Big Valley Christian pours foundation for football success

The construction that has taken place at the football stadium at Big Valley Christian High School has been emblematic of the team it celebrates every Friday night.

Piece by piece, with a plan and patience, coach Tim Giannosa has built a team and a season the Big Valley Christian community can be proud of.

It’s been a season of many firsts for the Lions – the first time they’ve won 10 games, the first time they’ve played past Thanksgiving, the first time they’ll appear in a Sac-Joaquin Section championship game.

Big Valley Christian (10-2) will face rival Stone Ridge Christian (10-1) in the Division VII final on Saturday at 1 p.m. at Lincoln High in Stockton.

“We’ve had teams that worked really well together and worked really hard and maybe had a few more standouts,” said Giannosa, who inherited the program from the late Larry Shimel in 2013.

“But this team, starting last year when a majority of them were sophomores, they’ve been working for this. This is a working-class group. They know they have to go out there and fight every time. I don’t know that we have a lot of superstars. We have guys who come together and fight for one goal.”

On Saturday, that goal will be to do what no team has done since Sept. 4, when Ripon Christian rallied from a 21-0 deficit to beat Stone Ridge Christian 35-28.

Since then, Stone Ridge Christian has won nine consecutive games by shutout, including a 37-0 victory over Big Valley Christian on Sept. 25.

Stone Ridge Christian is the defending Division VII champion. Oddsmakers would make Big Valley Christian the decided underdog, but Giannosa doesn’t subscribe to that theory.

Though his team has lost the last three meetings by an average score of 39-6, Giannosa believes his junior-laden club is closing the gap on the Central California Athletic Alliance champions.

“They’ve accomplished some phenomenal things this year, but I don’t view it as a daunting task,” he said. “We were in the red zone three times. I wish I could say they stopped us, but we stopped ourselves with penalties and interceptions.

“When you have those kinds of mistakes in the red zone, you don’t just expect not to score but you don’t expect to win.”

To his point, Big Valley Christian doesn’t cower to Stone Ridge Christian. On Sunday evening, when the small-school section finalists gathered for a banquet at Wine and Roses in Lodi, Giannosa was among the first to welcome Stone Ridge Christian.

“We were much better than the score showed,” Giannosa said. “I think they played a great game. Should they have won that game? Absolutely. We should have played a lot better, too.

“We have some guys that will give it everything they got. It’s exciting to be in this position. We didn’t want to play anybody else. While we were rooting for Millennium, we wanted Stone Ridge.”

Big Valley Christian has responded from its loss to Stone Ridge Christian with seven consecutive wins. The Lions have tackled each challenge with the selflessness demanded of a champion.

Vito Merritt (185 carries, 1,099 yards), Daniel Giannosa (70 catches, 767 yards), Corbin Simon and Cooper Wilson have taken turns shouldering the load offensively. Wilson scored the winning touchdown in last week’s 14-6 win over Delta.

Nineteen players recorded at least a tackle in a 43-6 first-round victory over Foresthill. Fifteen of those players had multiple tackles.

A secondary that struggled to take away the ball in the first half of the season has become a no-fly zone. Big Valley Christian has 14 interceptions, including a team-high six by Noah Magana. He had two picks to help preserve the triumph over Delta.

“Our defense won us that game,” said Giannosa, adding the Lions must be on high alert for the play-action pass from the run-heavy Knights. “They’ll throw the ball once or twice a game. It’s almost always successful and almost always for a touchdown. They beat you and beat you and beat you some more with the run, and then all of sudden launch the tight end deep. If you don’t see him, they’ll throw to him.”

Big Valley Christian is one of three small-school teams making their first appearance in a section final. The other two, Sierra and Liberty Ranch, are in the Division IV final.

This was all part of the plan. Giannosa hopes Big Valley Christian is building much more than a football stadium.

“We had to beat a certain number of teams and come in second in our league to get the path we wanted to the finals,” Giannosa said. “This is exciting for our school and the future of our school. We don’t want to be just an up-and-coming program, but a program that has success and championships.”

This story was originally published November 24, 2015 at 10:35 AM with the headline "Big Valley Christian pours foundation for football success."