The Preps / Scott Howard-Cooper : City Athletes Finally Allowed Out to Play Show and Tell to the World

Coach Phil Burns, Athletic Director Al Giddings, and Ron Keating, who teaches government, chipped in to pay expenses, piled the Fremont wrestling team into their cars Friday, and made history in Las Vegas.

The event was the Bonanza Invitational, a tournament at the school of the same name, and for the Pathfinders to be there was unprecedented. It wasn’t unprecedented just for Fremont, but for any City team to be at any overnight competition other than a state championship.

Teams from the Southern Section have been representing their schools at competitions throughout the United States for years, basketball tournaments being the most common. And this season is no different, with Anaheim Servite going to Honolulu next week, Huntington Beach Ocean View traveling to Arkansas in early January and Hacienda Heights Wilson, Santa Monica, Long Beach Wilson and Westminster La Quinta all playing in Las Vegas right after Christmas.

But City teams have always been kind of on the outside looking in, unable to get in on the out-of-town competition, not to mention the exposure, because of an anachronistic rule allowing teams to stay somewhere overnight only for a State championship. It was all right for school bands to travel to perform, but not athletes.

But Crenshaw, which represented the United States in a world tournament last spring in Denmark, put in a request to leave town for a couple days during the school year for another competition, and the Interscholastic Athletic Committee finally agreed.

That was the end of the outdated rule.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Carson basketball Coach Richard Masson, whose team will play in the King of Bluegrass Tournament next week at Fairdale, Ky. “They should have done that (eased the restrictions) long ago. Now the kids will have a chance to experience a different kind of life style for a couple days. It’s educational as well as fun for them.”

For Coach Willie West and Crenshaw, the No. 2 basketball team in the country at the start of the season, according to Street and Smith’s magazine, it’s a chance to get more recognition into a program that already seems loaded with it.

“But our school is 17 years old, and we’re still trying to get it known around the nation,” West said. “This will help. And it will be a lot of fun for the kids.

“It will also be an opportunity to judge the other talent in the country. Our kids pick up the newspapers and the magazines and read how all these players and teams around the country are rated high. Now, they will get to play against them. And that in itself would be worth the trip.”

One of the remaining restrictions on travel is not missing much school. Carson’s getting approval to go to Kentucky was a tough call for the Interscholastic Athletic Committee, but school and City officials were both willing to give in a little to help make the trip a success.

The tournament will start next Monday, but the Colts won’t play their first game until Wednesday night against St. Nicholas of Tolentine from New York City. And just to make sure the players won’t miss any more school than absolutely necessary, the team will fly out of Los Angeles Wednesday morning, returning Sunday evening.

To make it there at all, Masson said, the Colts had help from the community itself in raising almost $5,000 at a bingo night, bake sales and a free throw shoot-a-thon. Carson has been promised one-twelfth of the gate from tournament organizers, which is expected to be between $1,000 and $1,500, with money left over after expenses to be put back into the program.

Crenshaw was about $3,000 short for its trip to play in the tournament in Myrtle Beach, S.C., including a possible game with top-rated DeMatha of Hyattsville, Md., but two of the school’s most famous graduates made up the difference--Marques Johnson and Darryl Strawberry.

Dae Lea Aldrich, coach of the girls’ volleyball team at Manhattan Beach Mira Costa, spent much of this season answering questions on how the Mustangs compare to some of her previous teams, especially the state champion of 1982 and the state runner-up in ’83.

It’s clear that one thing that sets the current group apart from the rest--and why it may also be the one for future comparisons--is emotion. Aldrich found that out hours before the Mustangs, the No. 1 team in the nation according to Volleyball Monthly, whipped Newport Harbor of Newport Beach for the 1985 State Division I title, 15-4, 15-4, 15-10.

She organized a “team therapy session” in which Ken Ross, a motivational expert who has done similar work with the women’s volleyball team at UCLA, spent about 1 1/2 hours talking about everything from friendship to responsibility toward a teammate to goal setting. The results were staggering, with practically all of the players running the gamut of emotions.

“There were two who even after we got on the bus (to go to Golden West College for the match) were still crying,” Aldrich said. “I was worried if I did the right thing because they didn’t stop for a while.”

Her concerns were put to rest once the game got going, as Mira Costa kept alive its streak of not having lost a single game since Oct. 3, and only two all season.

Said Aldrich: “The kids were so fired up during part of the meeting that they would have popped a volleyball if they had one.”

They will send an autographed ball to Ross.

The announcement by Archbishop Roger Mahony last week that Cathedral High will not be closed, thus ending an 18-month controversy on the future of the 62-year-old boys’ Catholic school, won’t have much of an immediate effect on the sports programs since the school was scheduled to stay open until 1987 anyway.

But according to Athletic Director Bob Fish, the planned closure meant that school officials did not admit freshmen in September, which in turn meant that there were not enough people to field a freshman basketball team or junior varsity soccer team.

School spirit was, of course, given a boost by Mahony’s decision, but it doesn’t figure to help the Phantoms’ basketball team, which graduated all five starters from last year and has a new coach in Tim Guy, who formerly headed the JV program at Pasadena Blair. The season certainly started on a rough note last Tuesday, a 64-31 loss to San Dimas.

Said Fish: “We could have had an announcement from the Pope and it wouldn’t have helped.”