Losses even more amazing than record victories

Click here to see a slide show of Gary McKnight's Top 15 players.

Gary McKnight always says he more easily remembers the losses than the victories.

That's because there have been so few losses for the Mater Dei boys basketball coach.

McKnight became the CIF-Southern Section's boys basketball coaching career victories leader Wednesday when Mater Dei beat Norwalk, 116-53, in the second round of pool play in the Loara Tournament. The 830th victory moved him past Lou Cvijanovich, who coached Santa Clara of Oxnard to 829 victories from 1959-99. McKnight will become the state's all-time leader this season when he passes the 843 victories compiled by Mike Phelps, who coached at St. Joseph of Alameda and Bishop O'Dowd of Oakland from 1971-90.

Most amazing about the McKnight record is those losses. He has only 76 of them. Phelps had 196, and Cvijanovich had 267. McKnight's winning percentage is an unreal .916.

Mater Dei will be No. 1 in the first Orange County rankings should the Monarchs beat Canyon, another sure-fire county top-10 team, in the Loara tourney semifinals Friday at 8 p.m. at Loara and then win the tournament final on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Loara. Rankings, and much more about county boys and girls basketball, will be at ocvarsity.com Monday in the Register on Tuesday.

Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:

• The Tournament of Champions at Ocean View, annually one of the top boys basketball events in Southern California, has an excellent field again and begins Monday with this schedule: Lakewood vs. Rancho Verde of Moreno Valley, 5 p.m.; Compton vs. Serra of Gardena, 6:30 p.m.; and Centennial of Compton vs. Long Beach Poly, 8 p.m. County teams in the TOC are host school Ocean View, and Huntington Beach.

• Updates from the semifinal football games Friday and Saturday will be available and constant at ocvarsity.com.

• Dan Petrone this week resigned from one of the most-challenging coaching positions in county football, as Marina's head coach in the rugged Sunset League. He was a better coach there than his 6-24 three-year record indicates. Marina is not the destination of choice for many football players in the Huntington Beach Union High School District, and anybody who replaces Petrone has the difficult task of convincing the school's football parents that Marina will not become Edison overnight.

• Servite has the Hut Drill, Mater Dei its Pride Drill. One of the niftiest postgame drills is the Edison's football team's funky little jumping jacks while yelling out "C-H-A-M-P-S." It's very casual, almost like the anti-Hut Drill, and it started, by Edison coach Dave White's estimate, about 20 years ago.

• The National Football Foundation Orange County Chapter's Scholar-Athletes Awards Banquet is March 1 at Anaheim Convention Center. The event honors county high school, community college and Chapman University football players who made all-league or all-conference first team while maintaining a grade-point average of 3.5 or higher, and scholarship funds are awarded, too (the chapter has distributed $156,000 in scholarship funds over the past six years). Coaches have received the nomination forms, and the rest is up to them.

• The CIF-Southern Section's football people did a very good job assigning seedings, as a look at the semifinals proves. The top four seeds are in the semifinals in the Pac-5, Southwest and Southern Divisions, which are divisions involving Orange County teams, and in a few of the other divisions in the 13-division playoffs.

•Trabuco Hills kicker Mitch Murar takes a county-record of 78 consecutive successful extra-point attempts into tonight's Southwest Division semifinal, in which the Mustangs play at Tustin. Murar broke the record of 71 that Newport Harbor kicker Dillan Freiberg set earlier this season.

• In what would be a fine act of chivalry, boys water polo should be a winter sport and girls water polo should be a fall sport, a switch that can be done if there continues to be no post-section competition in either. It probably will never happen, because it's too complicated to make the switch, but it would be great if for one season the girls played in the warmer fall season while the boys played in the cooler winter season, and they switched that around every other year.

• Tickets for the CIF State Girls Volleyball Championships, Saturday at the UC Irvine Bren Center, are $14 for adults, $8 for children 12 and younger and for students with student idenfication. Newport Harbor plays Salinas in the Division I final at 7 p.m.

• We still need surveys returned for winter sports teams. Only 12 county wrestling teams have returned completed surveys. The sports and teams that complain the most about lack of coverage usually are the same sports and teams that are the least accommodating.