After moving down to Class 3A, Pomona football has re-emerged as perennial state title contender

LOVELAND — After years of playing above its weight, Pomona football is finally in the correct classification.

Translation: Pomona is now ready to pad its pigskin tradition while re-emerging as a perennial state title contender.

The Panthers, who long competed up in Class 5A above their numbers, moved down to 3A for the 2024-26 enrollment cycle and the effect has been immediate. Pomona is 6-2 after trouncing Mountain View on Friday night at Ray Patterson Stadium, and the Post Preps No. 3-ranked Panthers are looking to be championship-caliber.

“We’ve been calling it the new Pomona,” fourth-year head coach Nathan Johnson said. “Pomona will always be Pomona, but this is the new Pomona. We still have a great legacy, a great program tradition, and now we’re just going to go do it in 3A. So far, so good. We’ve been pretty successful so far this season. Now, we just have to keep it going.”

The beginning of Johnson’s Big Black tenure in 2021 marked the end of the Panthers’ ability to remain relevant in 5A. That season, Pomona went 7-5, winning the Jeffco League and a playoff game.

But then came a steep drop. The Panthers won just three combined games over the past two seasons, including a one-win campaign in 2023 that featured a schedule stacked with elite 5A programs.

“I knew that last game against Regis Jesuit in the playoffs in 2021 — when I suited 33 kids, 27 of whom were seniors, against a team like Regis who has like 95 kids on their sideline on a given week — I just kind of knew that was it for us in 5A to make a push there,” Johnson said. “But what was good about that first year when I wasn’t even able to field a JV team, only a freshman/sophomore team, was I was able to put together a really good incoming freshman class.”

In the past couple of years, even as the Panthers struggled in 5A, the program’s numbers grew. The JV team returned, and this season, Pomona has about 95 kids in the program overall as Johnson’s put an emphasis on recruiting from other sports and in the hallways.

Meanwhile, Pomona’s enrollment continued to plummet. That trend’s been evident over the past 30 years, even as the Panthers were a 5A powerhouse less than a decade ago under now-Legacy boss Jay Madden. From 2015-17, the Panthers went to the state title game each fall, finally winning the title in ’17 in a shootout over Eaglecrest.

The declining enrollment is due to a confluence of factors.

The surrounding neighborhoods got older, with little turnover in the homes. There is no space for building new houses within the school’s boundary. There are only three elementary schools to feed Pomona, which absorbed the area middle school this year to become a 6-12. And, of course, there’s the rise of Ralston Valley — a nearby high school that opened in 2000 and has taken much of Pomona’s Arvada enrollment.

Now it appears the Panthers found their sweet spot in 3A. Pomona’s enrollment this year is just over 900, which is down from the current CHSAA enrollment figure (1,133) and significantly less than the school’s enrollment figure from a couple cycles ago (1,339).

“The hope was that enrollment would resurge, but we’re now at a spot where we’re kind of steady, and where we’re going to continue to be for a while,” Pomona athletic director D.J. Yeager said. “To even be moved into 4A at some point, that’s like 400 more kids than we have now…. so we’ll probably be staying 3A in the football lens for the foreseeable future, and I don’t see that changing.”

The move to Class 3A didn’t come without some consternation from the Pomona community, which had grown accustomed to running with, and beating, 5A’s top programs under Madden.

“When the kids first heard about it, there was a lot of freakout, parents were upset, a handful of kids transferred,” Johnson said. “But I just had a pretty important meeting with them (in spring 2023 at the school), showed the players the numbers, showed them the reality of the situation.

“And I told them, ‘The expectation now is, we can’t use that excuse that we’re a school of 950 playing schools of 2,000, 3,000. Or that we don’t have the numbers or the depth. There’s no more excuses, only high expectations.'”

After Friday’s 42-7 throttling of Mountain View, Pomona’s outscored its Class 3A opponents 228-47 this year. The Panthers’ two losses came to the top two ranked teams in 4A, No. 1 Pueblo West and No. 2 Dakota Ridge.

Considering that, and the Panthers’ valleys in ’22 and ’23, it goes to show how playing in the correct football classification is such an important part of a program’s success.

Other current examples of this include Highlands Ranch, a perennial 5A school which moved down to 4A starting in this two-year cycle. After winning four combined games over the past three seasons, the Falcons, who like the Panthers saw their surrounding neighborhood age and their enrollment decline, are 5-4 this fall.

On the flip side, perennial 4A contender Denver South saw its enrollment jump a few hundred students over the past few cycles, prompting a move up to 5A. But as one of the smaller 5A football schools, the acclimation has been rough as the Ravens are just 2-7 this fall.

For the Pomona players who endured the pile of defeats over the final two seasons in 5A, the move to 3A is something that’s grown on them. For Johnson, the switch and corresponding success has been “a huge breath of fresh air.”

“I didn’t want to let the tradition at Pomona go (to the wayside), so that’s why I stayed here,” junior quarterback and linebacker/safety Emmitt Munson said. “I trusted the (reclassification) process and the opportunity to carry on with that tradition. My class, we were determined to turn this around, to change this. And trusting Johnson, trusting the coaches, it’s paying off this fall. If we were going to play 3A, we were determined to be the best team in 3A. Because we still want to be a team that everyone fears.”

Pomona certainly looked like a 3A team to be feared on Friday against Mountain View.

Munson scored three first-half rushing touchdowns as the Panthers raced to a 21-0 lead at the break, and the Big Black defense headlined by junior middle linebacker Connor Craver, senior inside linebacker DJ Heer and senior defensive end Izaya Hawkins suffocated the Mountain Lions’ offense.

That trend continued in the second half, as Heer ripped off a long TD run, and junior slotback Luis Santanan added two more scores via a run and then a 61-yard reception to make it 42-7.

Pomona’s final stiff test will come in the regular-season finale against undefeated Thompson Valley on Nov. 8, likely with the league title on the line. Johnson hopes his team’s performance in that marquee matchup can be a prelude to a deep playoff run.

“Certainly we see what’s on the table, we see the talent we have,” Johnson said. “We legitimately think and feel that we should be playing late into November, and hopefully early December in that title game up at Canvas Stadium.”

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