Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:
• Brea Olinda senior distance runner Austin Tamagno, one of the county’s all-time distance running greats, will run the 800 meters in CIF-Southern Section competition, starting with Saturday’s prelims and through CIF-Southern Section and CIF State championship meets. Brea coach Dreux Valenti said the 800s will help Tamagno improve his foot speed for national 1,500 and 1,600 races, including the Junior Nationals.
• University’s Paige Metayer, second among county leaders in the 400 (behind Los Alamitos’ Ashley Willingham) and among the county’s better runners in the 800, will skip the CIF-SS prelims to play in a club soccer tournament.
• University’s boys tennis team concluded the regular season be extending its Pacific Coast League win streak to 98 matches. That’s a very good boys tennis league. The Trojans’ most-recent league loss was in April of 2006.
• CIF-SS baseball and softball playoff brackets will be released Monday. Baseball brackets are out at 10 a.m., softball at noon. The pairings will be on OCVarsity.com shortly after their release, plus there will be analysis and more online.
• If baseball, softball and teams in other sports have the same won-loss records in league play, they can share a league championship. But if those teams are in the same playoff division, only one of those league co-champions can be the league’s No. 1 playoff representative.
• That order of playoff representation, i.e. which team is the league’s No. 1 playoff representative, which is the No. 2 team and which is No. 3, etc., is established by the league. In many baseball and softball leagues, the leagues’ teams play each other three times in league games. Which team won two out of three in those league series breaks ties so the leagues’ Nos. 1, 2 etc. teams can be identified.
• Friday is an open date in baseball, with no league games, in case an extra game is needed to determine a league’s playoff representation. Generally, the best-of-three format, coin flips or league constitution rules make such Friday games unnecessary. Sometimes nonleague games or tournament make-up games are played on that final Friday.
• CIF-SS spring sports finals dates and locations: swimming and diving, this week at Riverside Community College; boys tennis (team finals), May 20 at Claremont Club; track and field, May 21 at Cerritos College, boys volleyball, May 21 at Cerritos College; softball, June 3-4 at Bill Barber Park in Irvine; baseball, June 4, Divisions 5-7 at UC Riverside, Divisions 1-4 at San Manuel Stadium in San Bernardino. The Masters Meet, the qualifying track meet for the CIF State meet, is May 27 at Cerritos College.
• The Orange County Athletic Directors Association has its annual Athletes of the Year awards dinner May 31 at Anaheim Convention Center. The organization’s O.C. male and female athletes of the year must be graduating seniors. The Register and OCVarsity.com annually selects county male and female athletes of the year, too, but our selections do not have to be seniors.
• May 21 is going to be a busy day for football camps in the county .
• The Super Linemen Tournament, a skills and strength competition for football linemen, is May 21 at Estancia. Former NFL lineman Jesse Sapolu’s Men In The Trenches linemen camp runs it. For information on that and Sapolu’s camp go to sapolumeninthetrenches.com.
• Orange Lutheran football coach Chuck Petersen is bringing some players he coached at Air Force to help run the Task Force Heroes Football Camp at Orange Lutheran on May 21. It is an instructional camp for kindergarten through eighth-grade kids, with a $20 pre-registration fee. For more information on the camp, call 714-998-5151, extension 691.
• The Lott IMPACT Trophy group has an Equipment Safety and Proper Tackling Seminar at Newport Harbor on May 21. It is a free event for high school and youth football coaches and equipment managers and will include former UCLA coach Terry Donahue, former NFL and college coach Mike White, Newport Harbor coach Jeff Brinkley and others. For more information, call 714-315-9575.
• Wrestling officials are needed for the 2016-17 season. Contact Jeff Jacquot, president of the Orange County Wrestling Officials Association, at jjjacquot@sbcglobal.net.
• Officiating in any sport is a great way for former athletes, young and not-so-young, to stay involved in sports. The added income is a fine bonus. A shortage of officials exists in almost every CIF-SS sport.
• CIF-SS member schools can help keep officials in the officiating business by making sure officials don’t get harassed during and after games and matches. Parents, fans and coaches must remember that the kids, as talented as they are in Orange County, are not pro sports-level athletes, and the officials, as knowledgeable and as dedicated as they are in Orange County, are not pro sports-level officials.
• At the Beckman-Woodbridge baseball game Tuesday, a man wearing a Beckman cap followed the two umpires for almost the entire walk from the field exit gate to the parking lot, yelling at them for a balk call that enabled Woodbridge to score the winning run. It was the correct call – the pitcher, throwing from the stretch, clearly did not come to a full stop. This is not to pick on Beckman, because this lapse of supervision happens throughout the county, but this man should not have been allowed to confront the umpires the way he did.
• While we’re on the subject of supervision … it’s long been written here that kids should not be allowed to select the music played at high school games. At a baseball game last week, a parent had to request the person playing the between-innings tunes to press the stop button because of the awful language coming through the speakers. And this was at a game in the Academy League of which most of the league’s schools are Christian schools.
• Parents aren’t so smart with the music choices either. According to a 2010 study by the National Center for Health Statistics, accidents remain the leading cause of death among teenagers, and most of those fatal accidents are motor-vehicle fatalities and one in five teen drivers in fatal crashes had some alcohol in their system. Yet parents in charge of the music at games will play country music songs about drinking alcohol.
Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com
