About

The Blog

A season scoring summary page accompanies each blog post. This page has game outcomes, game location, individual school information, and league affiliations and records for every team that competed that year. Some information, especially for the myriad of small San Diego County private schools, never made it into the San Diego newspapers or other publications. The Union-Tribune database has been the source of most but not all scores since 1965.

Former players, coaches, sportswriters and fans who follow San Diego high school sports are invited to contribute with comments on errors and omissions. Future seasons will be narrated and scores added as we move along.

The Author

From 1895 to 1965,” a 68-page compilation of San Diego County football scores and records made available to high schools and the general public. Forty-one schools, members of the CIF San Diego Section that was formed in 1960, were cited.

Union sports desk.

My writing and reporting actually started in 1955 when Humberto Chacon, the sports editor of the Lincoln High Buzz, assigned me to cover the Hornets’ junior varsity football team. I had just enrolled in Mr. John DeBeck’s journalism class at the beginning of my junior year.

I later had professional positions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, and St. Louis, but San Diego always was home, and I maintained an interest in San Diego’s outstanding high school sports scene.

After working in the NBA and NFL, and covering major sports events for the Tribune in a 50-year span, I retired a second time and came home for good in 2009. I now had time to address a lingering idea of more than 20 years: Reprising the 1965 football publication, this time not in print but in cyberspace.

It is an ongoing process. The San Diego Section of the CIF now numbers at least 90 schools fielding teams, including nine from the Imperial Valley. Holtville, Calipatria and Imperial joined in 1980, followed in 2000 by El Centro Central, El Centro Southwest, Blythe Palo Verde, Calexico, and Calexico Vincent Memorial.

Finally, special thanks to my good friend and cyberspace mentor Henrik Jonson (see below) and to my wife, Susie, always patient, always supportive.

Rick Smith, January, 2012.

The Webmaster

It all started when I heard my ol’ friend Rick typed his Upper Deck football cards on an IBM Selectric and faxed them to Upper Deck. I vowed from then on to keep Rick in more current technology.

Looking back it was one of the best times of my life, as it should be, looking only forward with all dreams and aspirations intact. The camaraderie, lasting friendships, ribbing about singing in the school chorus, towel snaps in the team shower, called ‘braintrust’ by non-college bound senior teammates for correcting their chemistry homework during homeroom, Atomic balm in the jockstrap, bus rides to away games, free hotdogs after home games, are all cherished memories. I know and understand why high school sports experiences are held in high esteem. I do.

Proudly holding my ’67 UCLA bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering I became a San Diego resident in 1970 employed at NCR, then a Scripps Ranch resident with Carol since 1972, now in Poway since 1987. I’ve continuously kept pace with electronics, then embedded software technology, and now with the ever-evolving tools and methods of ‘cloud’ based computing and the internet.

My long friendship with Rick gave me this opportunity to attempt mastery of website technology, creation and administration. To combine WordPress, HTML, PHP, SQL, and other web-tools for an informative website for San Diego football fans is for me a naturally evolved pursuit.

Henrik Jonson, January, 2012 (updated 2023)