School year's end means football is on its way

It's football season.

Almost.

There is an all-star baseball event in Irvine this weekend, and the CIF State Championships in boys golf today at Pebble Beach. Football, always the biggest enchilada on the high school sports plate, gets going in a spicy way Saturday with the Air Strike Tournament on Saturday at Dana Hills and San Clemente high schools.

The Air Strike is a 16-team passing league tournament that will include county teams Dana Hills, Edison, Los Alamitos, Mater Dei, San Clemente, Santa Margarita, Servite, Tesoro and Trabuco Hills. Out-of-county teams in it include Oaks Christian of Westlake Village, featuring Joe Montana's son, Nick, at quarterback.

It's a seven-on-seven competition. Some people put a lot of emphasis on the results of passing leagues and passing tournaments. Some people, and yours truly fits into this category, don't understand the fuss about tackle football workouts in which there is no tackling.

These summer leagues and tournaments do help develop teams' pass offenses and pass defenses. They're fun to watch, too, and we'll have extensive coverage of Saturday's event on ocvarsity.com. But that's not real football.

We don't see Tustin in these things because Tustin rarely passes. But we did see Tustin in the 2008 CIF-Southern Section Southwest Division championship game. That's real football.

Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:

•Another football event coming up is the Orange County North-South All-Star Game, July 10 at Orange Coast College. It will be the 50th edition of the game. The coaches of that first game in 1959, Brea Olinda's Dick Tucker, who really came up with the idea for a county game and coached the North that year, and Mater Dei's Dick Coury, who coached the South, spoke at the Brea Lions All-Star Game Recognition Dinner a couple of weeks ago.

•Dana Hills won more CIF-SS championships than any other school in the 571-schools section. The Dolphins won four section titles, with championships in girls tennis, boys cross country, girls cross country and boys track and field.

•Tesoro's softball team did not give up a run in winning five playoff games to take the CIF-SS Division III championship. The Titans outscored their opponents, 34-0, in the playoffs.

•One of the most consistently winning programs in the county is University boys tennis. The Trojans have been in the CIF-Southern Section finals eight of the past 11 years, including the past four in which they have won two CIF-SS championships. University also has won four consecutive Pacific Coast League championships and has won 55 dual matches in a row.

•Another consistent winner is Mater Dei baseball. The Monarchs have been to the CIF-SS Division I baseball semifinals each of the past three seasons (2007-09). They reached the Division I quarterfinals in '06, and won the Division I championship in '05.

•Capistrano Valley's run to the '09 Division I baseball championship included four shutouts. They outscored their opponents, 25-4.

•Oxford Academy outscored its opponents, 28-11, on its way to winning the Division VI baseball championship. The Patriots beat the division's second- and fourth-seeded teams in the playoffs.

•The Ryan Lemmon Showcase, a two-day all-star baseball event, is Friday at Saturday at Windrow Park in Irvine. On Friday, graduating seniors from the Century League play the South Coast League at 4:30 p.m. followed by Pacific Coast vs. Sea View at 7:30 p.m. Saturday's game is Sunset vs. Trinity at 10 a.m.

•La Quinta now can offer a teaching position to go with its football coach job opening. The school had been prepared to hire a coach who would have been a walk-on, which is a coach who is not a fulltime faculty member. The deadline for applications is June 16.

•Santa Ana's boys basketball position is open now and it will be a walk-on position, with the departure of Scott Tenchka whose teaching job was eliminated. The Saints made the playoffs in all three of Tenchka's years at Santa Ana, and the team had a cumulative grade-point average of 3.75 this past season.

Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com