Oct. 26, 2025

Hanford Insider: Rob Isquierdo - Reestablishing Stratford

Send me a text and give me feedback on this episode! The week’s headlines feel different when you hear them from the people building the future they want to live in. We sit down with podcaster and community organizer Rob Esquerdo to trace a clear line from storytelling to action: how a classroom-born show, Rob Live, grew into a platform for resilience and a catalyst for change in Stratford. From interviews that turn grief into policy to partnerships that keep food moving to families, Rob show...

Send me a text and give me feedback on this episode!

The week’s headlines feel different when you hear them from the people building the future they want to live in. We sit down with podcaster and community organizer Rob Esquerdo to trace a clear line from storytelling to action: how a classroom-born show, Rob Live, grew into a platform for resilience and a catalyst for change in Stratford. From interviews that turn grief into policy to partnerships that keep food moving to families, Rob shows how steady, local work creates momentum that institutions can’t ignore.

We walk through the valley’s most comprehensive community calendar, with the Hanford Library’s renovation groundbreaking, the final Thursday Night Marketplace turned Halloween bash, and Council Corner at Starbucks. Then we dig into the headline everyone’s talking about: the planned Highway 41 and Laurel roundabout. The intersection’s near misses and medevac landings made it a symbol of risk; the 2030 build timeline now makes it a symbol of follow-through. We talk safety, small business upside, and what it means when an unincorporated town sees a promise turn into a project. Even the gas station owner is celebrating, and that says a lot.

Sports round out the pulse check: Hanford High’s dominant form, the Milk Can rivalry with Lemoore, Sierra Pacific vs. Hanford West in the Clash of the Claws, and volleyball playoff seedings that keep the gyms loud. Through it all, we keep returning to a simple idea: positivity isn’t fluff, it’s fuel. A reliable newsletter, a clear call for tips, and consistent coverage build the trust that gets people to meetings—and that gets meetings to move mountains, or at least redesign intersections. Subscribe, share with a neighbor, and tell us what local change you want to see next. Your story might be the spark that shifts the next big decision.

You can find the Hanford Insider at www.hanfordinsider.com and on social media at @hanfordinsider
Thank you for supporting the show!

00:00 - Welcome And Local Mission

01:06 - Community News and Calendar

03:54 - Podcaster Rob Isquierdo

14:22 - Hanford Insider Sports with Eric Bentley

WEBVTT

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On this episode of The Hanford Insider, we hear from podcaster Rob Esquerdo about his show and nonprofit reestablishing Stratford.

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Rob will give you a quick review of the busy community calendar, then later, I'll be back with your sports report.

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This is the Hanford Insider for Monday, october twenty seventh.

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From local events and community leaders to hidden gems and hometown history, we're here to keep you connected to what's happening right here in our valley.

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I'm your host, Rob Bentley, and together we'll explore what makes Hanford Chine.

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Let's dive in.

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Congratulations to Hanford Police Department Explorers at their recent state competition in Bakersfield, taking first place in several categories and placing high in others.

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The Hanford City Council will meet once again on Tuesday, November 4th.

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The Hanford City Council met last Tuesday, and Mayor Payton provided a comprehensive recap in his Wednesday wrap-up.

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If you haven't heard it yet, be sure to go back and check it out on my episodes page.

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Speaking of his updates, I'd like to thank those of you who reached out to me this week and let me know how much you appreciate the Wednesday wrap-ups by Mayor Payton.

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Your feedback really fuels me.

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Now let's take a look at this week's community calendar.

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This week's another busy one.

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I'm not able to read all the events on the show, but be sure to check out my community calendar for complete listing.

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On Wednesday, the Hanford Library will be holding a ceremonial groundbreaking at 10 a.m.

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to celebrate the renovations that are about to begin.

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Also on Wednesday, the Council Corner with Chris Tavares and Nancy Howes will be held at Starbucks at Lacey and 11th at 4 p.m.

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At the Thursday Night Marketplace this week, it's a spooky Halloween party.

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This is the last Thursday night marketplace of the year.

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And if I recall, not one was canceled due to heat this year, but just a couple weeks ago we lost one due to the rain.

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Thank you to Mainstream Hanford for putting on this quality event for the community so many weeks each year and doing it for the last 25.

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Thursday night is also the big rivalry football game Clash of the Claws pinning Hanford West against Sierra Pacific and Neighbor Bowl.

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Friday night it's the milk can game with Hanford facing Lamore.

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Eric will have a preview in just a few minutes.

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The Carnegie Museum of Kings County History of Agriculture display is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 1 p.m.

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to 5 p.m.

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through December 14th.

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Visit Carnegie Museum of Kingscounty.org.

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I've put together a great list of pumpkin patches, fall festivals, trunk retreats, and all of your favorite fall events on my community calendar that I send out each week to my subscribers.

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The calendar, without a doubt, is the most comprehensive community calendar available.

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There's no other calendar that can come even remotely close.

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Become a subscriber today at HanfordInsider.com.

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If you have an event coming up and you'd like some help getting the word out, let's work together.

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Send your information to HanfordInsider at gmail.com.

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Like I said, be sure to subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get a complete calendar of events.

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It's the most comprehensive community calendar available.

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Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome to the show Rob Esquerdo, who is a fellow podcaster, and he is very invested in the valley, and he has done a lot of work with reestablishing Stratford, his nonprofit.

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And last week on the show, we had uh Caltrans talking about the roundabout in Stratford that's really going to alleviate traffic.

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And Robert's going to share a little bit about that with us.

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But before we start, uh let's talk about your show, your podcast.

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Uh, I've been following it for a number of years, and you have quite a few episodes, and you've had some great guests, and a few of them have been online.

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So welcome to the show.

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Yeah, thank you.

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I've uh looked forward and followed you as well.

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So, Robert, uh, let's let's hear a little bit about your show and uh what it's all about.

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Uh Rob Live started as an idea that I came up with in the classroom as a teacher.

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I try to embed a lot of life lessons and inspirational stories with my students, and I thought, what if I could expand that audience and maybe inspire a larger audience?

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And the to me, the best way today is social media.

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And so I started to come up with an idea for inspirational messages, which then turned into interviews, and which then my friend James Chance, who's a uh video production teacher at Liberty High School, decided to get involved and make it so much better production-wise, and actually built us a studio.

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So, one of the things that our shows have in common is we like to spread positive messages.

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And we talked about this earlier about you know, Facebook, Instagram, uh, TikTok, all of these sites, and there's a lot of people out there that make content that uh kind of goes with the if it bleeds, it leads um kind of mantra.

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And people go to these sites to find out about you know what's going on in town crime-wise.

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But I I really appreciate your show because um, like me, you try to feature positive messages to people.

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So can you share with us maybe a few guests that are just really made an impact on your show?

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Yes, um, I'd have to say honestly, almost every guest has left some sort of impact, but the ones that stand out to me are some of the local stories.

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Uh, for example, um, when we had I think it was the been maybe my first or second episode, it was Christy Kamara, who's from Hanford, um, lost her son to Philicide, which was a term I wasn't familiar with, and that's where a parent takes the life of a child.

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So she lost her son, and um just her resilience to fight through that, she ended up making a book, uh writing a book called Um Can I Still Be Funny after the murder of my son?

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And the way she was able to pivot that into something positive, that she stands out to me to this day, and she's even getting a bill passed right now to help with uh some of the gun laws.

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Yeah, as a matter of fact, on the August 24th episode, we had her on, and she has since notified us that the bill has actually passed now, and so all of her hard work has paid off, and uh it's passed the governor's signature, and we're very excited about that for her.

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And um, I know you've had some other guests on it, uh people that I'm aware of.

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You've had uh Dallas Pour on, you've had Dwayne Tubbs.

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Uh you know, it's great having these guests that have such positive messages messages to share, but I know you have your inspirational stories part of your show, but you also have another purpose of community action.

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Um, yeah, so one of the things that I got involved in early on returning back to the Central Valley after a 20-year hiatus out in um Bay Area and Los Angeles was this idea of giving back to community, and that started with a library for London project in my hometown of London, and then out to Stratford with re-establishing Stratford.

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So I've always tried to kind of juggle between a uh inspirational and kind of a socially conscious approach.

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So let's move on to Stratford.

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Last week on the show, of course, we talked about the proposed roundabout and it's making headway, and uh it sounds like uh dirt may be moving in the future on that.

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And uh before we get to the actual roundabout, tell us a little bit about this the community of Stratford and how they rally together.

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Yes, uh Stratford's unique in the sense that it's a um unincorporated community, rural unincorporated community.

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And so with that being said, a lot of the decisions are made by the county um versus an in inner community sort of uh setup, like would you a mayorship.

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And so when you have decisions being made outside of the community, a lot of times they may not be in the best interest of the residents just by default because you don't know the day-to-day.

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And with that being said, a lot of um residents were like asking for some sort of organization, some sort of advocacy for them.

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And so we formed 11 years ago uh when I moved to Stratford and then um we're a team of seven uh and we have all walks of life that represent that group.

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And our whole mission is to create opportunities and services and provide resources for the community and to advocate for them in times of need.

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So I know one of the ways that you advocate uh for the community is through food distribution, so that's a popular community event, yeah.

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Very yeah, that's very popular.

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Um it got extremely popular during COVID and then we just kept going on with it.

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And I want to give a huge shout out to Valley Voices.

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I don't know if they they might have been on your show already because we already have we have very similar guests, but Valley Voices really got involved and they um partnered with the Central Valley Community Um Bank, food bank, and they've organized us to have every third Saturday a food distribution, and so we want to thank them for putting that together for us.

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So let's move on to the Highway 41 project then.

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Um as we said last week, that uh there's a proposed roundabout there at Laurel where the Minimart is, and there's been some close calls on accidents.

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I've been um I was uh through there in July and uh nearly got nailed by somebody who was passing on the right.

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Tell us about how that change alone you can see it kind of transforming the community.

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Yes, um it's it's it's crazy that you everyone I know has a near-miss story that's ever tried to you know frequent that area on a regular basis.

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And I think that this is a transformative situation because in a community like Stratford I said earlier that um people don't necessarily believe in in in talk, in in how communication leads to action because they hear a lot of things, they're promised a lot of things, and there's not always a lot of follow-through for them.

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And so as a community, I think Stratford lost a little bit of hope and faith in this in the gathering and hearing of voices.

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And so what they did instead now is they said we want to see action.

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So this is gonna transform the community in the sense that it's a physical change of the landscape that was started through meetings.

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And so our hope is that they will buy into this idea that everything has to start with the communication and that it's not a waste of time, it can lead to some change.

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Yeah, when I think about it, um when he was mentioning it, I thought to myself, it's kind of like a radiator springs, as you will with cars, you know.

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Yeah, you get that fast freeway going through and traffic just goes and it doesn't slow down.

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But I can definitely see development in that area as traffic slows down.

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There's gonna be some complaining.

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Uh you know, people have a certain thing against roundabouts, which I particularly don't.

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Um, I I enjoy the traffic controls of roundabouts, and I think they're they're much safer, but I can see it transforming that area of the town.

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I think it's gonna be a real big boom for the uh local economy.

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Oh yes.

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Um, the gas station owners right there on uh Laurel and um 41.

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I went in to visit them, uh, want to say on Saturday, and I was I was like, hey, did you guys hear the news?

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And the owner was there and she's like, What happened?

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I said it's going to be.

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And she was celebrating because she has witnessed so much.

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They've had the uh is it called Medivac, the helicopter has landed multiple times in her parking lot to help victims of collisions there.

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Do they have a timeline that they've given you on the what to expect?

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Yes, uh, they said that the project will begin physically in 2030.

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So it's about a uh four to five year wait.

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And I know that also for some residents say, oh, you know, this needs to happen right away.

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And my perspective is that six months ago it wasn't going to happen at all.

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So if we have to wait a little bit, we can do that.

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Exactly.

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Exactly.

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Those projects definitely take time.

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Well, Rob, you certainly are involved in the community, and I admire your work that you've done with the community of Stratford, uh, reestablishing Stratford.

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Some people have followed that on social media, and you know, what is this all about?

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And I think community action is what this is all about.

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You've been able to mobilize the community and get them to act and to push Caltrans to get this roundabout put in.

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Uh, once again, the show is Rob Live and it is on YouTube and various podcast outlets.

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And uh, Robert, I want to thank you for coming on the show, and I I really appreciate everything that you've done for the community.

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And I understand you have some special events coming up this week, right?

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Yes, we have on Thursday, October 30th from 6 to 8 p.m., we have our largest event of the year, which is our Stratford Trunk Retreat event.

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This year's particularly special because it's the first year that we're actually going to do it on Main Street Stratford next to the library.

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We're gonna get some barricades with a county permit to be able to shut down the streets and have celebrate right there in a central location.

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Well, that's great, Rob.

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Thank you so much for joining me today.

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Thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing you in our studio as well.

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And now it's time for Hanford Insider Sports with Eric Bentley.

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Another week, another dominating victory for Hanford High football, taking down Mission Oak 49-7 on Friday.

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The game was never really in doubt from the start, as a pair of long Jaron Mao to AJ Williams touchdown passes gave the Bullpups a 14-0 lead after the first quarter.

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It was the second quarter that really proved to be the decider as the Hanford High defense forced three Mission Oak turnovers, while the offense kept firing on all cylinders, with Jaron Mao finding Tavion Patterson for a pair of touchdowns, and Rajon Newton punching one in before the half to give the Bullpups a commanding 35-0 lead at the break.

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The Hawks got on the board late in the third, but a pair of Bullpups touchdowns would pad the four-score lead as Sanford High would cruise to the victory.

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Quarterback Jaron Mao finished the evening with six touchdown passes while the defense turned Michin Oak over four times.

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At 4-0 in league, the Bullpups control their WIL destiny.

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A win in Friday's milk can game secures a third consecutive league title.

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And even though Hanford High owns the tiebreaker over second place to Larry Union, the Bullpups hope things don't get too spooky at Neighbor Bowl on Halloween for that 7 p.m.

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kickoff.

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And this week's Clash of the Claws football matchup between Sierra Pacific and Hanford West will give one of those two teams their lone Tri-County Sequoia League win as they both sit at 0-3 after falling in their matchups last week.

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Sierra Pacific will be the home team for that Thursday 7-30 kickoff.

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In girls' volleyball, the regular season came to a close, and it was heartbreak for Hanford West last Tuesday, as the Huskies fell to Kerman in another five-set matchup between the two teams, giving the Lions the Tri-County Sequoia League title.

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But a bounce back victory over Sierra Pacific concluded the Huskies' regular season with a 6-2 second-play finish and a 29-3 overall record, good enough for a nine-seed in the Division IV section playoff bracket.

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Postseason play starts this week as Hanford West will travel up to Chowchilla on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

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Hanford High Volleyball also secured a second place league finish, taking down Mission Oak last week in straight sets before being swept by a dominant Lamore team.

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At 7-3 in WIL play and finishing the season 18-12 overall, the Bullpups will also see playoff action as an 11 seed in the Division IV section playoff bracket, and they might want to give Hanford West a call for some scout film because six-seed Kerman awaits Hanford High on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

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And Sierra Pacific's volleyball season came to a close last week with a 9-16 overall mark, 3-5, and a fourth place finish in league play.

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And it may be cooling down outside, but it's heating up in the pool.

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The final week of the regular season for water polo is this week.

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We'll have playoff seatings and matchup previews on next week's episode.

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As always, we'd like to cover as many sports as we can, but we can only do so much without you.

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Any sport, any team, any level, if you have a score report or a team update, please let us know at HanfordInsider at gmail.com.

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I'm Eric Bentley, and this has been your Hanford Insider Sports Report.

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Well, that's all the time we have for this week's show.

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If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to show your support, you can go to buymeacoffee.com slash Hanford Insider to make a donation.

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I also need your help getting the word out about the show by liking and sharing on social media, or like most people, just telling a friend.

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For more information about the show, you can find this podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, and YouTube at Hanford Insider.

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If you have a show idea, be sure to email me at HanfordInsider at gmail.com and I'll look into it.

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Thanks for listening.

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Have a great week.

Hanford Insider: Rob Isquierdo - Reestablishing Stratford

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