Editor’s note, Aug. 13: The spelling of Coach Bob Shaffer’s name has been corrected.
Truckee football played in Nevada in the 1950s, in California from 1961 to 1980, and has been back in Nevada since 1981. A mandated return to California may occur in the coming year(s), but this article is not a prognostication on future events nor a 2026 season preview. It is a not nearly far-reaching enough chronicle of the dynasty of a small-town football program that could.
In 1952, Truckee High School played its first-ever football game and lost 61-0 at Loyalton. The beating was so bad that head coach Jim Brehler wasn’t sure if the players would show up for practice the following week.
The team’s first home game took place on a makeshift field comprising the first and eighth fairways of the Tahoe City Golf Course. Their opponent that day was the California Youth Authority, a correctional facility for juveniles that may have had players as old as 21.
“We played the biggest, toughest, and oldest bunch of thugs you ever saw” as Coach Brehler’s described it, and Truckee got whopped again.
That inaugural season’s lone victory came against the Sparks freshman team, and it would take decades to create anything resembling a winning program. But dynasties aren’t built in a day. Rome wasn’t, and Truckee Wolverine football wasn’t either.
Successful campaigns in the ’70s and early ’80s led to Truckee’s gridiron reign taking firm hold in 1989. It was Ron Estabrook’s first year as head coach, and the first time the team motto “Truckee Pride” was used to convey its small-town grit. The Wolverines put together a magical 11-1 season and made it all the way to the Nevada state title game, hosting it at their home field, Surprise Stadium, in front of what seemed to be the entire town of Truckee.
The next year the team battled back to the title game. Trailing 10-9 with 40 seconds left in the fourth quarter, Coach Estabrook sent out freshman kicker Damien Fertitta for a 27-yard field goal. Fertitta nailed it, Truckee won the state championship, and a dynasty was born.
A record run, a dip, a return to greatness
Football is a game of toughness and execution, of blocking and tackling, of sacrifice, preparation, brotherhood, bumps, bruises, blood, sweat, tears, and chin straps. But numbers do a decent job of framing its story.
The numbers for Truckee football show its dominance.
From 1989 through 2025, the program has won over 80% of its games, amassing 338 victories in 37 years. Playing on average a 10- or 11-game schedule, the Wolverines have won nine or more games in a season a staggering 26 times during that span. Twenty-two league titles have been brought home. Thirteen Nevada state championship trophies have been hoisted. Another eight times the team advanced all the way to the championship game and finished state runner-up. The team has twice won back-to-back state titles and once won four titles in a row. At the height of its power, the program won an unheard-of 41 consecutive games.
The program’s stability at the top would make Genghis and Kublai Khan proud –– only four head coaches in 37 years. Estabrook, the originator; Jim McCallister, the 1994 one-year interim; Bob Shaffer, the 18-year legend who won state nine times; and Josh Ivens, the current helmsman who very nearly steered a state three-peat from ’22 to ’24.
Earning his 100th victory last season, Ivens has become one of the most successful coaches in Nevada high school football history. But his first year as head coach, in 2013, by wins and losses at least, was the worst the dynasty had known.
“I took over for Bob Shaffer, and my first year we went 3-6,” Ivens said. “It was a devastation. Pretty ego-destroying, to be honest.”
After the final game, a coach on Ivens’ staff lamented the season being so hard that he didn’t think he wanted to return the next year. “Then don’t,” Ivens told him plainly. “Because next year is going to be even worse.”
The 2014 senior class hadn’t won much at all as a JV team or in youth football, and signs pointed to another dismal year. “I didn’t know if we’d win a game,” Ivens said.
Desperate times in dynastic runs call for desperate measures. Coach “recruited the halls,” imploring anyone he could to come out for football and found a couple big diamonds in the rough. The team came together, worked hard, and when the season came around managed to scrape together some wins. Truckee entered its final game at South Tahoe with a 4-5 record and a chance for a .500 season.
But down 19-0 at halftime in the rivalry game, another losing record seemed etched into the granite of the surrounding peaks.
A fiery locker-room speech by assistant coach Jim Bennett changed the tenor. Amped out of their gourds, the Wolverines came out feral and cut the score to 19-15. Late in the fourth quarter, the defense forced South Tahoe to punt — and in improbable fashion Truckee’s scrappy special teams unit ran back the kick for the game winning score.
“We finished 5-5, and it was like we’d won the state championship,” Ivens said of the players’ post-game celebration. “I learned so much that season. I got confidence, like, okay, we can take a team that’s not super talented and we weren’t that good as coaches and still be okay.”
Over the next few seasons, the momentum snowballed and the win totals continued to climb. “People were saying, ‘Truckee’s back,’” Ivens recalled.
The dynasty regained its full power, winning back-to-back state titles in 2022 and 2023, the ’23 team finishing a perfect 13-0 and the ’24 team’s lone loss coming in the state championship game.
Mountain town football
The player who scored that game-winning touchdown against South Tahoe was a speedster named Tanner Sawyer. He is now an assistant on Ivens’ staff, with various roles including coaching the kick returners.
Most coaches throughout the run have been former Wolverines who’ve come back to help the team. That’s a lot of what the program is about, that’s Truckee Pride. Ivens himself was a linebacker on the 1990 Nevada state champion team. He rejoined the program in 1993, working his way up from the JV team to a varsity assistant and the longtime defensive coordinator under Shaffer.
“If there is one legend of the program, it’s him,” Ivens said of the coach who led the team from 1995 to 2012. “He gave me the keys to the program and was a great mentor.”
In total, Ivens has been part of 11 of Truckee’s varsity football Nevada state championship wins — one as a player, eight as an assistant coach, two as head coach, and even one as a broadcaster, in 1998.
“I did the color for the game,” he said. “I wasn’t that good.”
If Ivens wasn’t great on air, it’s perhaps because he’s so much of a no b.s. football coach. When pressed for the key to Truckee football’s longevity of success, he answered, “Commitment.”
The players, coaches, parents, and community give near year-round effort for those precious few games in the fall. There’s the offseason weight training and conditioning, spring ball, the summer camp in Oregon, the continuing education on safety (safer tackling techniques, new-and-safer helmets), the never-ending fundraising efforts, the total buy-in program-wide.
There are also the surrounding mountains. “I like to tap into the skiers,” the coach shared, “the skiers and snowboard guys who love the thrill. They’re skiing before they’re even walking. There’s something to that.”
Assistant Coach Matt Estabrook echoed the sentiment. “They’re fearless,” he said of the mountain-raised players, noting how Truckee’s bold alpine lifestyle uniquely translates to the game of football.
Matt is the son of head coach Ron Estabrook, and he played cornerback and running back for his father on the mythical 1989 team. He recounts memories and details of that year with uncanny recall and precision, speaking of the “purity” and “special nature” of high school football, especially in a small town like Truckee.
“Players play for the love of the game,” he said. “They come out and fall in love with it. It’s comradery. It’s a bonding experience. It’s all about sticking to the common goal, loving each other, playing for one another. Trusting that guy next to you.”
Both coaches see the crux of their roles as motivators and as teachers, instilling teamwork and life lessons through the game of football.
Truckee has had its share of outstanding players throughout the years — running back James Van Brunt of the ’90s, quarterback Kevin Schlesinger and all-time leading tackler Ryan Macken of the 2000s, and all-around playmaker Marcus Bellon of the 2020s, to name a few. Yet all the success has not been about individual production nearly as much as collective achievement, about the team being greater than the parts of its whole.
A central aspect of that collective whole is continuity, which can be found in the offense the program runs.
The Wing T
Much like the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s and early ’90s, Truckee’s dynasty has, in large part, been led by tough, mean, beyond-stingy defenses. But also like those 49ers, offenses do tend to get their ink.
While the 49ers offensive success was built on the innovation and complexities of its new West Coast offense, Truckee has taken a different approach.
“We don’t run a modern offense,” Iven’s said plainly. “We run the Wing T.”
The Wing T is a railroad in the internet superhighway world. With roots in Pop Warner’s 1910s Single Wing offense and a popularity-peak from the 1940s to ’60s, it’s about as old-school as football gets. In an age where all levels of the sport are spreading out their formations and passing the ball more than ever, quick strikes the name of the game, the Wing T packs players tightly into the box and aims to run the football methodically down the field.
The Wing T has largely attained relic status. Yet relics, to hard-nosed football teams, can be priceless.
“It’s the right offense for our school,” Ivens summed.
While there have been tweaks and additions to the playbook over the years, the offense’s brilliance lies in its simplicity. It employs a very small number of plays, but they look quite similar (identical, even) at their outset, making it difficult for the defense to know who has the ball and where they are going. Wing T execution is forged by the absolute fundamentals of football — open steps, down blocks, kickouts; ordinary things that Truckee has learned to do extraordinarily well.
Learning to turn ordinary into extraordinary starts early, for understanding the ways of the Wing T begins well before a football player has walked the high school hallways. In brilliance by pragmatism, since the mid-’80s the offense has also been run by Truckee’s youth program as well. So, by the time a Wolverine becomes a senior he has executed the same blocks and steps a million times, has earned his 10,000 hours in the fundamental concepts of the buck sweep, the belly, the trap.
That’s how Truckee football has been able to make a symphony out of a relic.
The unchanging past and an uncertain future
From the abysmal start in the early 1950s to a high-soaring Nevada dynasty, Truckee football now faces an unknown future. California wants it back.
The debate, widely chronicled, swirls around transgender participation in sports. Nevada and California differ on who should participate with whom, and Truckee finds itself caught in the middle.
Per Ivens and Estabrook, most of the community wants to stay put. A move to California would increase transportation times and cost, with regular trips over Donner Summit in the winter also leading to game cancellations and season interruptions. Further, a move to California would detrimentally alter some other sports’ seasons.
The competition in California would likely be more challenging, and with California Interscholastic Federation red tape, there is uncertainty about which league(s) Truckee could even be placed in, and when. Rivalries and traditions would be lost.
“Obviously we are going through a pretty sensitive ordeal,” Ivens said.
Estabrook added, “Everybody has their opinions. When it comes to sports, the biggest thing we have to do is keep our kids safe. If it happens, we have to deal with it as a community.”
Estabrook knows a thing or two about change to the program. He entered Truckee High not long after the program’s two biggest changes: Its 1981 move back to Nevada sports (“it was a simpler time … we were essentially just asked, it made sense, it happened”) — and what is known as the great divide — the 1974 split of Truckee’s enrollment to create North Tahoe High.
In something out of a Civil War novel, football brothers became foes, forced to battle it out on the gridiron as if a Mason-Dixon Line had been drawn somewhere near Olympic Valley. The teams became heated rivals.
“It was a pretty stressful week for a player,” said Estabrook of the annual game. “You didn’t want to lose. We grew up together. Played little league together, all that stuff. We were friends but we didn’t like each other on the field.”
But seasons change. Over time, the schools’ enrollments grew too far apart, Truckee’s swelling while North Tahoe’s diminished, and the Wolverines and Lakers haven’t met in an official game since 2005.
More change may be afoot for Truckee football. Classic coaches-speak at all levels of the game is to ignore what can’t be controlled so you can focus on the controllables. For Truckee football, that means doing the little things and doing them the right way. It means commitment. It means playing for the teammate next to you. It means small town football. It means Truckee Pride.
When asked if there’s more pressure to win another league or state title in the potential final season(s) in Nevada, Coach Ivens was blunt: “The urgency in Truckee exists all the time. There’s no time where there’s no urgency to not win it all. That’s why going 3-6 [his first year as head coach] was so miserable. The urgency is all the time.”
Such is the burden of being a dynasty. If the program hadn’t ruled in such a dominant manner for so very long, the pressure and urgency wouldn’t be as great. But it doesn’t feel like Truckee football would want it any other way.
