Folsom coach confident going into matchup with De La Salle
There are three big reasons Folsom head coach Kris Richardson is champing at the bit ahead of his team’s seasonopening game at De La SalleConcord on Friday night: He’s local: Richardson played at College Park-Pleasant Hill — about a 15-minute drive from De La Salle. He then played for former De La Salle coach Ed Hall at Diablo Valley College.
“I’m very familiar with the history of De La Salle football,” he said. “I grew up with friends who played there and was teammates at DVC with former De La Salle players. I’ve been to and watched many games at Owen Owens Stadium, but never participated in one. I can’t wait.” He wants to right 2 wrongs: Folsom has lost its only two meetings to De La Salle, in the 2012 and 2013 CIF Northern California Open championship, 49-15 and 45-17. Both Folsom teams were quarterbacked by Washington Heisman Trophy hopeful Jake Browning, both were 14-0 and they had averaged 47 and 54 points, respectively, heading into the title games. After the second loss, the Bulldogs changed their strength and conditioning regimen. They’re now looking to end De La Salle’s 26-year stranglehold on the region. The Spartans haven’t lost to a Northern California opponent in 290 games.
“We learned a lot from those losses,” Richardson said. “We changed our approach.” His Bulldogs are really good: De La Salle coach Justin Alumbaugh says so. Folsom returns 15 starters from last season’s 16-0 1-AA state-championship team. The Bulldogs feature dual-threat quarterback Kaiden Bennett (5,649 total yards, 73 TDs last season), 6-foot-4 Clemson-bound receiver Joe Ngata (81 catches, 1,777 yards, 26 TDs) and threestar defensive tackle Tyler Hardeman.
The Bulldogs are fast, confident and efficient, as they showed last week in a scrimmage with Sheldon-Sacramento, one of the Sacramento Bee’s top 10 teams.
Folsom scored six touchdowns in the first half before resting starters.
The Bee’s Joe Davidson, who has covered high school football in the region since the late 1980s, says the Bennett-toNgata combination is the “best 1-2 punch we’ve seen in our area.”
It’s a big reason Davidson said that “it can be easily argued that Folsom is the most dominant, talented, skilled, prepared, proven and superbly conditioned and coached team in (Sacramento) region history to open a season.”
With seven starters returning on defense, including fourstar linebackers Henry To’oto’o and Jhasi Wilson and cornerbacks Amir Wallace and Taveis Marshall, the Spartans are equipped to slow down Folsom.
“Those (previous Folsom) teams weren’t chopped liver,” said Terry Eidson, De La Salle’s defensive coordinator since 1982. “They were a good program then and they are now. … They were 16-0 last year and state champs and have about everyone back. It’s a big test for us.”
The key likely will be containing Bennett, who reminds Eidson of former St. John Bosco quarterback Re-al Mitchell (now at Iowa State).
“At every level — NFL, college or high school — you face a quarterback who can throw and run equally well, it’s very difficult to prepare,” Eidson said. Bennett “is a handful.”
De La Salle hopes the same can be said for sophomore quarterback Dorian Hale, who looked sharp in last week’s scrimmage and is making his first start.
“They look like an incredible high school football team,” Folsom assistant Bobby Fresques said. “We look like an incredible high school team. It’ll be fun.”