Prep Notebook : Magnets Attract All Kinds

The City section, which has so little imagination that two of its leagues are named the Valley 4-A and the Valley 3-A, has added another collection of schools that contains exactly what its name implies.

The Magnet League, which came into being last fall, is made up of six magnet schools, including Valley Alternative in Van Nuys and the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in Reseda.

And just as the magnet schools themselves provide an alternative to less specialized education, their athletic programs provide an alternative to big-time high school athletics. Or even small-time high school athletics.

Games in the Magnet League are more recreation than they are intense, high-pressure competition.

“We take the student who is going to be playing at picnics when he grows up,” said coach Mac Becker of the Sherman Oaks school.

Three sports are played in the Magnet League--nine-man flag football, basketball and slo-pitch softball. The teams are co-ed and the games are played during school hours because the magnets do not have after-school busing. Football and basketball games are played with no timeouts--in two 20-minute halves for basketball, four 10-minute quarters for football--and softball games are limited to one hour.

Becker, a physical education teacher, is not paid extra for coaching the six teams--junior varsity and varsity teams in the three sports--at Sherman Oaks. He and his athletes give up their lunch hours so they can practice.

It’s still a little informal in what Becker calls “the embryo year.”

Winning is the objective of any team, of course, but Becker said his athletes aren’t necessarily looking for championships.

“They’re looking for the reward of playing the game,” he said.

Asked who won the league football title last fall, Becker thought for a moment before saying, “I guess we did. . . . We only lost one game and I don’t think anybody had a better record than that.”

Obviously, it’s not worrying him.

“We’re not trying to compete with the high school programs and duplicate what they have,” Becker said, “but we don’t want to shortchange the children who are here, either. So we want to give them an opportunity to experience athletics at a lower-key level.”

The competition is intense, Becker said, but “there is no such thing as a fight or a brawl.” He said the level of competition is “better than intramural, but it’s probably not as good as regular high school athletics.”

The main reason, he said, is that the magnets have a much smaller student base from which to draw from than other Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. Sherman Oaks has only 427 high school-age students, including just 107 juniors and seniors.

But, Becker said, “I would think if we took our varsity basketball team, we could probably hold our own with a small high school--a rural high school maybe outside of the L.A. area that had the same population. The quality is still there.”

As Cleveland was wrapping up its second straight Valley 4-A League championship last week with a 73-56 win over Kennedy, Cavalier fans began chanting, “We want the Shaw. We want the Shaw.”

The Shaw, of course, is unbeaten Crenshaw (17-0), the defending City champion that is seeded No. 1 going into this season’s playoffs, which begin Friday night. Cleveland (21-1) is seeded No. 2.

The 4-A final is March 1 at the Sports Arena.

Of a possible match-up with the Cougars, Cleveland Coach Greg Herrick said: “We think we can play with them. . . . I told the players, ‘There’s only one team that can beat them--that’s us.’ ”

Cleveland should not look too far ahead, however. Last year, the Cavaliers were 20-2 going into the playoffs, then were defeated by Fremont in the first round of the playoffs.

Fremont was a fifth-place team.

“We bring up last year to show what can happen,” said Herrick, whose team will meet Locke, another fifth-place team, in its playoff opener Friday night at Cleveland. “It’s almost the same situation this year. We want them to know.”

When Crespi basketball coaches found out Friday that only one official would appear at their game against Bosco Tech that night, assistant coach Ed Marek began phoning referees from a list he found in the coaches’ office.

After several calls, Marek finally got in touch with an official who said he could be at Crespi by halftime of the junior varsity game.

A few hours later, an official showed up all right--looking for the soccer field. Marek, it seems, had been working from a list of soccer referees.

“This guy showed up in a soccer official’s uniform, so I asked him if I could help him,” said Crespi Coach Paul Muff. “Then I realized what had happened.”

The bemused official told Muff he hadn’t worked a basketball game in 10 years, but that he’d be willing to give it a try.

Muff vetoed that idea, however, so only one official worked the Celts’ 73-61 victory.

Notes

Crespi basketball players Joe Campanella and Alfie Basile are traveling to New York City at their own expense this weekend to visit Columbia University. On Saturday night, the senior guards will get a chance to see former Crespi standout Joe Carrabino, a Harvard University senior who will lead the Ivy League-leading Crimson against the Lions at Columbia’s Levien Gymnasium. . . .

Camarillo’s Matt Hickman, who finished third among the heavyweights last year at the Southern Section 4-A wrestling championships, never made it to the mat this season. The All-Southern Section offensive tackle, a 6-3 senior who went into football practice last fall weighing 298 pounds and played most of the season at 280, didn’t make it down to the state’s 247-pound maximum for wrestling.

“It wasn’t even close,” said Camarillo wrestling Coach Charlie Festerling, who pointed out that Hickman was hampered by an elbow injury that sidelined him before the Southern Section weigh-in in mid-January. The injury, however, didn’t keep college football recruiters away. Hickman will sign a letter of intent today with University of Nevada, Las Vegas. . . .

Hickman’s place on the wrestling team was taken by Blaine Wingle, a guard who played next to Hickman on Camarillo’s Coastal Conference champion football team. Wingle placed second at the Marmonte League championships last week and was one of four starters from the Scorpion football team who qualified for the Southern Section 4-A wrestling championships Friday and Saturday at Fountain Valley High School. . . .

Westlake’s Ken Burke, the state high jump champion and a three-year starter in basketball, has missed the Warriors’ last five games with a stress fracture in his left foot. He is expected to miss Westlake’s regular-season finale tonight at Royal, but may be back in time for the opening round of the Southern Section playoffs Feb. 22. He said he did not expect the injury to affect him during track season.

Burke, who was averaging about 12 points a game and whose best jump is 7-2, is considering offers of track scholarships from Texas A&M;, Arkansas, Kansas, Arizona, Louisiana State University and Cal. He visited Texas A&M; last fall and has scheduled a trip to Arkansas during spring break. . . .

Canyon offensive lineman Brent Parkinson, who will sign today with USC, received seven votes in the Long Beach Press-Telegram’s annual poll of Pac-10 football recruiters. Only three players got the maximum 10 votes in the Best in the West poll--running backs Aaron Emanuel of Quartz Hill, Mark Green of Riverside Poly and Marc Hicks of Davis.

None got eight or nine votes, and only three got seven--Parkinson, offensive lineman Mike Beech of Newport Harbor and quarterback Michael Johnson of Baldwin Park. . . .

Add recruiting: San Fernando fullback Mike Daniels will sign with New Mexico. Quarterback Scott Cline of Camarillo, The Times’ Valley Back of the Year, has not been heavily recruited for football and said he probably will play baseball in college. . . .

The Alemany girls basketball team has won or shared the San Fernando Valley League championship in each of the last 14 years. Louisville, which has shared the crown with the Indian Maidens the last two seasons, will play host to Alemany on Thursday in the title-deciding game.

Both teams are 13-1 in league. Louisville is 19-4 overall, while Alemany is 14-5. Three of Alemany’s losses have come to Louisville: 63-56 and 54-27 in tournaments and 59-58 in league.