New Blood in the Loft: How a Sacramento Middle School Is Raising the Sport’s Next Champions

Every so often a story comes along that reminds you why this sport has survived for well over a century in this country — not because of prize money or trophies, but because someone hands it down. This spring, that story is playing out in a small red barn just south of Sacramento, where seventh- and eighth-graders in an agriculture class are learning to raise, band, vaccinate, and eventually race homing pigeons for a club that’s been flying since the 1930s.

The Fort Sutter Racing Pigeon Club Finds an Unlikely Loft

The Fort Sutter Racing Pigeon Club has been a fixture of the Sacramento fancy since the 1930s, but last year it found a new home base: Katherine L. Albiani Middle School in Elk Grove Unified School District. The club’s president, Jim Looper, is also an agriculture teacher there, and he brought his own birds into the classroom as a hands-on unit for his students.

The setup is exactly what any fancier would recognize — cages stacked along the walls, nesting material, grit and grain on a side table, the low constant coo of birds settling in. What’s different is who’s doing the work. Seventh-graders Emily Dvorak and Lily Wiechert, and eighth-grader Kathryn Deem, have spent the spring learning to feed, band, and vaccinate a loft of pigeons that, in a few months, will be competing in real races for the Camellia City Combine.

None of the students had a pigeon racing background going in. Dvorak signed up for the elective after feeding pigeons on her grandmother’s farm. Wiechert already keeps turkeys, chickens, and ducks at home and wanted to add pigeons to the mix after hearing about the class from her older sister. Deem had a similar path — a sibling who raved about the ag program until she signed up herself. It’s a small but telling detail: in a hobby that often struggles to bring in newcomers, word-of-mouth between siblings is quietly doing some of that work.

Not Just Feeding Birds — Learning the Sport

What separates this from a generic classroom pet project is how far into real fancier knowledge the curriculum goes. Students aren’t just filling water dishes. They’re learning why peas matter for protein, why oyster shell is added for calcium, and why grit is essential for digestion. They’re studying ID bands and what the numbers on them actually track. They’re being walked through pedigrees and genetics — and it’s clearly sinking in. Dvorak, describing what breeders look for, told a CapRadio reporter that fanciers want “narrow tail feathers because that makes them more aerodynamic; it reduces the drag,” and more feathers on the wings for additional thrust. That’s not a talking point a teacher fed her for a soundbite — that’s a kid who’s started to think like a breeder.

Looper, for his part, comes by this honestly. His father kept pigeons before he was born, and Looper was attending pigeon shows and handling birds as a small child. He stepped away from the hobby for a stretch of adulthood before returning to it in 2017, and has been steadily building his lofts ever since. He’s blunt about the level these birds compete at: “Some of these birds are going to be valued at four figures, and most people don’t recognize that they have any value.”

The Camellia City Combine and the Eastern Sierra Course

Once the birds are race-ready, Fort Sutter’s members — Looper’s birds included — compete in the Camellia City Combine, flying a course across the eastern Sierra. Like most American federations, the season splits into old bird season, which starts in April, and young bird season, which begins in August.

The release logistics will be familiar to anyone in the sport, but they’re worth spelling out for readers newer to pigeon racing: birds are loaded into specialized trailers and driven out to a release point, which for this combine starts around Sparks, Nevada, and moves roughly 50 miles farther east each week as the season progresses. Since the birds are essentially always flying home westward, moving the release point east extends the race distance week over week.

Looper made a point that’s worth repeating to anyone outside the sport who assumes this is just “release a bird and see who’s fastest”: distance isn’t really the variable that decides a race — speed is, and speed is shaped heavily by conditions. Mountain ranges and wind can hand one bird an advantage over another that fought a headwind the whole way. And races get postponed outright for smoke, heat, or rain, because — as Looper put it — the sport is ultimately structured around what’s best for the birds, not the schedule.

A Training Race in a Middle School Parking Lot

The most vivid moment of the visit was a live training toss. Two metal transport boxes, each holding about a dozen banded birds separated by sex, sat in the back of a pickup outside the barn. Looper had set up what fanciers would recognize as a basic training race — the birds would fly from the release point near the school back to his home loft a few miles away in rural Elk Grove, with exact arrival times logged automatically.

The students popped the boxes open themselves. After a beat of stillness, the birds burst out, circled the barn to orient themselves, and then vanished toward home. Minutes later, Looper’s phone started chiming with results — the birds had already crossed the electronic gate at his loft.

Looper told the students something that stuck with at least one of them: some of the birds in that release had been raised in that same barn the year before. “It kind of goes full circle,” he said. Wiechert’s response captured exactly the kind of long-view thinking this sport tends to instill in people who stick with it: “Maybe next year one of those birds will come back in this barn, and I’ll get to raise its chicks!”

Why This Story Matters for the Sport

Pigeon racing in the U.S. doesn’t get a lot of mainstream press, and when it does, it’s often framed as a curiosity. This piece, reported by CapRadio’s Sarit Laschinsky, is different — it treats the sport with the same seriousness you’d give any youth athletics program, right down to genetics discussions and race-day logistics. That framing matters. Programs like this one are exactly how a hobby with an aging membership base picks up new fanciers, and it’s a genuinely useful model for other clubs around the country to look at: partner with a local school’s agriculture program, loan out breeding pairs for a season, and let kids do the hands-on work of raising and training birds that will actually compete.

If your club has a relationship — or could build one — with a local FFA chapter or ag class, this is worth passing along to your board. It’s a low-cost way to build both goodwill and a farm team of future members.