The Preps / Scott Howard-Cooper : For Most, the College Recruiting Ordeal Comes to an End

“Recruiters are like car salesmen selling their school. They try to tell you everything about their school and they tell you anything you want to hear. “I think the weirdest thing I got was a poster with girls on it. Nothing about the football team, the school or anything else, just the good-looking girls there.” --Baldwin Park quarterback Michael Johnson, the Division III Player of the Year who signed with Arizona State. “It’s beginning to bother me now. It wasn’t in the beginning, though. Coach (Frank) Falks at USC said it would get worse at the end. And it has.” --Vera Emanuel, a week before her son, Aaron, signed a letter of intent with USC. Vera Emanuel will never win the purple heart, but she’s got my sympathy for surviving the prep football recruiting battle.

As was her son, she was kind to callers, recruiters, reporters and others. But unlike Aaron, she was an innocent bystander. He bought into the high-rent district by rushing for 4,807 yards and 54 touchdowns in three seasons at Quartz Hill.

Many callers were strangers, and some figured they were granted immunity from politeness because they were reporters. Of course, that’s not just with the Emanuels.

Baldwin Park Coach Trifone Pagone tells how some papers, particularly around Arizona and Arizona State, “reported” Johnson’s recruiting.

“The recruiters were great,” he said last week. “It was the newspaper people that were really out of hand. They were like car salesmen. They kept encouraging him (Johnson) to sign with their school.”

The other innocent bystanders were the athletes who drew no attention but should have drawn some. There’s no debating the popularity of football and boys’ basketball in Southern California, but there are other sports. With so much attention being devoted to football recruiting, some other people and things were overlooked:

--San Marcos pole vaulter Brandon Richards, the 17-year-old son of two-time Olympic champion Bob Richards. He set a high school record of 17 feet 5 inches at the Vitalis-U.S. Olympic Invitational Feb. 10 in East Rutherford, N.J. The previous record was 17-4 1/2, set by Joe Dial in 1981.

--The Millikan girls’ basketball team began this season with a 6-44 record in the Moore League dating back to 1980 and just one winning season--11-9 in 1978--since beginning play in 1977. The Rams (6-16 last season) are finally headed in the right direction under second-year Coach Greg Pappas. Starting two sophomores, two juniors and a senior, they finished third at 6-4 in a league that included Compton, the top team in the Southern Section if not the state, and are 19-6 overall going into the opening round of the playoffs Saturday against Chaffey.

--The Shrine All-Star football game. The four coaches who missed out after the game was canceled last year have been invited back, so Riverside Poly’s Mike Churchill and William Partridge of Gardena will lead the South team, and Carl Sweet of El Dorado and Joel Schaeffer of Reseda the North.

People magazine got the scoop, so, digging furiously for new information, I called Mater Dei football Coach Chuck Gallo.

Yes, he said, his fine quarterback, Todd Marinovich, has made Stanford his No. 1 college choice, mostly because that’s where John Elway played. ABC-TV is due to feature Marinovich, who led Orange County with 2,019 yards passing last season, Gallo said.

Some fraternity in the Midwest has already written him a letter, saying, tongue in cheek, that would start a fan club if he signed with the school.

We only have three more years to trip over each other trying to learn where Marinovich will go to school. He’s still a freshman.

All creatures great and small:

Jaime Cardriche (6-8, 310) leads St. Anthony with 9.3 rebounds a game and is second to guard Van Anderson with 15.5 points. The Times’ No. 10 team in the Southern Section, the Saints (17-5) will play Alemany (18-7) in a 5-A Division first-round playoff game Friday.

Bolsa Grande sophomore Nam Cao is 5-5 and 110 pounds--”But he’s 5-5, 112 when he’s dressed,” Coach Tony Lipold said. But he has been known to carry the Matadors. He’s averaging 14 points a game on 52% shooting from the floor and 85% from the free-throw line.

Seven-foot junior Lee Velasquez from Rancho Alamitos is averaging 6.7 points a game.

Prep Notes Claremont goalie Tony Rieger was named to the Parade Magazine All-American soccer team. . . . Two-time All-Southern Section basketball player Eric Samuelson, who helped lead Sonora to two straight appearances in the 2-A title game, has withdrawn from Cal State Long Beach and enrolled at Fullerton College. . . . Greg Whiteley of University High in Irvine was a second-team selection to the Kinney All-American cross-country team. He finished eighth in the Kinney national championships Dec. 8 in San Diego. . . . One of Nebraska’s recruits last year, I-back Keith Jones of Omaha, warmed up a cold winter with an electronically timed 4.33 seconds in the 40-yard dash during a conditioning program at the school Feb. 2. His brother, Lee Jones, also became the fastest lineman in Cornhusker history during the same drills, covering the distance in 4.76 seconds.