Why Rancho Cucamonga means so much to C.J. Stroud. And why he means so much to his hometown

Very, very interesting story about CJ’s teenage years from the Chronicle.
Some excerpts below, but read the entire thing if you can.

C.J. Stroud played for Burke on Rancho’s basketball team a little more than five years ago.
He has a poster of Stroud on his wall, which features a picture of the quarterback in a Texans uniform dropping back for a pass. It reads “Class of 2020 C.J. Stroud drafted in 2023 by the Houston Texans.”

“He thinks he’s the best shooter in the world, that’s for sure,” Burke says with a laugh as he reminisces with the school’s assistant principal. “But he was a good scorer. His biggest thing everyone knows him for is that game-winning shot he hit.”

Basketball was Stroud’s first love. But football is where he made a name for himself, leading Rancho’s team to the state playoffs in his final two seasons before earning a scholarship to Ohio State.

Stroud was unlike anything anyone had ever seen come out of Rancho.

“Every time the game was on the line, he wanted it,” said Chris Van Duin, a longtime business teacher and former coach at the school who also serves as the PA announcer at the school’s basketball and football games. “Not because of an ego thing. It was an ‘I’m going to do whatever I have to do to help our team win.’”

As the Texans prepare to open their season against the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday in Inglewood — just 53 miles west of his hometown — Rancho Cucamonga will always be a part of Stroud’s story. And this will be his first time playing nearby as a pro.

There will be his former coaches and some of the players who look up to him in the stands, while others in Rancho surround televisions at their homes and bars to watch him play.

“I love where I come from,” Stroud told the Chronicle. “I love being from an area that people are starting to know about for the right reasons. I love the fact that it’s safe, (has) a lot of great people, a lot of great food. I love everything about it.”

The city of Rancho Cucamonga is a quiet, laid-back middle class community of about 174,000. It’s just outside the bustle of Los Angeles and no one seems to be in a rush. The skies are always blue, the sun is always shining and the weather is never humid.
The San Gabriel Mountains serve as a backdrop.

Stroud was born and grew up here, and it shaped everything from his vernacular, his style and his personality. Stroud is often seen wearing an IE hat, the initials for Inland Empire, which is a metropolitan area that consists of Rancho, San Bernardino, and a large swath of communities east of Los Angeles.

He started at quarterback as a junior, and every Wednesday, the team would have a competition between the first-team defense and the first-team offense. If the defense got the best of the offense, Stroud would get upset and throw his helmet to the ground. He wanted to win at everything.

He also had an expectation for how his teammates should work. Verti recalls one of Stroud’s teammates being late for a practice and Stroud being irritated with the teammate and letting him know how he felt.

“If someone doesn’t care as much as him, that frustrates him,” Verti said. “If they were late, he couldn’t understand, at that time, why you’re not going as hard as you could go because there is so much benefit from the work.”

At a recent press conference after a home preseason game, Stroud was asked about wearing a Seattle Mariners hat, which drew criticism among Houston Astros fans. Stroud said he meant no harm and joked: “It’s all about the swag, baby.”

It made Verti chuckle. The same person he coached five years ago is the same person he is today.

“Same fashion. (He) cares and talks about his teammates the same way,” Verti said. “Same mannerisms. Just a little older.”

The thing that everyone mentions about Stroud is that he’s not so much of the mythical figure everyone hears about, similar to the stars who never return.

He still comes back and talks to the students. He sponsored the school’s football team with cleats and new gear.

If you ask anyone where Stroud’s football origins began, outside of his own family, they always say “You’ve got to go talk to Tojo.”

Tojo is a legend around here. He’s about 5-foot-6, but he has a personality and presence bigger than everyone else around him. He’s confident, a little boisterous and a little cocky.

And around these fields, they refer to him as the “quarterback guru,” mainly because of his work with Stroud when he was 8 years old until he was 13.

The way Tojo tells it, he saw Stroud — then a 7-year-old wearing a No. 7 jersey — standing taller than the other kids his age, and slinging the ball around on these same fields about 16 years ago.

Tojo had normally coached the oldest age group in the league.
But when he saw Stroud on the opposite fields throwing it around like he was in middle school already, he knew he had to coach him.

“I knew it from Day 1,” Tojo said. “I’m like, he’s going to be good.”

So he moved down a few age groups the following year, and took over Stroud’s 8-year-old team. In each of the next five years, he moved up with Stroud and coached him until he had aged out.

“The first time he stepped out here, he could throw the football,” Thompson said of Stroud. “What Tojo did — what most coaches don’t have young Black quarterbacks do — he had him stay in the pocket.

“He taught that pocket presence at a young age. That’s why now, when you see him play, he’s not going to take off too early. He’s going to stay in that pocket as long as he can before he makes the throw.”

Tojo said Stroud’s father would often want his boy to use his legs and take off when nothing was open. But Tojo had a different plan. He wanted Stroud to stay there and survey the field.

“I used to tell (Stroud’s father), ‘Come on, man, he’s got a golden arm,’” he said. “He was fast. He could run the ball, but with that arm, just keep him in the pocket.”

Each night after practice, he’d work with Stroud on staying in the pocket for just a second longer so his receivers could have enough time to get open.

Stroud never had an attitude, Tojo said. “I’d tell you if he did, because some of these kids have ’tudes out there,” he says, pointing to his current players.

Stroud was always laser-focused. He didn’t joke around a lot. He listened and did what he was supposed to do. He’d get upset if they lost a game, or if he made a bad throw, but that just spoke to his competitiveness and hunger to win.

“By the third and fourth season, he already had it in his mind, I’m going to stand here and sling that ball,” Tojo said. “And he was good at it.” Tojo won a lot of games with Stroud as his quarterback. They had a love-hate relationship because Tojo coached him hard, he said. But each year, Stroud kept coming back, wanting more.

The youth here now have someone they can look up to and aspire to be — a normal dude who came from Rancho Cucamonga, who also did all the right things to get to the highest level.

“All day, every day,” Tojo said, when asked if the kids talk about Stroud. “They ask me when he’s coming. I tell them, you’re going to have to wait until the bye week.”

More here: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/texans/article/cj-stroud-rancho-cucamonga-rams-21018333.php