The Road to the Record Book

The Beginnings

I have always enjoyed high school football.  I played on a team and got into a better college than my academic record might have suggested that I deserved because of football.  But after playing, I saw a few games in Norristown, PA before moving my family west to California in 1992.  Once in the Danville area, I started following the Monte Vista program. Driving all around the East Bay to see home and away games.

My son played for Coach Bergman at Mote Vista the first two years Craig was head coach of the football program (1997-98).  I went back to watch a HS basketball game for my own high school in Pennsylvania and purchased their team yearbook where I found someone had assembled a number of stats on the team and the players. I saw that my name was at the bottom of Page 1 as a scoring leader.  By now, my 15.4 PPG average has surely caused me to fall completely off the list. 

But the document that I read and how I scoured it looking for names of players that I knew or player with intrigued me. It made me wonder about what statistics/results/history Monte Vista Football had available. I found out that the school hadn’t accumulated anything.  And so, my quest began to build the program's history through published statistics/results. Here is what I have done.

 Gathering the data

 I started out by saving articles from the San Ramon Valley Times as new games were played.  Then, over the ensuing years - before moving to Southern California and now Florida, I visited libraries in Pleasant Hill, Livermore, Oakland, Hayward, and even Half Moon Bay looking at microfilm of old newspaper articles on games.  Articles that I found, and their accompanying statistics were copied and inserted in three-ring binders.  Digitization of this data would mean that team and player results could be summarized and evaluated.  In 2009, I completed digitizing all game results back to the 1968 season, which, at the moment, I consider the first year of the varsity program (See another Story for more discussion here).

In 2010, I contacted Steve Abrams of the 1987 team, and that started a whole new effort.  Steve wanted to see the creation of a Monte Vista Football Alumni association.  He helped drive that process with George Schramm and a few other local MV football alumni.

Digitization of the Data

But my interest was still in the numbers and getting others to see the numbers.  When I digitized things, I built two spreadsheets in Excel.  I chose Excel because it was the tool that I knew best and I was certain to have to do a pile of manual typing to create a digitized set of data.  The two spreadsheets recorded Team Results and Player Statistics.  At this point, there are digitized statistics of every team result and probably 95% of offensive player statistics.  I have another story where I discuss the statistical detail.  Data gathering of information for the site is an ongoing effort, as is its digitization.

Building the 1st Generation Monte Vista Football Records website

Having the data digitized was great for me.  I could use the tools that I built to find out all sorts of interesting facts.  But no one else could easily see those results and records.  So, I learned to use a tool to build the first Monte Vista Football records web site.  In addition to being able to display results and statistics for the team and the players, I added another goal.  Hopefully, in the end, any Monte Vista Football Player would be able to find their name and photo on the site at least once.  This meant two things.  First, I needed to gather player photos (I did not do too well) and team photos (I have most of them).  Second, I needed to create an all-time roster list from rosters available for each season.  For the most part, the mission was accomplished for both of these items.

There was interest around the site and what it presented.  But it was very difficult to update and maintain, which could only be done after the season was over.  I took the site down after 2-3 years.

The 2nd Generation Monte Vista Football Records Website

Nothing was planned for this.  Then in May of 2026, football alumni Brian Holter approached dear old Dad and offered to build a new site using my Excel data and Artificial Intelligence tools.  Over the Memorial Day Weekend, he built the new site that you are reading this document from.  Since then we have found more data and created new features.  We both hope you find what you are reading here as interesting as we found the experience of constructing it.