By admin 
When you talk high school football in Northern California and break down the data, it’s no surprise that the De La Salle Spartans of Contra Costa County top a lot of lists.
Read more UC Davis football enters season No. 6 nationwide in FCS. Who starts at QB?
De La Stomp, anyone?
Cal-Hi Sports recently dropped some numbers on schools with the best all-time winning percentages, and it starts with the Spartans of national renown. The list also includes a Sacramento program that has a surprising place in state history.
De La Salle has a 566-85-8 record since fielding its first varsity team in 1972, including a 12-1 mark in 2025, good for a state-leading all-time winning percentage of 86.5%. Included in that run was an all-levels football record 151-game winning streak that ended in 2004.
The Spartans owned Northern California to the tune of having a 318-game streak without a loss against teams north of Fresno, spanning the 1991-2021 seasons.
Second on the state’s all-time winning percentage list?
The Inderkum Tigers of Sacramento. A winning percentage does not equate to all-time victory totals. Inderkum opened in the Natomas Unified School District in 2005, and the football program became an instant winner under eventual 200-game winning coach Terry Stark, now in his first year at Antelope High of the Roseville Joint Union District. He is one of three active 200-game winning coaches in Sacramento.
Inderkum has gone 205-50 all time for a winning percentage of 80.4%, and they haven’t slowed down a bit. The large-school, Division I Tigers and coach Justin Reber enter this season ranked fourth in The Sacramento Bee’s Top 25 rankings. What’s missing in the Tigers trophy case is a CIF Sac-Joaquin Section championship despite several trips to the finals, including in Divisions II and III.
Longtime North Bay power Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa is fifth on the state’s all-time winning-percentage list, according to Cal-Hi, having won 79.2% of its games. The program’s all-time record is 504-145-12 entering Friday’s opener at Bee No. 1-ranked Folsom.
DLS opened under direction of Sacramento native
De La Salle opened in 1965, but it took founding principal Brother Norman Cook years to get a football program started on campus.
A graduate of Christian Brothers High School of Sacramento and later an administrator at the school, Brother Cook told The Bee decades ago that he found resistance to starting the sport by campus teachers and district administrators who feared that blocking and tackling would be dangerous and a distraction from academics.
De La Salle did not field a winning team until a young coach named Bob Ladouceur took over in 1979. The school has not had a losing season since, going 547-46-3 in that stretch.
Ladouceur went a remarkable 399-25-3 at De La Salle, stepping down in 2012. He has remained close to the program, serving as an assistant and mentor and this fall is coaching the school’s freshman team. His varsity successor and former Spartans captain and defensive leader Justin Alumbaugh has gone 148-21. The foundation of DLS success is fundamentals, strength and conditioning and brotherhood. The program has won 40 North Coast Section championships since 1982, including the last 33 in succession in addition to reaching the CIF State finals a record 16 times.
De La Salle devoured Sacramento-area competition, not losing to a single regional team from 1979-2021. Then the Folsom Bulldogs broke through.
After suffering five regular-season and playoff losses to the Spartans, Folsom beat De La Salle, 28-27, in the CIF Northern California Division I-AA final in 2021. Folsom then topped De La Salle in Concord, 24-20, early in the 2022 season on a late Austin Mack touchdown plunge to become the first team to beat the Spartans on their home turf twice in a row since Salesian of Richmond did so in 1978 and 1979.
Read more Jaguar at California wildlife sanctuary dies from 2 rattlesnake bites. ‘Huge loss’
De La Salle plays Granite Bay in Week 10 of this season, an unusual bye week otherwise for the programs.
Sac-Joaquin Section’s winningest programs
The Manteca Buffaloes of San Joaquin County are celebrating their 100th year of football, and after going 11-1 in 2025, they have 645 all-time victories.
That win total tops all section schools. Next are the Grant Pacers of Del Paso Heights with 622 victories.
Grant opened in 1932 and rose to power in the 1980s and to superpower levels in the 1990s and 2000s, earning Bee Team of the Decade honors for those decades. Pacers coaching great Mike Alberghini was The Bee’s Coach of the Decade for the 1990s and 2000s. The Grant field bears his name. Coach Al died in 2025 at 78 years old.
Alberghini won a regional-record 282 games at Grant, and his successor and former Pacers player Carl Reed has won three section and NorCal crowns plus a CIF State championship in recent years.
Third on the section’s all-time victory list are the small-school Escalon Cougars with 613.
Cal-Hi did not list the Elk Grove Thundering Herd or the Placer Hillmen on the all-time winning-percentage list as the schools did not qualify. But the programs have combined to win more than 1,000 games: Elk Grove has 555 all-time wins, and Placer has 530.
What about Folsom?
Folsom opened in 1922 and fielded its first football team in 1941, but it wasn’t until 2009 that the Bulldogs inched over .500 for the first time.
Folsom was NorCal ranked No. 1 in 1962 when the enrollment was fewer than 500 students under famed coach Dewey Guerra, who started the Cordova Lancers program, located a few miles south on Highway 50, from scratch in 1963. Cordova led the nation in victories in the 1970s, going 102-6-1 under Guerra and his replacement Ron Lancaster. Cordova has 407 all-time wins.
Folsom won section titles in 1989 and 1990 under coach Tom Doherty, a Cordova assistant in the 1970s who was paramount in Folsom adding its blue field. Doherty later hired two coaches to take the Folsom program to new heights, in Kris Richardson and Troy Taylor.
Since 2008, Folsom has gone 223-27 with 12 section and six CIF State championships. Current coach Paul Doherty (no relation to Tom Doherty) has won five successive section D-I titles and two CIF State titles in three years, and he regularly credits Richardson and Taylor for laying the foundation of success.
Read more Report: Bennedict Mathurin, Pelicans agree to 2-year deal
This story was originally published August 26, 2026 at 6:00 AM.