“All I ever wanted to be was a Wildcat,” said 1993 graduate Brad Sanfilippo Saturday night as he was inducted into the Los Gatos High School Athletic Hall of Fame. Both Sanfilippo and 1985 graduate Brock Bowman talked about how as young boys they were at Helm Field every Friday night playing tackle football in the end zone, waiting for the varsity football team to take the field so they could greet their gridiron heroes.
That tradition is still carried out at every Los Gatos home football game — grammar school boys playing football on the nearest grass, dreaming about someday becoming a Wildcat.
Sanfilippo, currently the Los Gatos High School boys varsity baseball coach, was one of those lucky enough to reach that dream. He was a three-year varsity starter in both baseball and football who went on to play baseball at UC Davis.
As a junior, Sanfilippo rushed for 837 yards and helped lead the Wildcats to the CCS championship. As a senior, he rushed for 1,159 yards and scored 23 touchdowns. He hit .414 as a senior shortstop and was named captain of the baseball team.
A decade earlier, Bowman was an All-CCS quarterback who led the Wildcats to an 11-0-1 record. He was also 8-0 as a pitcher that season on the baseball team, earning all-league honors in both sports.
Bowman attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on a football scholarship, later transferring to Johns Hopkins University where he switched sports and played baseball. He compiled a 7-1 record as a pitcher for a JHU team ranked No. 3 nationally at the Division III level.
Sanfilippo and Bowman were two of the 10 athletes comprising the sixth class inducted into the Hall of Fame Saturday evening at La Rinconada Country Club. Also awarded entrance into the Hall were Chuck Smith (class of 1947), Jim Johnson (1953), Guy Greene (1969), Rick Urbano (1970), John Baggerly Jr. (1972), Pam Reinoehl (1979), Cindy Meckenstock-Gion (1984), and Genevieve Farnady (1990).
Reinoehl was one of the first great athletes at Los Gatos following enactment of Title IX in the early 1970s. She played four seasons on the varsity basketball team, earning all-league honors as both a junior and senior.
While she only played one year of high school softball, Reinoehl played AAU softball in the summers and was named an All American after hitting .533 at the national tournament. She earned a full scholarship to play softball at UC Berkeley, where she set numerous school hitting records.
Meckenstock-Gion was another member of the Los Gatos girls’ basketball dynasty of the late 70s-early 80s to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. And she was proud to be a part of the first pair of siblings to be inducted into the Hall.
“It was hard growing up as Suzie Meckenstock’s little sister,” said Cindy. “But she pushed me to become the player that I was.”
Cindy Meckenstock was named all-CCS her senior year and played on two Northern California championship teams and in two state final games in 1982 and 1984. She was named All-Bay Area first team in 1984 and accepted a scholarship to play at Santa Clara University, where she started every game during her four years at the school.
Farnady was the third and final female athlete inducted in this year’s class. She was a three-sport star in cross country, soccer and track. She was the No. 1 runner on the cross country teams in 1987, 1988 and 1989.
She was a four-year varsity starter in soccer, leading the team to its first ever CCS soccer championship. In track, Farnady set the fastest sophomore 800 time in the state in 1988.
While the Meckenstocks are the only siblings in the Hall of Fame, there are now two father-son combinations with the induction of John Baggerly Jr. John Baggerly Sr. (1935) was inducted in 2005. Pete Denevi (1944) and son Mike Denevi (1971) are the other father-son combo.
Baggerly Jr. was a three-year starter in varsity football and a four-year starter in baseball. He was All-CCS in football as a defensive end, and he was all-league in baseball three times while setting home run and total-base records.
He won the Panighetti Trophy as the school’s outstanding male athlete in 1972 and went on to play baseball at San Jose State University.
Another baseball standout of that era — Rick Urbano — was also inducted Saturday. Urbano held four of the seven major pitching records at Los Gatos High School for more than 35 years. His 111 innings in 1969, 16 starts and 13 complete games the same year, and 171 strikeouts in 1970 were all school records.
Just one year earlier, there were more records being set, but these were by Guy Greene in wrestling. Greene was a CCS champion wrestler in 1968 and 1969 and Nor-Cal champion in 1969. He attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on a wrestling scholarship, and is currently the varsity wrestling coach at Simi Valley High School.
Back in the days when one could play four varsity sports, Chuck Smith did just that. He starred in football, basketball, baseball and track and led Los Gatos to a football championship in 1946. From there, he went to the basketball court where he was the team’s MVP, and then to the baseball field where he played four years on the varsity. And he also found time to pole vault and high jump on the track team.
In the early 50s, Jim Johnson was the Wildcats’ star athlete. He played quarterback on three championship football teams and starred on two championship baseball teams as well. Johnson earned a scholarship to San Jose State, where he played both football and baseball. And he played professionally in the Chicago White Sox organization.
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