Tumultuous doesn’t even begin to describe the last calendar year for the Warren football team.

Last November, Warren came within a breath of the program’s first CIF-SS football championship, as a potentially game-winning Hail Mary pass was intercepted four yards short of the end zone in the Division 3 final.

From that moment to now, the entire Bears program has been flipped over.

After helming Warren to its first CIF-SS finals appearance, Bears head coach Kevin Pearson stepped down in March. Warren’s leading running back transferred in the offseason, and its top four tacklers and top receiver graduated. The entire offensive line was overhauled.

Then, following a season-opening loss, its UCLA-committed stars — quarterback Madden Iamaleava and receiver Jace Brown — left the team and attempted to transfer to Long Beach Poly.

Despite all of that and the ensuing 0-5 start to the season, Warren has resoundingly rebounded with a 3-2 league record and a run to a second consecutive CIF-SS championship game, as the Bears (6-7) will take on Rio Hondo Prep (11-1) in the Division 7 final on Friday at Arcadia High.

“Obviously, we didn’t foresee it like this,” Warren coach Adam Leonard said, “It took an extreme amount of grit for our guys to just have a vision, have a goal and continue to set forth toward it, even when we took some really tough losses with personnel.

“I’m just really excited for the kids that stuck with it. It’s a level of excitement to know our work hasn’t been in vain.”

With so much turnover, Warren had to redefine itself. After the Week 1 departures, the Bears had to eschew the scoreboard results and find its game over the remaining nonleague games.

“My message to the kids was these (nonleague) games, we have to find out who we are,” Leonard said. “It’s an in-season training camp to get us ready for league and beyond that. The kids stuck with it, and we were able to fine tune things and really get to who we are to be successful.”

What Warren found was a physically determined running game behind that new set of offensive linemen. The Bears have just one senior on the offensive line, and Leonard told them the team would “ride or die” on the push they were able to make.

What resulted was a three-headed ground attack speared by junior Skylar Lendsey, senior Teralle Watson and senior quarterback Jamar Malone II, a transfer from Nevada.

“I learned I had to step up more for the team,” Lendsey said, “because their heads were getting kind of down, saying that we were going to do worse. I had to keep my players up. Telling them to keep practicing hard, and it paid off.”

This journey has been a unique one in Leonard’s football career that stretched to the NFL and Canadian Football League, but win or lose on Friday, it has been fruitful for the Bears.

“I haven’t experienced anything quite like it,” Leonard said. “It puts things in perspective. The game of football is a vehicle for life. We learn so much from it that can impact our lives, that character development. We’re really being intentional about who our players are outside of their pads.”