To get this out of the way, yes, we do in fact have a hockey team at Santiago…well, sort of. It’s a district team where students in the Corona-Norco Unified School District (CNUSD) are allowed to play. The players come from Santiago, Centennial, Norco, and Roosevelt High Schools. The team was established in 2012 and joined the Anaheim Ducks High School Hockey League (ADHSHL). The ADHSHL is made up of schools and districts ranging from Southern to Northern California. There are 3 Varsity divisions: Division 1, Division 2, and Division 3. They also have a Junior Varsity division for teams that may not have a Varsity team, or if a club has enough players to make a JV team if they already have a Varsity Division.

The Stingrays program has three teams – Varsity, Junior Varsity, and Developmental. They were Varsity Division 2 finalists in the 2013-2014 season. In that same season, their Junior Varsity team won the JV division. Since then, the Varsity team has since dropped to Division 3 and last season they were very impressive with 9 wins, 3 losses, and 2 overtime losses. That was good enough for 3^rd place in their division. That season though, they, unfortunately, lost in the Quarterfinals to Villa Park in a very back and forth game that resulted in a 6-5 loss. Even though they lost, they were still really proud of how far they came and they know it could’ve gone either way and it just wasn’t meant to be. There were many seniors on the team last season, so there were players the team has lost.

This season, they are once again being led by Head Coach Josh Newton along with Assistant Coaches Brian and Danny Albert. There are many seniors again on this year’s Varsity roster, so they are eager to play and definitely want to finish the season with a Championship. There are also many players that have been promoted from the JV team to the Varsity, so they will need to contribute and add some depth to the senior-heavy team. They begin playing this weekend in a Memorial Weekend tournament, but their regular season begins in October along with the rest of ADHSHL.

The Corona-Norco team is full of players that chose to play for the high school, rather than the local club team. Due to the financial part of hockey, players typically either choose to play club hockey or for the Corona-Norco team. In areas such as Minnesota, high school hockey is everything. Every school has a team, and they are all good. Some players get drafted right out of High School in Minnesota. The hockey culture in those regions is incredible and the State Championship is played in a sold-out Xcel Energy Center which has 20,000 seats. The ADHSHL’s goal to turn California into an area that only high school hockey is played and that every game is packed with students from their respective schools.