BREAKTHROUGH YEAR FOR HOWE
Clear Lake High School star moving on to SRJC to continue football career, education
LAKEPORT >> Travis Howe lost his senior track season, prom and graduation to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bad year?
Hardly.
A member of Clear Lake High School’s Class of 2020 and now enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College, Howe said he wouldn’t have traded his senior year for anything, even with the coronavirus thrown in there. Who could blame him?
The 18-year-old Lakeport resident, son of Rob and Jodi Howe, is the Lake County Record-Bee’s boys Athlete of the Year following a highly successful senior campaign. Howe earned AllNorth Central League I firstteam honors twice — during his one and only high school football season, and during a 27-5 basketball season that followed on the heels of a 27- 4 junior campaign when he was not a full-time player. That wasn’t the case in 2019-20.
Football
By his own admission, Howe wasn’t ready to play football until his senior year. He went through a huge growth spurt late in his sophomore year and the summer before his junior year.
“I grew like eight inches,”
Howe said.
He also filled out his frame between conditioning and hard work in the weight room where he went from 115 to 225 on the bench press.
“Shady Cerezo (assistant football coach) came to my open gyms and we talked,” Howe said of what led to him play football his senior year. “As soon as I was onboard with football, he (head coach Mark Cory) was happy.”
While a first- year player, Howe said he really wasn’t at much of a disadvantage because the Cardinals were transitioning to a spread offense.
“We were all new to it, so it was the first year for all of us (in that system),” Howe said.
As a sure-handed and quick wide receiver, Howe made the most of his opportunity, leading the team in receiving yardage and touchdowns. He also drew the attention of a handful of football programs, so much so that Howe will be playing football instead of his lifelong love — basketball — in college.
“I never would have thought I’d be playing football in college,” said Howe, who carried a solid 3.6 GPA at Clear Lake and who plans to follow in his dad’s footsteps as a law enforcement officer.
“They’ll love his work ethic, he’s a great kid,” Cory said when asked about Howe’s next stop
at SRJC. Cory, who coached at large school power Eureka High School before taking over the Clear Lake head coaching job in 2016, has seen a fair number of his players move on to the collegiate ranks.
“I don’t think he’s scratched the surface,” Cory said of Howe’s budding football skills. “I think he can go there and play.”
Though he coached Howe for only one season, Cory said the senior was a quick study on both offense and defense.
“I was not smart enough to give him the ball enough earlier in the year,” Cory said of Howe’s breakaway speed on offense. “He kind of became our guy, especially during league.”
Howe never left the field, playing on special teams and in the Clear Lake secondary on defense.
“In one year, he became the
best defensive back I’ve ever coached at Clear Lake,” Cory said. “He kind of took away the other side of the field. Teams wouldn’t throw to his side of the field.”
Basketball
If Howe proved to be a hit on the football field, the best was yet to come. The Cardinals won 27 games in basketball, matching the school-record total they posted a season earlier, only this time with Howe as a starter and making the most of it. A defensive force on a team loaded with offense, Howe helped push the Cardinals over the top again — they repeated as undefeated league champions, earned a section runner- up pennant, and made it as far as the NorCal quarterfinals before losing to powerhouse Lincoln of San Francisco, a Division 1 team compared to Clear Lake’s Division 5.
Usually guarding the other team’s top scorer, Howe excelled at shutting down his man. He did it time and time again. Howe certainly had some game on offense, too, though it wasn’t often needed with the likes of teammates Jaron Mertle, Darius Ford, Tyler Cerini and Donovan Valadez providing plenty of scoring punch. Still, at 6.2 points per game, he had his moments, including a memorable 26-point game in a league win over Cloverdale on the Eagles’ home floor.
The variable that figured heavily into so many Cardinal wins wasn’t how many points he scored, but how many points he prevented.
“We put Travis on the best player against pretty much every team,” Clear Lake coach Scott De Leon said. “I’ll have to go back and look, but I bet what those players averaged against Travis probably dropped by 50 percent versus what they averaged on the season, maybe even a little more than that.”
But Howe’s offense also was there when it was needed most, according to De Leon, who said his 26-point explosion against Cloverdale was the perfect example.
“There were some games where we needed Travis to be the guy … and he was,” said De Leon, who said the unselfishness of the Cardinals was a reason they won 27 games for a second season in a row. “Give credit to Travis for scoring those 26 points, but also give credit to his teammates for recognizing he was the guy on that particular night. They recognized the mismatch we had and kept getting him the ball.”
Still, it was Howe’s defense that earned him the most kudos, according to De Leon.
“He’s got to be in the top two or three,” De Leon said when asked to rate the best defensive players he’s coached. “We’ve had some awfully good defenders over the years. The guy he played behind his junior year (Rodrigo Lupercio) was one of them.”
Lupercio graduated after the 2018-19 season, opening things up for Howe this past season.
“I know it was frustrating for Travis his junior year because it was hard to take Rodrigo off the court, just like it was hard to take Travis off the court this season. But he filled that role as a junior (backup). I know he wasn’t happy. He paid his dues. He let the guy ahead of him get the limelight just like he knew he was going to get it his senior year.”
Howe said he wasn’t surprised that Clear Lake followed a 27- win season with another 27-win season even if that seemed unlikely given the players the Cardinals lost to graduation after the 2018-19 campaign.
“I don’t want to sound cocky, but we had been building up to that since we were little and first started playing,” Howe said of himself and longtime teammates such as Mertle and Ford. “All the work we had put in all those years, it all came together this year. We wanted to put our names up on another banner and that’s what we did. We wanted to make it farther than any other (Clear Lake boys) team had gone before.”
And if for no other reason than the basketball season alone — forget about all the COVID-19 chaos that was to follow only a week after the Cardinals’ season ended — Howe said his senior year was a gigantic win.
“For me and my teammates, the year couldn’t have gone any better. I was past contented with how my senior year went.”
Howe said he did enjoy the graduation parade the Clear Lake High School seniors received as they motored through Lakeport near the end of the school year.
“It was awesome and everybody came out and supported us,” Howe said. “That’s one of the benefits of being from a small town.”
Looking ahead
Breaking up the gang is one of the hardest things about going to college, according to Howe. Mertle is attending UC Merced and Ford is at Chico State.
“I’m definitely used to seeing them every day in practice,” Howe said. “Basketball was our life.”
Howe plans to live in Santa Rosa with former Clear Lake High football player Roman Uribe. While there won’t be fall football at SRJC because of the coronavirus, spring football is a possibility. Classes will be online until further notice.
De Leon, who announced he was stepping down after seven seasons at the helm of the varsity club during the team’s final game last season, said Howe and his teammates bought into the team’s philosophy years ago, making the last two seasons so incredibly successful and the individual success they enjoyed possible.
“I look forward to seeing how they all do in college,” De Leon said of his 2019-20 seniors.
“I think he (Howe) exceeded what we expected in some things,” De Leon said of Howe’s senior season. “I expected him to be the floor general and be the team leader on defense. What I didn’t expect were the times he contributed offensively where we needed him.”