Los Lunas football starts rebuild under new coach Stephen Johnston
About 85 Los Lunas players were moving through station work and conditioning as Stephen Johnston installed a new system ahead of an Aug. 21 opener at Mayfield.
About 85 Los Lunas High School football players were moving through station work, conditioning and reaction drills as Stephen Johnston spent his first summer building a new culture for the Tigers. The work was part X's first months on the job after Los Lunas Schools announced on Feb. 25 that Johnston would replace Greg Henington, whose contract was not renewed after a five-year run.
Johnston, 39, arrived with a track record that stretches from Manzano High School to Artesia, where he coached from 2014 to 2021, including a stint as defensive coordinator. At Los Lunas, he is trying to install basic offensive and defensive schemes while also setting expectations for how players and coaches handle practice, the locker room and the daily demands of a program that has carried community expectations for years.
That history matters because the Tigers are not rebuilding from scratch. Henington led Los Lunas to its first-ever state football championship in 2021, when the Tigers went 13-0 and beat Artesia 40-28 for the Class 5A title. Over five seasons, Henington finished 43-16 and made the playoffs every year, a standard that made the coaching change a difficult transition for a program deeply tied to school pride in Los Lunas and the surrounding Valencia County community.
The next chapter comes with another shift in classification. Los Lunas is expected to move back to Class 5A for the 2026 season after spending time in 6A, and the new schedule is expected to create more balanced matchups over the next two years. Johnston has said the Tigers have enough talent to contend again, and the school’s football page already lists him as head coach while still identifying the program as the 2021 5A state champions and the 2024 district runner-up in 6A District 2.
The first real test will come quickly. Los Lunas opens the 2026 season Aug. 21 at Las Cruces Mayfield, giving Johnston only a short runway to turn summer drills into a system the Tigers can carry into Friday nights. Rising senior quarterback Luke Cieremans said the team is settling in and expects to return stronger, a sign that the reset is already taking hold inside a program where every rep now counts toward whether the rebuild is real.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
