Tracy’s two retiring varsity football coaches, Steve Lopez and Mark Stroup, have been recognized for their contributions to their teams, schools and the community by being named Tracy High Alumni of the Year.

At the end of the 2009 football season, Lopez ended a 16-year run as the first head football coach at West High. A 1968 graduate of Tracy High, where he played defensive back, he taught and coached at his alma mater, serving as Stroup’s freshman math teacher and freshman football coach.

Lopez moved to West in 1993, heading the sophomore team his first year and becoming varsity head coach the next when West added a junior class.

Lopez’s Wolf Pack teams won Valley Oak League and Tri-City Athletic League titles and played in eight playoff games, including advancing to the finals of the Sac-Joaquin Section Division I championships in 1997 and 2005. West High’s stadium is named for him.

Stroup graduated from Tracy High 1986. A quarterback his junior and senior years, he began coaching basketball at Tracy High in 1988 while attending college.

He moved to West High in 1993 and became a girls basketball coach and an assistant football coach under Lopez before being named head football coach and athletic director at Tracy High in 1999.

In rebuilding a once-struggling football program, Stroup took the Bulldogs to the playoffs in recent years and finished his final season at the helm with a perfect regular-season record of 10 wins and no losses, adding one win in the playoffs. Winner of the Sac-Joaquin Section Athletic Director of the Year award, he continues as Tracy High’s athletic director.

Although unable to attend Saturday night’s asparagus and tri-tip dinner, when the awards were presented, Tracy High coaching legend Wayne Schneider sent a message of congratulations to Lopez and Stroup. Both honorees played for him, and after Schneider retired from coaching, he supported both Tracy and West programs.

“The Tracy and West programs will miss Steve and Mark,” he said. “They made the Tracy-West rivalry what it is today. It is such a friendly rivalry instead of a bitter one.”

During the 19th annual asparagus and tri-tip dinner, held in Tracy Community Center, the Tracy High Alumni Association also presented $500 scholarships to four Tracy High seniors: Hope Christine Connolly, Morgan Brean Northcutt, Bianca Marie Tuso and Stephen Joseph Miller.