Palo Alto’s return to the forefront of Central Coast Section football has certainly not gone unnoticed, and Jamir Shepard’s emergence has been no small part of the Vikings’ 5-0 start. With seven catches for 220 yards and three touchdowns in Friday’s win over Milpitas, Palo Alto beat the defending state champions for the first time since 2011 and kept the momentum rolling ahead of this week’s huge showdown with Wilcox. Shepard now has 29 catches for 611 yards on the season, and his nine touchdowns have tripled his total from his sophomore season.
Though he has yet to receive any scholarship offers, they’ll likely soon pour in for the 6-foot-2 junior, who looks like the latest in a line of excellent Palo Alto receivers. Davante Adams, who attended Fresno State and now plays for the Green Bay Packers, is the most notable of the group, and he starred alongside B.J. Boyd, who went on to pursue a career in baseball and is now at the Triple-A level of the Oakland Athletics’ farm system.
Unbeaten watch
It’s getting to that point of the season where the crop of unbeaten teams has started to thin out enough to be looked at considerably. There are 11 remaining teams in the Central Coast Section with perfect records, but at least one will fall from the ranks this week as there are showdowns between unbeatens as Wilcox hosts Palo Alto.
The BVAL Santa Teresa Division still has three unbeaten teams and the PAL Bay Division has two. Wilcox, Palo Alto and the two PAL Bay teams, Sacred Heart Prep and Terra Nova, are the only four teams in the section to have already played five games and won them all. Terra Nova and SHP each have their byes this week, while Palo Alto and Wilcox don’t have byes until late October with the SCVAL scheduling format.
On the other side, there are 12 winless teams remaining in the section, though many of those, including Aragon and St. Ignatius, can be attributed to grueling schedules. Homestead, Lynbrook and Soledad are the only 0-5 teams in the section, though Homestead has just one more game before Darrell Page will be eligible.
