Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:
• One of the highlights of every spring, the Trabuco Hills Distance Carnival and Track and Field Invitational, is today and Saturday at Trabuco Hills High. The event is the third-largest regular-season high school track event on the West Coast with 102 schools and more than 3,200 athletes. Long Beach Poly will have its usual championship-quality athletes there, and Dana Hills and Santa Margarita are among county teams in it. Check out the details at trabucohillsinvitational.com.
• This will change the county’s girls lacrosse rankings: Corona del Mar, ranked No. 10 in the county, beat No. 1 Beckman, 15-11, on Wednesday at Corona del Mar. Kacie Kline scored six goals for Corona del Mar. The outcome makes Corona del Mar 6-3 overall and 4-0 in the Pacific Coast League, and it was the first loss for Beckman (6-1, 3-1).
• Last Friday in girls lacrosse, county No. 3 Los Alamitos beat La Costa Canyon of Carlsbad, last year’s Southern California Open Division champion, 12-10.
• The University and Corona del Mar boys tennis teams have quite a history going. University, ranked No. 1 in Orange County, beat No. 2 Corona del Mar, 14-4, Tuesday for University’s 100th straight dual-match win. University beat Corona del Mar in the CIF-Southern Section Division 1 finals in 2012 and ’13.
• University has won the CIF-SS Division 1 team tennis championship four years in a row and in six of the past seven years. The one year in that span the Trojans came up short, 2009, they lost a close one to Thousand Oaks in the final, 10-8.
• The county record for consecutive CIF-SS boys tennis championships is six by Corona del Mar from 1975 through 1980.
• Sage Hill’s boys tennis team defeated Whitney of Cerritos for the first time in three years this week.
• There is a high school beach volleyball league. The boys teams play during the fall, the girls in the spring. Four county girls teams are in this week’s Interscholastic Beach Volleyball League top 10: Huntington Beach is No. 4; Saddleback Valley Christian is No. 6; Edison is No. 7; and Mater Dei is No. 9.
• In our OC Varsity Hot Shots pages earlier this week, we ran lists of the top fielders in baseball. Having seen a couple of highlights videos, it looks like we should have included Woodbridge shortstop Chad Jacob.
• Mater Dei’s Stanley Johnson scored eight points for the West as it beat the East in the McDonald’s All-American Game on Wednesday in Chicago. Mater Dei coach Gary McKnight was there, too, to receive the Morgan Wootten Award for lifetime coaching achievement.
• Southern California schools won eight of the 12 championships awarded at last week’s CIF State Championships in basketball. Eight of the 12 champions were private schools.
• Three county coaches were named Southern Section Winter Sports Coaches of the Year by the California Coaches Association: Sunny Hills girls soccer coach Jeff Gordon, Canyon boys basketball coach Nate Harrison and Santa Margarita girls water polo coach Brian Weathersby.
• Coaching openings can be found at ocvarsity.com under the “coaches” tab. A couple of recent additions are girls volleyball coach at San Clemente and wrestling coach at Edison.
• The numbers are in: The National Football Foundation’s Orange County Chapter awarded $13,000 in scholarship monies to county football players at the organization’s Scholar-Athlete Dinner last month. Membership in the chapter supports the student-athlete program and offers the opportunity to be a voter in the College Hall of Fame selections. Go to nationalfootballfoundation-occhapter.com for information.
• The Orange County Athletic Directors at its winter meeting last month honored “Athletes With Character.” These honorees consistently show leadership and team-first values. For a list of the honorees, go to ocvarsity.com and enter “Orange County Athletic Directors” in the search window.
• Coaches and/or athletic directors should pay closer attention to the pregame music at their baseball games. The host schools are not going to be mentioned, but one school’s pregame entertainment featured a song that included marijuana references, and another school twice played a song about having an open container of beer on the truck’s dashboard. There is a lot of beer-themed country music played at county baseball games.
• This is going to be a great help to Saddleback football: Former Roadrunners coach Jerry Witte and longtime assistant Paul Carnegie are returning to the staff to help Coach Rob Thompson. Witte, who took Saddleback to a CIF championship in 1985, will coach the offensive line and Witte’s decades-long right-hand man Carnegie will coach quarterbacks.
• The Sixth Annual Kevin Armstrong Memorial Sports Foundation Golf Tournament is Monday at Mile Square Park. The tournament benefits the foundation named for Armstrong, who died in 2005 and whose large life cannot be described in this limited space. For information, visit armstrongfoundation.org.
Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com
