Every team in every sport needs a Brendon Vos.
Fullerton baseball coach Tony Gonzalez knew he could rely upon Vos to accept any assignment and execute it with full effort. Vos was a multi-position player as a freshman. Gonzalez asked Vos to zero in on pitching. Vos did so.
Vos would be the Indians’ starting pitcher one game, maybe throw a couple of middle-relief innings in another game or close out a game. He was so good at everything and anything that Vos, who posted a 1.53 ERA this past spring, was named the team’s pitcher of the year.
“Brendon was a competitor,” Gonzalez said. “He loved to be on a baseball field.”
Vos won’t be on the field for Fullerton when the season opens in a couple of weeks. A senior, Vos died of leukemia on Wednesday.
He was diagnosed with leukemia last May, the first week of the 2016 playoffs. A few months later, Vos was told by his doctors that he was cleared of leukemia. He fell ill in late November and a diagnosis revealed that the leukemia returned.
Gonzalez continued to speak of Vos in the present tense Thursday.
“He’s not going to wow you with his stuff,” Gonzalez said. “Tall, lanky, long fingers and long arms. Really good ball movement, keeps the ball down, throws three pitches for strikes.”
And Vos would throw those pitches in whatever situation worked best for his team.
Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:
• PerfectGame.org, a baseball website, has Orange Lutheran at No. 1 and Huntington Beach at No. 5 in its national preseason rankings. It rates Dana Hills senior pitcher Hans Crouse as the No. 5 prospect in the nation. JSerra senior Royce Lewis is the No. 6 prospect.
• The departure and reinstatement of Vince Brown as Foothill baseball coach was unique in that no information came from the school or from the Tustin school district. First, his forced resignation was revealed on Facebook by Foothill baseball families. Then, Brown announced his reinstatement via Twitter and Facebook.
• Coaches committees selected the All-CIF Southern Section football teams. The CIF-SS office had nothing to do with the selections. There was a brief time the CIF-SS office had “CIF” dropped from those teams to make sure people knew that the CIF-SS personnel was not involved in the process.
• It has been a tough semester for Troy football. Junior quarterback Josiah Norwood, the Freeway League offensive player of the year in 2016, transferred to Santa Margarita. Junior running back Skyler Taylor, who rushed for a team-high 675 yards in ’16, transferred to Freeway League rival La Habra.
• Brendan Costello, a backup quarterback in 2016 at Santa Margarita as a sophomore, transferred to Mission Viejo. Another sophomore quarterback, Joey Yellen, transferred to Mission Viejo from St. John Bosco.
• Sonora’s boys basketball team clinched its fifth straight Freeway League championship. The Raiders have been Freeway League champs for seven of the past nine seasons.
• Edison 6-foot-8 junior basketball player Josh Phillips had 112 blocked shots going into this week. That’s five blocks a game for Phillips. My unofficial book had him with three on Tuesday in the Chargers’ loss at Los Alamitos.
• The other shot-blocking 6-8 junior in that game, Jacob Eyman, is one of the more improved basketball players in O.C. from last season to this season. His timing, agility, touch around the basket and his basketball sensibilities are much better.
• League constitutions vary from league to league. Many leagues will go to coin flips to break ties at the end of a season. However, there could be some games added to Friday’s schedule in basketball that would break ties for a league’s final playoff berths. In basketball, leagues that have been playing Tuesday-Friday or Wednesday-Friday schedules went with Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday schedules this week to leave Friday open for possible tie-breaker games.
• Three seasons ago, Villa Park’s girls basketball team finished 3-23. This season, the Spartans have clinched a playoff berth in Coach Brad Willis’ second season Villa Park.
• The teams selected to the CIF-Southern Section Open Division in boys and girls basketball will be announced Friday. Brackets for the other 11 divisions will be released Sunday.
• Boys and girls soccer playoff brackets will be released Monday.
• CIF-SS individual wrestling playoffs in six divisions are Feb. 17 and 18. The Southern Division meet is at Brea Olinda High. The Coastal Division meet is at Westminster High.
• The Masters wrestling meet is Feb. 24 and 25 at Citizens Bank Arena in Ontario.
• CIF-SS girls water polo playoff brackets will be released Saturday. The playoffs begin with wild-card round games, if necessary, Tuesday. Division 4 and 5 first-round games are Tuesday, with the first round in other divisions on Wednesday.
• A couple of notes on the 92 points scored by LaMelo Ball of Chino Hills on Tuesday: Ball is a 6-foot-2 sophomore and it was a league game against Los Osos of Rancho Cucamonga, so this is not like some 7-foot-2 center on a top-ranked team tearing up some struggling public school team or a little private school team in a tournament first-round game. Los Osos outscored Chino Hills, 44-43, in the fourth quarter.
• I scored 92 points one night. I could have scored 100 but mom told me to stop playing because the noise from me blasting into my bedroom door after yet another Nerf ball dunk was distracting her viewing of “Maude.”
Contact the writer: sfryer@scng.com
