Pali High Football Is Back At Stadium By The Sea. The Baseball Diamond Still Isn't.

"The Dolphins are back where they belong." That was NBC4's read on the scene at Stadium by the Sea on August 21, when Pacific Palisades Charter High School hosted a football game on its own campus for the first time since November 8, 2024. Los Angeles Chargers linebacker Daiyan Henley stood on the sideline as the lights came on over the bluff. Then Crenshaw High, a school Pali hadn't played since 1984, scored on a diving end-zone catch with eight seconds left to win it 34-29.

For a neighborhood that has spent the last nineteen months measuring its recovery in ribbon cuttings, this looked like the real thing: a full stadium, an NFL team showing up to mark the occasion, Friday night lights back on after nearly two full years dark. But walk two hundred yards from the stadium to where the baseball diamond used to sit, and the story splits into two completely different timelines. Pali High's football program got its field back in one season. Its baseball program is homeless for three to five years, playing its games at a recreation center across town, because the diamond where head coach Mike Voelkel built a program over eighteen years is currently sitting under temporary classrooms that won't come down until 2028 at the earliest.

That gap is the part of this story worth knowing if you live here. It says something the reopening headlines don't: campus recovery isn't running on one clock. It's running on as many clocks as there are fields, and this fall's football schedule proves that even the sport that got its stadium back isn't fully home yet either.

What Actually Happened On August 21

The scoreboard mattered less than what it replaced. Pali High played its entire 2025 season on the road, every regular-season game away from Stadium by the Sea, finishing 10-1 with the only loss coming in the City Section Open Division quarterfinals against Garfield High School. Head coach Dylen Smith built that record with a roster that had no home field, no home locker room, and no home crowd for a full calendar year.

August 21 changed one of those things. Quarterback Jack Thomas and receiver Demare Dezeurn, the reigning Western League Player of the Year, ran out under stadium lights that had sat dark on Friday nights for twenty-one months. Crenshaw's win spoiled the homecoming, and the fact that it was Crenshaw at all added a detail most residents wouldn't have caught on their own: the two schools hadn't met since 1984, back when both played in the old Crosstown League. The Chargers didn't just happen to be in the neighborhood. Their presence marked the return-to-campus moment specifically, the kind of gesture a league publicizes because it's rare, not routine.

Two Fields, Two Timelines

Here's where the "the campus is back" framing runs into trouble. Stadium by the Sea reopened for football in a single season. The baseball diamond took an entirely different path, and it started with a decision that had nothing to do with sports.

In April 2025, LAUSD needed a flat surface to place temporary classrooms while the rest of the fire-damaged campus came back online. The baseball field, one of the only pieces of the campus that had survived the fire intact, got flattened for that purpose. Voelkel, eighteen years into building the program, described what got bulldozed in plain terms: "it took 250 bags of clay to build our mound." It wasn't just infrastructure. It was where his players spent six or seven hours a day, some of them more time there than at their own houses that year.

The workaround the baseball team found this year is one football never needed: a new home at Cheviot Hills Recreation Center, a facility the program expects to use for three to five years while reconstruction continues on the main campus. That timeline runs alongside LAUSD's broader $266.6 million campus restoration project, which puts full baseball field reconstruction as far out as 2029, a year after the rest of the permanent campus is expected to be finished.

Put the two timelines side by side and the picture gets sharper than any single reopening headline. Football lost a season and got its field back. Baseball lost its field entirely, and the rebuild plan is what's keeping it gone.

The Home Schedule Still Isn't Fully Home

Even football's return comes with a catch worth knowing before you plan a Friday around it.

1. August 21 — Home vs. Crenshaw at Stadium by the Sea. Lost 34-29.
2. August 28 — Away at Ted Slavin Field in Studio City vs. Harvard-Westlake. Lost 23-29.
3. September 3 — Away at Granada Hills Charter.
4. September 10 — Home vs. Brentwood School, one of the rivalry games that pulls fans from both sides of Sunset Boulevard.

Of the first four games since the campus reopened, only two are actually played at Stadium by the Sea. That's not a knock on whoever built the schedule. Non-league dates get set around whichever program has open weeks and existing series, often months before anyone knows exactly how ready a stadium will be. But it means the Friday night ritual that sat entirely on hold for a full year is being rebuilt one home date at a time, not restored all at once.

If you're the kind of resident who used to head over for a Friday game without checking anything first, whether you're coming from the Alphabet Streets or up along Via Bluffs, that habit needs a small update this season. Check the schedule before assuming the lights are on. Half the time this fall, they won't be, and the team on the road that week is the same one that just got its campus back.

What This Says About The Recovery Overall

None of this is really about football or baseball. It's about how recovery moves through a place like this: unevenly, field by field, rather than behind one clean ribbon cutting. Palisades Village reopened on a single Saturday in August. Temescal Gateway Park came back in July with one trail permanently gone. The new recreation center still has its own separate timeline. Now Pali High's stadium is back in one season while its baseball diamond sits years away, occupied for now by the same classrooms that let the rest of the school return to campus at all.

If you live in the Palisades, that pattern is worth carrying into how you read every future "we're back" headline about this neighborhood. The honest version is rarely a single date. It's a series of dates, spread across different corners of the same property, moving at different speeds for reasons that usually have more to do with what else needed that same ground than with how much anyone cared about getting it back.

Steve Kerr walked those same halls decades before any of this, graduating from Pali High in 1983 on his way to five NBA championships as a player and four more as a coach. The program he came from has weathered plenty since. This fall it's running on two clocks at once, one for the stadium and one for the diamond, and only one of them has an end date anyone can actually count on.

For more on how Pacific Palisades is rebuilding street by street and field by field, The Cilic Group keeps close watch on the neighborhood we call home. If you're weighing a move here, or want an honest read on how recovery has actually played out on a specific street, request a confidential consultation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing on the ground.