Daly City Sports Hall of Fame recognizes the ‘Forgotten Regents’

Prior to Saturday, only one Serramonte High School graduate could be found among the 102 plaques of those enshrined at War Memorial — Ricky Mixon, the pride of the Regents’ great basketball teams of the late 1970s. Mixon, a 1979 graduate of Serramonte, was inducted to the Hall in 2015. He said he couldn’t fathom why he’s the only one.

“I have no clue,” Mixon said. “Because if Serramonte had never closed down, all those things Jefferson did from ’81 all the way up to ’90, that would have been Serramonte, because that’s where all those kids lived.”

Corey Cafferata — a Daly City Sports Hall of Famer after his epic years as head coach of the Westmoor girls’ basketball team from 2003-08 — took over as president of the Daly City Sports Hall this year and coined the phrase the “Forgotten Regents.” To remedy this, he nominated four Serramonte graduates: track standouts Kevin Adams and Ronald Kennedy, football star Joe Nobles, and Mixon’s former basketball teammate Michael Gutierrez.

Westmoor also has four inductees: Daniela Nopuente and Rose Thompson, girls’ basketball; Robert Baptista, baseball; and Omar Rashid, soccer coach.

The other four inductees are Michael Alexander and Darryl White, Jefferson basketball; Denise Patch-Brown, El Camino softball; and Ivan “Ike” Elliott, Daly City Parks and Recreation Department.

“This is not a Westmoor, Serramonte, Jefferson, Thornton secondary school, the Wilderness and Bridgemont event,” Cafferata said. “It’s a city event … for those that all have roots connected to Daly City.”

Regents basketball

Mixon played for Serramonte’s back-to-back North Peninsula League boys’ basketball champions from 1977-78. The teams were also built on 1977 graduate Reggie Love, and 1978 graduate Laron Franklin. But the Regents boasted other talent, including Gutierrez and Nobles.

Nobles, who went on to play NCAA Division I football as a wide receiver at University of Hawaii, was a three-sport standout at Serramonte, including baseball and basketball. Gutierrez was a hoops standout, but Cafferata said he is being inducted as a coach as well, having coached Mercy-San Francisco girls’ basketball to 282 career wins, and also coaching Design Tech to its first girls’ basketball Central Coast Section playoff appearance.

“We only had like three basketball players,” Mixon said of Serramonte’s NPL reign. “They were mostly track (stars), but we were athletic.”

Serramonte — located on plot of land that now houses Summit Shasta High School, and the now-defunct high school’s former gymnasium, renamed Serramonte Del Rey — was a small school, ranging from 800 to 900 students, Mixon said.

With the school closing in 1981, it missed the chance to compete in the division format of the CCS playoffs, which divided the postseason into tournaments divisions I-II starting in 1983. The format eventually grew to divisions I-V by 1988. In 1977, Serramonte was knocked out of the CCS tournament in the opening round by Mitty. In 1978, the Regents lost their playoff opener to Riordan.

It would have been a different story if the small-school Regents didn’t have to face West Catholic Athletic league powers, Mixon said.

“We’d have won the state championship,” Mixon said. “I believe that.”

The powerhouse Rams

Nopuente and Thompson may be seen as sentimental favorites in that they were nominated by Cafferata, their former coach at Westmoor. The two were as legit as legit can be, though, both contributing to the Rams’ 49-game winning streak in PAL North Division play spanning from 2003-07.

Nopuente graduated in 2006 in the midst of the win streak as a star point guard who set Westmoor’s single-season scoring record. Thompson was a junior on that team, that finished runners-up in the CCS Division II tournament, and were the only Rams team in school history to reach the CCS finals.

“Rose and Daniela in general have had great Daly City roots, they both were star high school athletes, they both moved on to play college basketball and coach … and with Rose and Daniela, I never lost a game,” Cafferata said.

Rashid, who is being inducted as a soccer coach — he once coached all four Westmoor soccer teams, boys’ and girls’ varsity and junior-varsity, in the same season — is a sentimental favorite. He coached at Westmoor for 33 years starting in 1989.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of coaches like Omar,” Cafferata said. “But there’s only one Omar.”