How a small West Oakland high school produced Bill Russell and an 65-game win streak

McClymonds High School sits in West Oakland, the third-oldest high school in the city, with an enrollment that has never cracked much past a few hundred students at a time. Its basketball trophy case tells a different story: between 1958 and 1960, the Warriors won a then-state-record 65 consecutive games, going 84–1 from 1958 to 1961 and stretching to 107–1 across five seasons under coach George Powles and later Paul Harless.

The roster during that stretch included Bill Russell, who would go on to win two NCAA titles at USF and eleven NBA championships with the Boston Celtics, and Paul Silas, who went 82–0 during his own McClymonds career before a long NBA playing and coaching career of his own. Both were later inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame; both died in 2022, and their banners still hang over the McClymonds gym.

The tradition didn't stop in the 1960s. McClymonds won the CIF Division I state basketball championship in 2008, and the football program has reached six consecutive state title games in recent years. The school's rivalry with Oakland Tech and Oakland High in the Oakland Athletic League remains one of the more competitive prep sports rivalries in the East Bay.

Coaches and alumni are candid that West Oakland's gentrification has thinned the neighborhood McClymonds has always drawn from. But as current basketball coach and alum Barry Bell put it to Oaklandside in 2023, the standard set decades ago hasn't moved: “We represent being the School of Champions.”