100th season of Analy Football underway
The Tigers held their first official practice on Monday
Football in August is a lot of things.
Think balls flying through a piercing blue sky and receivers without leg pads sprinting to haul them in.
Think lineman facing off, imagining how good it will feel to hit someone. Hard.
Think bodies—some tall, some short, some large, some small—flowing through a blue, green, white and yellow turf field, rotating to a new station every ten minutes with a one-minute water break in between.
At the first official practice of the season, the sun is shining and rap music—think “Metro Boomin,” that is, if you even have any knowledge of rap music whatsoever—is blasting.
Chip Castleberry, the longtime coach whose name is the name of the field, is trotting around exuberantly. A Junior Varsity player is throwing up in the trash can.
Life is as it should be.
“It’s a great day to be a Tiger,” says Castleberry, who has spent a total of 65 years with the Analy program as a water boy, player, coach and athletic director. “It’s a great day to be a Tiger!”
It is a great day indeed, for it is a day of unspoiled potential. At Analy High School’s first official practice of the season, the team’s record is, of course, 0-0. The future has the potential to be amazing, and the past—a.k.a. last season, which ended with a 49-0 loss in the playoffs—is reflected upon but is ultimately irrelevant, no matter how good or bad it was.
The 2024 season is also exciting because it marks the 100th year of Analy Football.
This year is also Dan Bourdon’s 15th as the head coach. Bourdon, who was once a quarterback for the Tigers, led the team to five consecutive league championships between 2012 and 2016 before taking a three-year break to spend more time with family.
In 2020, Bourdon returned to his position as the head coach. After a couple of years of near-.500 records, and with the team’s consolidation with El Molino and COVID complications far in the rearview mirror, he is “optimistic for the season.”
“We graduated a lot of experience,” he said. “So there's going to be a lot of new bodies out there, but ones that I think can perform at a high level.”
Revered by his players and alums alike, Bourdon leads a group of 50 young men on the Varsity team, along with another 70 on JV, with 14 other coaches, including Jerod Brown, the former coach of El Molino who is now Bourdon’s right hand man.
“Coach is all business,” said senior wide receiver/defensive back Oliver Sherwin. “He’s a great coach who really pushes us to our limits. Sometimes you don’t get along with him, but that’s okay. Some parents get mad because their kids don’t play, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to win.”
Sherwin says that Bourdon’s “bad cop” demeanor is balanced out by some of the other “good cop” coaches who give the players a little bit more slack. Overall, Bourdon’s team seems to appreciate his seriousness, as they are interested in results, whether that shows up in the record or not.
“We want to make this program into something we aren’t ashamed about again,” said Sherwin. “My cousin is also a freshman, and I want to set a good example for him.”
With the first game of the season on August 30th, the team is already imagining how good it will feel to be back on the field again.
“The atmosphere of a football game is unlike any other,” said senior Gitano Depaola, one of Sherwin’s fellow captains and a slot receiver/outside linebacker. “Everybody is giving 100 percent during practice so that we are ready.”
This season will also be the first to see a realignment of Analy’s league, which now includes, in addition to Santa Rosa and Montgomery, St. Vincent de Paul, Ukiah and Maria Carrillo high schools instead of Windsor, Cardinal Newman, Rancho Cotate high schools—even though they are still set to play Windsor in the first game of the season.
“I’m looking forward to being with the team and maybe making it to the playoffs,” said senior offensive lineman and captain Ioan Ramos.
“I just want big things to happen,” added senior running back and captain Eddie Espinal. “We want to be one of the better teams in the league.”
100 years of football
Analy football has changed a lot over the years.
Analy was at the forefront of many of these changes, as they were one of the first high schools in the state to put lights in their stadium in the 1950s courtesy of the Sebastopol Rotary Club. Believe it or not, the Oakland Raiders would sometimes hold their practices in Sebastopol.
Other notable changes over the years have included the use of more protective equipment along with the ability to stream game tape online rather than needing to make copies of cassettes or physically cut film.
“You wouldn’t even give kids water bottles back in the day,” said former coach and athletic director Chip Castleberry. “You would just give them salt tablets. We weren’t concerned about anyone getting hurt. Someone would get hit and we would just laugh about it.”
Courtesy of Loretta Castleberry, Chip Castleberry’s wife, the Sebastopol Times has gotten a hold of some photographs which show just how much the game and the program has changed over the years.
On October 25, the 2012 team, which made it to the North Coast League Semi-Finals, will be inducted into the Analy Hall of Fame.
The 2024 Tigers hope they can follow in that team’s footsteps. Here’s the schedule for the upcoming season:
100 years. Congratulations