Stanislaus District’s Got Talent: 2015 Raiders face rival with SJS title on the line

Featured players: Liam Pecchenino and Justin Rice

Pecchenino and Rice will be featured together in the final two parts of the series. Before he was a track and field athlete at Fresno State, Pecchenino was a two-year varsity player at safety, tight end and linebacker. He contributed on special teams and on defense in his senior season at Central Catholic. He now teaches government and economics and coaches Central Catholic’s freshman team.

Rice was the 2014 and 2015 Stanislaus District Player of the Year, held Central Catholic rushing records and played both offense and defense on state championship teams. After a decorated high school career, Rice played Division I football at Fresno State, Arkansas State and Utah State, starting at running back then switching to linebacker. After college, he played in the Canadian Football League in 2022 before a meniscus injury three games into the year ended his season. Rice returned to the States and is now a pilot.

A whole new season

Everyone gets 10 guaranteed regular season games.

The best play week by week, extending their season only if they win in the playoffs.

The best of the best play for championships.

The 2015 Central Catholic football team was starting the journey to a fourth consecutive blue Sac-Joaquin Section banner.

The first two games were blowouts as the Raiders beat El Camino 42-0 and Christian Brothers 63-0.

The week of the third-round game against Placer brought a number of practice visitors. The crew recording the “Chasing Four: The Story of the 2015 CC Raiders” documentary usually showed only up on game days. But by then, it was around nearly every day, behind the scenes and filming practices for the project that would be released in a few months.

Coaches also stopped by. The Raiders were lectured by local leaders like Mark Loureiro imparting their knowledge on how to deal with the Placer Hillmen who, at the time, were undefeated.

Placer had scored over 40 points in 10 of its 12 games with five 50-point games and one 60-point outing. Up to that point in the season, Placer had the second-best offense in the Sac-Joaquin Section, with 1,505 passing yards and 4,519 yards on the ground, an average of 502 yards per game. Everything they heard all week was how impossible Placer was to stop.

The Raiders’ defense, which allowed more than 14 points just twice heading into the matchup, had other plans.

“They all told us, ‘Placer is gonna score 35 to 42 points, so you guys gotta score 49,’ and I just remember the absolute offense we took to that,” Liam Pecchenino said. “I would argue we had two of the best linebackers in the section (Kekupa’a Freehauf and Austin Escobar) and there was no way they were gonna let a team score 35 on them. Especially a Wing-T team. No way.”

What transpired that Friday night in front of hundreds of fans and former NFL player and coach Herm Edwards was a 48-14 beatdown with 304 rushing yards and five touchdowns from Justin Rice, six total sacks and a pick-six by senior Josh Frowein.

The win set up the matchup everyone knew was coming after the bout for the Valley Oak League championship: No. 1 Central Catholic vs. No. 2 Oakdale Part II, with the Division III section title on the line.

“You can ask any player on that sideline, we knew who we were gonna face in that section final,” Pecchenino said. “We knew after Week 10. We knew who we were gonna see in three to four weeks.”

A section championship rematch against a rival

The week of the section title game was all business. No time for locker room shenanigans or Madden Mobile games. They were preparing for a rematch against their rivals in the biggest game of their season.

“We probably watched more film that week than I had in my high school life,” Rice said. “Every lunch we were watching film, we were watching film before practice, after practice. It was a lot of trying to clean up what we did wrong and fix things we could have done better.”

Both sides knew it wouldn’t be the 42-37 shootout the matchup was just three weeks prior, though a number of local reporters and coaches made predictions it would be. Whoever was going to win would be the more disciplined, harder hitting, better executing team. That would secure the title.

They adjusted their defense more than the offense, Rice said, after Oakdale exploited a few holes in the Raiders’ pass coverage the few times they lined up in some formations.

“They got us a few times in that first game,” Rice admitted.

The game was at a neutral site, Lincoln of Stockton, and the teams hit harder than they had all season. Rice finished with 168 yards and two touchdowns on 28 carries, an average of six yards per carry. But he remembers it being a dogfight. He said that after how easy the first few rounds of the playoffs were, it felt like the Mustangs were stopping him. That’s what comes with a game of this magnitude between rivals.

“We knew they didn’t like us, and they knew we didn’t like them,” Rice said. “So there was definitely some fire in that game. I’m sure everybody was buddy-buddy after the game, but during the game, both teams were trying to prove they were the better team.”

The Raiders recorded just one tackle for loss and did not force a fumble, but they allowed just one touchdown and senior Austin Escobar recorded an interception in the Raiders’ 21-7 victory.

“Our defense was the reason we won that game,” Rice said. “They gave the offense a lot of short field to work with, which is where we got most of our points. Our defense was pretty unstoppable that game, especially against Oakdale who scores a lot of points if they can exploit something.”

Perfect record intact, league championship secured. Blue banner won. After winning their last three section titles in Division IV, they won their fourth in their first season in D-III.

“It was a little more exciting that year because we were undefeated and we were still going,” Rice said, “and we were playing in a higher division.”

Said Pecchenino: “This was the first year we had been bumped up, and pretty much everyone said we weren’t going to win it.”

The goals were accomplished

When the season started five months prior, their only real goals were league and section titles.

Sure, the Raiders were three-time defending state champions and had a lot to live up to, but to them, anything after that fourth-straight section title was just icing on the cake.

What loomed was arguably their toughest challenges of all as they geared up to take on not just the Sac-Joaquin Section’s best, but the top small-school teams in California.

They were 14-0 with just one guaranteed game remaining, the Northern California championship against storied program out of the Bay Area Marin Catholic, a win would position them where no other Sac-Joaquin Section football team had ever been: staring at the possibility of a fourth straight state championship.

This story was originally published December 23, 2025 at 11:50 AM.

Quinton Hamilton

The Modesto Bee

Quinton Hamilton covers high school sports for The Modesto Bee. He is a Southern California native and received his bachelor’s degree from Pacific Union College and a master’s in journalism from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. Quinton has worked at the Record-Journal in Meriden and helped on projects at Hearst Connecticut.