Johansen football playing for first place when it takes on perennial power Los Banos
Johansen High football coach Rod Smith Sr. has been speaking this season into existence for a few years.
In 2021, fresh off the COVID-19 pandemic, he saw the team had potential. He recognized some players at the junior varsity level who had promise and could be special if they continued to work.
In 2022, those JV players got their first varsity experience, taking their lumps along the way while learning valuable lessons in a 1-9 season.
In 2023, the team has put it all together. The Vikings are off to their best start since 2019 with a 5-1 overall record and a 3-0 record against Western Athletic Conference opponents. More than 20 players are now seniors on varsity after showing promise as sophomores in 2021.
“We had a lot of confidence in this team,” said Smith, who has coached in the program for 18 years, spending the last four as the head coach. “We feel like they can do some really good things.
“This is the bulk of that squad, and it was probably only 30 of them on that JV team and I would say maybe 25 of those are together still.”
The Vikings will put their unbeaten WAC record on the line Friday night at home against defending league champion Los Banos. Kickoff is slated for 7 p.m.
A Vikings win goes a long way in league standing and playoff seeding. The Vikings are the section’s 12th-best Division III team, according to MaxPreps, which records high school rankings, scores and history dating back to 2004.
In the most recent playoff projections, the Vikings are slotted at No. 11 in the 12-team Division III playoff bracket.
Exciting to see unlikely star ‘explode’
Smith estimates Tek Garcia entered his senior season with fewer than 10 total carries.
In fact, he never played running back before this year. In past years, he was a cornerback on defense and played the wing in the Vikings’ Wing-T offense.
Garcia’s shot came in Johansen’s run-first offense due to unfortunate injuries. After two running backs suffered preseason injuries and another was sidelined in the season opener, all signs pointed to the new guy to take the offensive charge.
As the team’s go-to running back, Garcia exploded this season. He leads the Sac-Joaquin Section in rushing yards (1,165). He is the only player in the section with over 1,100 yards. He also has scored eight touchdowns on the ground.
In most cases, a running back is nothing without his offensive line — and Johansen has a great one. Robbie Buantello, Richard Nuku, Jonathon Rodriguez, Sonny Vasquez and Samuel Reyes all have a hand in Garcia’s success this year.
The Vikings went from a running-back-by-committee outfit to a team that relied on a workhorse. It worked and Smith continued to feed the hot hand.
“He really started blossoming last year. In a game against Beyer, he had an interception that sealed the game and it seemed to kind of blow his confidence up,” Smith said of Garcia. “I feel like he just kind of steamrolled off that. … It’s been great to see him explode.
“He’s a fantastic kid. He’s got good grades, he doesn’t doesn’t come off as arrogant. We ask him to do something, he just does it. We tell him we’re gonna give him rest, he just comes off. He doesn’t complain about it. He gives you everything he has. He’s one of a kind.”
Running back Kean Saing suffered one of the preseason injuries. He missed the entire preseason but returned for the first league game against Pacheco. Last week against Ceres another back, Jairus Vasquez, was the Vikings’ leading rusher with 100 yards. Both will likely continue to take the load off Garcia as the season continues.
Inside the Johansen-Los Banos matchup
Friday’s matchup is arguably the biggest in recent memory for Johansen.
Last season, the Los Banos Tigers swept the Western Athletic Conference. The 7-0 league record was the program’s best since it went unbeaten in WAC play in 2014. The Tigers have not lost a league game since they fell to Davis on Sept. 24, 2021, during the Spartans’ 10-0 season.
In 2021, Johansen went 1-6 in league play. The Vikings’ only win of the season came against league opponent Beyer, 30-28, in overtime.
Heading into Friday night’s affair, Johansen and Los Banos are two of three WAC teams with perfect 3-0 records: the Tigers, Vikings and Lathrop High. To make things even more interesting, both teams are 5-1 overall.
Los Banos is led by dynamic dual-threat quarterback David Herrera, who last season rushed for 879 yards and 13 touchdowns and added 1,206 passing yards and another 16 scores through the air. He was named the 2022 WAC Offensive Player of the Year.
The Tigers average 34 points a game and allow just 14. In league games, the defense has been even better, allowing just 28 total points in three games — an average of just over nine points allowed a game.
According to MaxPreps, Johansen is looking for its first win over the Tigers since 2006. The Vikings won in 2004 (20-7), 2005 (32-26) and 2006 (40-6) but have lost the last five matchups.
The Vikings’ lone loss this season was to Bear River of Grass Valley. They went 2-1 in nonleague games and beat Pacheco, Mountain House and Ceres in their three league games. Their point margin is not as lopsided as that of Los Banos, but week after week, Smith is proud that his team continues to make plays to pull out wins. Four of its five victories have come by less than five points each.
That 2019 season started the exact same way. After going 2-1 in their first three games, the Vikings beat the exact same league teams, Pacheco, Mountain House and Ceres, in their first WAC games. That year, they lost to Los Banos, 34-33, and finished the season 7-3.
Though they take a three-game win streak into Friday night’s matchup, Smith knows how important it will be to play their best game of the season. He said the team went “back to the basics’‘ this week in practice. The players scaled back their weekly conditioning to avoid game-day fatigue, adjusted blocking assignments offensively and worked with the defense on containing Herrera, who rushed for 205 yards and three touchdowns last week against Mountain House.
“When we play at the level we’re capable of playing, I think we can beat anybody in our league,” Smith said. “Last week … I don’t feel like we played to our level and we (still) got a victory. But we need to play to our level this week. Los Banos is a good football team. They’ve been a good football team for as long as I can remember. In my 18 years here, they’ve always had a good program.”
This story was originally published October 5, 2023 at 12:48 PM.
