If both Franklin and Elk Grove win this Friday night another
first for the Elk Grove Unified School District will be marked. It will be the
first time two EGUSD schools play for a Sac-Joaquin Section football
championship in two different divisions.
In 2010 Monterey Trail and Pleasant Grove – both EGUSD
schools - faced off for the Division I championship, which the Eagles won, 21-6.
Franklin, now undefeated at 12-0, is in Division I while Elk
Grove, with its lone loss to the Wildcats, is in Division II.
But, both the Wildcats and the Herd have huge tasks in front
of them when Franklin hosts defending Division I champion Granite Bay in one of
the semi-final games. The other game in D-I will pit undefeated Burbank against
Oak Ridge. That contest will be played Saturday at 1 p.m. at Titan Stadium.
In Division II, Elk Grove will host Del Oro, who just
squeaked into the playoffs with a 5-5 record and is seeded 15th, but behind
star running back Brandon Monroe has turned on the afterburners with big wins
over St. Mary’s and Yuba City. Del Oro is the defending Division III champion.
The Golden Eagles and the Grizzlies are both members of the
Sierra Football League.
In the other D-II semi-final undefeated Folsom will take on
Buhach Colony, the fifth seed.
The weather calls for a sunny day Friday, but if you can’t
make it the Franklin-Granite Bay game will be broadcast live on the Section’s
TV portal, cifsacjoaquin.tv. Access Sacramento is awaiting approval, but will
likely broadcast Elk Grove-Del Oro live on cable channel 17 and streamed live
on accesssacramento.org.
This is the third year for this football playoff format
where the 64 schools that qualify for the post-season in Divisions I through IV
are placed into the brackets by enrollment numbers. The largest 16 schools are
put into Division I and so forth. Some
schools, like Del Oro, may compete in one of two divisions depending on the
size of the other schools which qualify for the playoffs.
Franklin is the second-largest high school in the
Sac-Joaquin Section with more than 2800 students while Elk Grove has about
1,800. ...
When Elk Grove’s baseball team defeated Pitman High School
of Turlock in the 2006 Section championships they beat a hard-throwing
right-handed pitcher in the second and clinching game of the best-two-out-of
three series, Colin Kaepernick.
On the heels of Kaepernick’s first NFL start in San
Francisco’s 32-7 win over Chicago Monday night, came memories of Kaepernick, a
multi-sport athlete in high school, and his baseball skills.
“He was one of the top pitchers in the Section,” Elk Grove
baseball coach Jeff Carlson recalled. “He was a tall, skinny kid, but was
impressive. You could see by the way he was warming up before the game he was a
next-level type of player. He had a different intensity level than a typical
high school pitcher.”
Elk Grove beat Kaepernick and Pitman, 4-2, in that game.
Jamie Niley, Sean Grayson and Dwight Childs each had doubles while Josh Powers
tripled off Kaepernick. Ray Hernandez, now a Class-A pitcher in the
Diamondbacks’ organization, had a pair of RBI’s on two singles.
Elk Grove’s starting pitcher that day was David Freitas, now
a catcher in the Oakland A’s minor league system.
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