see how the Padres rolled through playoff opponents Salinas and Wilcox?
Doesn’t it know that most of Serra’s starters are seniors who have been on the Open Division stage the past two seasons?
Even if the computer circled all of that twice in red, it knows what Mater Dei brings to the field – major college talent.
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Lots of major college talent.
“That’s another level,” Wilcox coach Paul Rosa said about the Southern California powerhouses earlier in the playoffs. “Basically you’re playing college football already.”
Let’s go to the recruiting scoreboard compiled by 247Sports to see where things stand.
Class of 2024 rankings, California:
- No. 1 Aydin Breland, DL, Mater Dei, 6-5, 290, five-star, Oregon commit.
- No. 3 Brandon Baker, OT, Mater Dei, 6-5, 285 five-star, Texas commit.
- No. 4 Zabien Brown, CB, Mater Dei, 6-0, 180, four-star, Alabama commit.
- No. 11 DeAndre Carter, OL, Mater Dei, 6-4, 340, four-star, Auburn commit.
- No. 13 Nate Frazier, RB, Mater Dei, 5-11, 208, four-star, Georgia commit.
- No. 15 Elijah Brown, QB, Mater Dei, 6-1 ½, 200, four-star, Stanford commit.
Four others in the school’s senior class are rated in the state’s Top 100 and five in the junior class are rated in the state’s Top 20. By some estimates, the Santa Ana powerhouse has up to 40 Division I college prospects.
Is this really high school football?
Serra’s top-ranked player in its senior class: No. 44 Maealiuaki Smith, QB, 6-4, 195, three-star, Oklahoma State commit.
But Serra knows the lay of the land, knows the opportunity that awaits, knows that it’s facing an all-star collection of talent that has become an annual challenge for anyone representing Northern California in the state’s top championship game.
If it’s not Mater Dei, then it’s St. John Bosco on the other side of the field.
Since 2016, one of the two Southern California superpowers has ended the season with an Open Division state title – and not a single one of the games has been decided by fewer than 14 points.
The domination of the two schools, separated by 24 miles, was intriguing enough for the New York Times to write a 2,300-word feature in 2021 titled, “California’s High School Football Powerhouses Feed the College Game.”
In the story, the Times describes how the rise began:
A little more than a decade ago, St. John Bosco was at a crossroads. Enrollment, which had peaked in 2001, had plummeted by one-third to fewer than 700 in the wake of the Great Recession. “We were on the ropes,” said Paul Escala, who was hired as St. John Bosco’s president in 2010 and is now the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The school decided football could be its salvation.
Escala asked the alumni to bet on a vision of St. John Bosco as a college prep school — in the arts, academics and athletics. It would rely on data to target students who could afford a premium education and would be more strategic in delivering financial aid. “That was music to my ears,” said {football coach Jason} Negro, who was hired months before Escala.
Mater Dei, which missed the playoffs in 2011, followed Bosco’s lead, with former coach Bruce Rollinson asking Negro how the Bellflower school was excelling, according to the Times.
Both schools became heavily involved in youth football. Both hired top-notch assistants. Both started replacing outgoing stars with star transfers — and not just from their backyard, taking advantage of CIF bylaw revisions in 2012 and 2017. Both became not only state powerhouses but mythical national champions, too.
One player the Times interviewed transferred to Mater Dei from Bakersfield, commuting 150 miles each way with his mother. The player committed to Texas.
“I knew I’d never regret this,” the player’s mother said.
Serra didn’t have any transfers this season. It had four in 2022 and one (Smith, who moved from Sacramento) in 2021.
The transfer game is different in Southern California, Serra coach Patrick Walsh said.
Asked if he wants to jump into that pool, Walsh added, “Staring here in front of a week like this, the answer would be yes. But looking at the previous 12, 13 weeks, the answer would be no because that is not the culture of Northern California football as it stands right now.”
For Walsh, the transfer issue boils down to a philosophical difference.
That difference is choosing or not choosing to replace players who have worked years for starting spots — and bought into team culture — with high-profile transfers.
“I want to be very, very clear,” Walsh said. “People transfer schools. Everyone in our section, everyone in our league has kids transfer in. We’ve had kids transfer out. It’s not like people are never going to transfer again.
“It’s more of the systemic approach to getting or attracting a ton of transfers and the cost of that is lifelong Padres families that have committed to our program as freshmen – not only making sacrifices to get to school but also because we’re a private school, financially – and then senior year saying, ‘Sorry, you’re not playing because we have a five-star transfer.’ That is hard for me to deal with.”
Serra has much of what Bosco and Mater Dei have – elite coaching, administrative support, good facilities and a brand name. It even has famous alums (Tom Brady, Barry Bonds).
The difference is Serra’s roster is not filled with four- and five-star talent.
It is unclear the number of transfers Mater Dei, now led by former assistant Frank McManus, has this season. But this much is clear: As with the state game against Mater Dei in 2021 and Bosco last season, Serra is facing one heck of a climb Saturday night, probably an impossible climb.
If the game unfolds as expected, another blowout on the state’s biggest stage, CIF officials must address the elephant in the room: How much longer can this go on? And what can be done to level the playing field?