HMB’s ray of sunshine
QB Gavin Tomberlin, Half Moon Bay teammates continue down winning path
HALF MOON BAY >> Gavin Tomberlin isn’t just the quarterback on Half Moon Bay’s undefeated, sectionchampion football team.
He’s also its ambassador.
At any given moment on Twitter, Tomberlin is politely chiming in about all things Half Moon Bay football.
“First trip to the Big Dance!”
“Made the top 10!” “Great write up … thanks for covering.”
There really is nobody like Tomberlin in Bay Area high school football, a combination of talent, intellect, kindness and teamwide promoter.
When Tomberlin was doing a one-on-one interview on camera after a crucial win over Aragon in late October, a coach noticed that the quarterback was delaying the team’s postgame meeting.
“C’mon, Sunshine! Hurry up!” the coach shouted.
Tomberlin doesn’t have blonde hair like Sunshine, the play-making quarterback in the Denzel Washington movie “Remember the Titans,” but he’s OK with the comparison. How can he not be? The guy is a bottle of sunshine, if there ever was one.
“He can play that role as the star quarterback, your stereotypical good-looking kid on campus,” Half Moon Bay coach Keith Holden said. “Everything goes his way. He can definitely play that role.”
But Holden and anyone close to Half Moon Bay football knows that Tomberlin works for everything he gets. He promotes and defends the team, not himself.
This Half Moon Bay team is special. When its core group of seniors were sophomores, Half Moon Bay won a Central Coast Section Division V championship.
Last season, it won another.
The success meant a promotion, to the top division in Half Moon Bay’s league.
Each week this fall in the Peninsula Athletic League’s Bay Division, Half Moon Bay faced mighty challenges. Each week, it turned the challenges into dust.
The Cougars went undefeated in the 10-game regular season and breezed through three rounds of playoffs to win one of the CCS’s Open divisions and secure a spot in the program’s first Northern California regional.
Half Moon Bay will aim for 14-0 when it plays host to Sutter on Saturday night.
The town is buzzing as the Cougars are just one win from playing for a state championship.
“It’s a good time,” Tomberlin said. “But everyone wants to see us continue.”
The quarterback, as with some of his teammates, has deep Half Moon Bay roots. Tomberlin’s parents went to Half Moon Bay High, as did their parents.
“My great grandparents came, I am pretty sure, on the same exact boat from Portugal way back when,” Tomberlin said. “This is the first place they came and the last place they lived. It’s paradise over here.”
The roots on this Half Moon Bay team were planted a decade ago. Tomberlin, running back Chase Hofmann, receiver Hayden Von Almen and several others began forming bonds and developing skills in the town’s Pop Warner system.
Tomberlin played tight end at first. But when the team’s quarterback moved to an older division, Tomberlin took over and never switched again.
“I remember the first time I saw him working out, I think he was 7,” Holden said. “I saw him on the football field throwing passes, working on his game. It’s not like he woke up and was a great quarterback. He’s really put in a lot of time, a lot of hours, to be as good as he is right now.”
Tomberlin is just one of many good players on this team.
Dylan Williams is a newcomer to the school but not the town. The senior had been the kicker at Menlo School but transferred in time for this season.
Holden raved about Williams after the team won its first two games, saying the success starts with the kicker, who consistently sends kickoffs into the end zone for touchbacks.
But the coach neglected to say that Williams is fast enough to return kickoffs, run reverses and chase down Tomberlin’s passes.
“We never knew Dylan actually,” Tomberlin said. “We just knew the Menlo kicker who was really good lived in Half Moon Bay. He’s practically my neighbor almost.”
It didn’t take an advanced degree to figure out that Williams, who has made two 49-yard field goals this season, was multi-talented.
“Oh, this guy is a real weapon,” Tomberlin recalled thinking.
Tomberlin’s not so bad, either. Holden doesn’t pay too close attention to the quarterback’s statistics, but he knows Tomberlin’s interception number: zero.
“We don’t do it without him,” Holden said. “It’s real simple. The past two games we haven’t punted. You look at his stats through the season — I don’t know how many touchdowns he’s thrown — but zero interceptions on the season. He’s been lights out.
“Throwing the ball and all that has been good. But he’s been equally as good with the run game. I know it’s not as dynamic statwise. But for what we do, him reading the triple option, it’s made him complete. It’s made our offense really tough to stop.”
In late summer, Tomberlin and his teammates started down this path of uncharted territory, a good team unsure how it would do against a stronger schedule.
Now, as winter approaches, the Cougars are still navigating down the path of the unknown, hoping this special season has one more week of life beyond this one.
“It’s exceeded my wildest dreams,” Tomberlin said. “It’s just awesome because we’re doing it all together and hard work really does pay off.”