OCVarsity Voice: Find out what schools we really hate

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Adam Maya reveals the real agenda of our reporters.

OCVarsity’s Steve Fryer is from Santa Ana. Damian Calhoun lives in Compton. Miguel Melendez lives in Bell. Carlos Arias lives in the southern tip of the world, also known as San Clemente. Dan Albano lives right near the ocean (fittingly), in Huntington Beach.

I am from Alhambra, a town half the people I’ve met in Orange County didn’t know existed, leaving me to tell them, “Near Pasadena.”

Why am I telling you this? Because I read a comment Monday saying that I hate a certain school in Orange County. A few days before that it was a player I hated. I get these notes every week. We all do.

Sometimes, they are funny, but mostly they are sad. People genuinely believe we are biased against certain schools, or sometimes, all schools, which wouldn’t make sense. I think it’s important for you, the reader, to know we do not root for any schools.

We can’t. Credibility is huge in the journalism business, and without it we wouldn’t be able to do our job effectively. We probably wouldn’t even have one.

With football we cover nearly every game, every week. In every other sport, we try our best to give successful programs the coverage they deserve. Sometimes we make mistakes or miss an achievement, and a respectful reminder never hurts. But to say I hate a school I grew up 30-plus miles from is misguided.

Conversely, I’d love to hear someone make a case that Fryer is favoring Saddleback, his alma mater. He works as hard as anyone to get as many schools represented in the paper. You’d be even more hard-pressed to quibble with the coverage of Albano, who is more thorough than the Associated Press.

Yet, Arias said a parent years back told him he was trying to keep her daughter from going to college. A parent once told me his daughter no longer wanted to play softball after an article I had written. Huh?

Often time, people complain we only care about the Trinity League, or that we love and hate Mater Dei at the same time, which also doesn’t make sense. Our responsibility is to write about the news. And Mater Dei makes more news than most, to no fault of our own.

When I arrived at the Register two years ago, I was learning the names of the 80 some-odd schools for the first time. The only thing I knew about Mater Dei was that former USC quarterback Matt Leinart and linebacker Matt Grootegoed went there. I hadn’t even heard of the other Trinity schools. In fact, I thought Santa Margarita was in Fresno because that’s where Carson Palmer grew up.

I really have no favorites. None of these schools are the San Francisco Giants or San Francisco 49ers, my two favorite sports teams growing up. And even they matter significantly less than they once did because of my profession.

So whether it is football on a Friday night or tennis on a Tuesday afternoon, between Savanna, St. Margaret’s or Servite, it does not matter to me who wins. I just want to see a good game and be able to tell a story about it afterward.

And it is cool to see the kids succeed.

Contact the writer: amaya@ocregister.com