Veteran Calif. HS football coach steps down

To be fair, it isn't just Catholic schools. Oaks Christian came out of nowhere, as did Valor Christian in Colorado.

De La Salle didn't have a winning season for its first 15 years.

 

CIF is a micro version of the NCAA..

 

That was the thing with Ladouceur. During their 151-game win streak, his name would come up for college jobs, but he was quite happy as a high school coach and religion teacher. It sounds like he'll still be involved in the program, as either a position coach or with the jv or frosh.

Only talked to him once, on assignment from Cal-Hi Sports, and he was a very direct guy.

 

I was on a HS team my junior year that had 10 players get scholarships to play Division I ball and two of whom made it to the NFL. We were ranked among the best teams in the state all year and when we scrimmaged De La Salle they beat the living shit out of us. If memory serves, this was a couple years before the streak began.

 

I saw his team play for the California state championship at the end of the 2011 season. They were one of the most fundamentally-sound teams that I've ever seen.

 

It seemed like the entire team was 6-foot to 6-3 and 220 to 240 pounds. Everybody was "cut." No big fat linemen or scrawny DBs.

 

Unbelievable record. He didn't even average 1 loss per season. Just incredible.

http://espn.go.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/7001261/top-15-players-de-la-salle

 

Can someone explain how the California state championships work for football? Is it just 5 or 6 classes with a champion for each? I'm assuming that's impossible to do seeing as how the state is a big damn state.

Thanks.

 

It used to be the furthest you could go was "Section Champions" They do it differently now where some of the teams from the Bay Area and further north can actually play the southern teams, but I'm not sure of the exact setup.

The year we made the sectional semifinals we were playing into December, so I'm guessing they changed it up if De La Salle is playing schools like LA Crenshaw in the playoffs now. That didn't used to happen, at least not in the playoffs... We used to always talk about how great it would be if De La Salle would be able to play Mater Dei. I don't know if that ever happened... With high schools games being created for TV these days, it wouldn't surprise me if it has...

 

Mizzou, they do it the same way now -- up to section champions -- and then pick the teams BCS-style (except with humans and not computers) out of the 10 sections to play in a four-team "bracket." There's a North championship and a South championship in each division (Open, plus I through IV) and then the winners meet for the championship.

This system is new, I want to say less than five years old, so most of the time De La Salle couldn't be more than a section champion.

 

They've changed it further than even the last time I looked, which was four years ago. The four-team CIF "bracket" is better than voting two finalists, which is better in turn than no champion at all.

 

Yeah, I read one of the stories where they said called De La Salle a "state champion" and I wasn't sure if the writer was correct or not until I looked it up... I knew they had been declared "national champion" a few times, if you consider USA Today's dreadful high school poll to be something worthy of determining a "champion".