Christian and Mark Papadopoulos gave up on ice hockey when they started attending Los Alamitos High School.
It was a simple decision. Both wanted to be involved in a sport that they could play with “Los Alamitos” on their chests, and that wasn’t possible playing hockey.
So they exchanged their hockey sticks for lacrosse sticks until this school year, when Los Alamitos announced it would expand from a single junior varsity club ice hockey team to varsity and JV squads.
“We wanted to be a part of the school, so we switched over to lacrosse,” said Mark, a junior goaltender and the younger brother to Christian, a senior. “Then this popped up. We love hockey, so we came back to it.”
Nearly two months into its first year at the varsity level of competition in the Anaheim Ducks High School Hockey League, the Griffins have yet to leave the ice unhappy after a game.
Los Al stands alone in first place with a 6-0 record in the 10-team 2A varsity level. The Griffins will take on Huntington Beach High on Saturday at Anaheim Ice.
The Griffins have carried the momentum from their first JV season last year, in which they advanced to the championship game.
“I saw the kids wearing jerseys last year,” said Christian Papadopoulos, who also is the student body president at Los Al. “They kept winning and got to the finals. I was disappointed I wasn’t a part of it, and it made me want to be on this team more.”
The Papadopoulos brothers represent only one type of player on the team, though.
High school hockey is relatively new to the sports landscape in Southern California, and it significantly trails the established system of club hockey in overall interest. The Anaheim Ducks High School Hockey League began play in 2008, and a similar league in Valencia started in 2001.The top level of amateur youth hockey, referred to as AAA, still possesses the top talent, but several AAA players are leaking over into the high school ranks.
“It’s fun for them,” Los Alamitos coach Sandy Gasseau said of the AAA players. “Maybe it’s a little more laid-back. Maybe they’re able to produce more offensively. There’s more space, more room to do things. On your AAA teams, you’re not going to get three goals in one game, but if you come play with us, you can.”
One of those AAA crossovers is Los Alamitos’ Rock Boynton, arguably the best goaltender in the Ducks’ high school league. Boynton is second in the league in goals-against average (1.61) and save percentage (.910), but he doesn’t even attend the school on his jersey. Boynton attends Narbonne High in Harbor City and was recruited to play for Los Alamitos by Gasseau, who also coaches for the Anaheim Jr. Ducks, Boynton’s club team.
It’s almost like business vs. pleasure for Boynton, who gets exposure and prime competition while playing AAA hockey for the Jr. Ducks, but enjoys the atmosphere and fans of the high school league more.
“Coach asked me if I wanted to play on the team, that it would be a good experience, more practice and more game scenarios,” he said.
“It’s actually a lot more fun because there are a lot more fans in the stands, and the whole high school comes to watch you. You don’t get that in club. You only get parents,” Boynton said.
Boynton represents another segment of players in the high school league – those who don’t go to the school for which they play. According to Richard Castellanos, Los Al’s team manager, 60 percent of the players on the team are students at the school. Some other teams are federations of entire school districts (Capistrano Unified, Long Beach Prep and San Diego South).
The league has what it calls “pure teams.” Teams such as JSerra, Orange Lutheran and Santa Margarita, who play in the five-team 1A varsity division, are composed entirely of students at their respective schools. The league asks teams to decrease the number of players from other schools the longer they are in the league.
New teams can struggle to fill out a roster, however, which is why they are allowed relief by using players from schools that don’t have hockey programs of their own.
“The bottom line is for us to grow the sport,” said Art Trottier, vice president of The Rinks, a group of facilities that include ice rinks in Anaheim, Lakewood, Westminster and Yorba Linda and roller rinks in Corona, Huntington Beach and Irvine purchased by the Anaheim Ducks, which runs the league.
“Our main initiative is to build the sport of hockey. We were losing kids going into high school to play a sport for their school. This was the obvious (solution),” Trottier said.
Although there is a distinction between nonschool-affiliated club teams and the teams in the Ducks’ high school league, they both essentially are “club” programs in the sense that they are not affiliated with the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body on high school sports in the state.
To get ice hockey approved for play by the CIF, a section would have to submit a proposal to the governing body to add hockey to its list of state-approved sports.
“There are at least three levels of governance to get through to even get to that point,” Southern Section spokesman Thom Simmons said.
Gaining CIF approval is something the Los Alamitos players also want, but most know it almost surely won’t happen during their time at the school.
That doesn’t take away the pride they have in being the founders of ice hockey at Los Alamitos, though.
“Some day, hockey will be perceived as a big sport at Los Al, just like football and volleyball,” Christian Papadopoulos said. “I can see it.”
Contact the writer: jbalan@ocregister.com, 714-796-2430 or Twitter: @jeremybalan
