ROAD TEST: Simi Valley High Made...

It used to be that when a high school basketball team competed in an out-of-state tournament, the players brought along sleeping bags.

The team would sack out at the home of a player from the school hosting the tournament, or on the floor of the gymnasium.

The cuisine each day was strictly fast food a la grease.

Such is not the case for the Simi Valley basketball team, which is participating in the Sundevil basketball tournament at Eldorado High this week.

Forget the sleeping bags. The Pioneers have accomodations at one of the city’s largest hotels.

And the food? The team has its choice of the city’s biggest and best buffets.

While travel conditions have changed, the reasons for taking trips remain the same:

-- Play against high-level competition.

-- Gain experience playing in unfamilar surroundings.

-- Strengthen team morale and rapport.

Bob Hawking, Simi Valley’s coach, said that the third reason may be the most important.

“The kids are together for five days, 16 hours a day, and learn about each other and grow together,” Hawking said. “There has to be a feeling of togetherness--it’s an intangible successful teams have.”

It could be argued that those close feelings might be better nurtured in more austere surroundings than Las Vegas. Barstow, for example.

Hawking disagrees.

“It might not be a good place for some teams, but our kids are pretty responsible and disciplined,” Hawking said. “They were briefed on what is expected of them, and we trust them to take it from there.

“If you can trust your kids like we can, Las Vegas is a great place to come because you can eat cheap, the rooms are inexpensive this time of year, and the competition is good.”

Simi Valley is spending a little more than $2,000 on the trip, all of which was raised by the players and coaches during the past 10 months.

“We had a car wash, sold buttons and hats at the Simi Valley Days Carnival, sold ads to our press guide and made some money off of our own tournament in order to get here,” Hawking said. “The kids worked hard for this trip. Fund-raising certainly isn’t very glamorous, but if you want to take nice trips like this one, you have to pay the price.

“It’s all part of having a real first-class high school program. You need incentives--things that make your program stand out.”

The team’s itinerary included stops at the Las Vegas Sports Hall of Fame, the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Boulder Dam.

Hawking is in his 12th season as coach of the Pioneers, and this is his first out-of-state trip with the team. The timing is no coincidence. It is the first phase in a program he hopes will bring Simi Valley its first Southern Section basketball championship sometime during the next three years.

“What we are preparing for here is tough competition down the road--whether it is in our league or in the playoffs,” Hawking said.

“We didn’t want to go all the way to a high round in the playoffs and then get stuck with a long road trip and have that be our first experience. This is all a part of this team’s maturing process.”

Hawking said he hopes Simi Valley can take another trip out of state in the next two seasons.

“I’ve been trying to get us into a tournament in Hawaii, but I haven’t got much of a response from the host school there yet,” he said.

Hawking has already started preliminary plans for a trip to the East Coast to play national power Dunbar High of Baltimore in two years.

It is his hope that the Pioneers by then will be playing at that level of competition.

That may seem a terribly optimistic thought at this stage of the Simi Valley program’s development.

The Pioneers’ only two league championships in Hawking’s years as coach came in 1982 and 1984. The team finished tied for second in the Marmonte League last season and made its sixth playoff appearance in 12 years.

Before Hawking became coach in 1975, Simi Valley suffered through 10 consecutive years of losing seasons.

The Pioneers’ stock is rising due to an influx of outstanding sophomores this season.

Three of them--Don MacLean, Shawn DeLaittre and Butch Hawking, the coach’s son--made the trip to Las Vegas.

MacLean, at 6-8, already is considered to be one of the best high school centers in Southern California.

He is often compared to Tom Lewis, a former Mater Dei High All-American, who is starting as a freshman this season for USC.

MacLean averaged 24 points and 17 rebounds in the first two games of the tournament here.

DeLaittre (pronounced De-Late) is also a starter. The 6-4 forward entered the tournament averaging 18 points a game.

Hawking, a 5-10 point guard who is making his varsity debut in the tournament, was named the most valuable player of the Simi Valley Junior Varsity Tournament earlier this season.

Three other highly regarded sophomores--James Robinson, Darren Aurand and John Jones--are playing on the JV level. Robinson, a 6-3 forward, had an older borther, Mark, who played for the Pioneers last season and earned Times All-Valley honors.

Aurand, a 5-10 guard, also had a brother who played for Simi Valley last season. Christian Aurand was the team’s starting point guard. Jones is a 6-3 forward.

“There is no doubt in my mind that by the time these kids are seniors, they can play on Dunbar’s level,” Hawking said. “That’s why we’re doing what we can now to get them ready. They have the talent, size, competitive background and experience that we’ve never had in the past.

“They are not your normal 15 and 16-year-old basketball players. Some of them have been playing on an extremely competitive level since they were 8 or 9.”

MacLean and DeLaittre came off the bench in Simi Valley’s first three games, but have since been added to the starting lineup. Both players replaced seniors.

Hawking admits he was a little apprehensive about how the team would react to a pair of sophomores stepping right into starring roles.

“It was something we gave a lot of thought to,” he said. “The bottom line was, we were starting kids who deserved those positions.

“Don and Shawn didn’t start any of our tournament games, yet both were all-tournament and Shawn was MVP. They earned their shot.”

Steve Jenner, one of the seniors who was dropped out of the starting lineup, said the move has helped the team.

“I never saw myself as a guy who could score a lot of points like Don or Shawn can,” Jenner said. “We all have roles on this team. In a way, I like coming off the bench better.”

Said Hawking: “We’re lucky that we have a good group of kids who are able to put egos and personal goals aside for the good of the team.”

“It was obvious from the start that they could help us,” Jenner said. “We had heard that they were good players, but they had to come out and prove it to us and they did--not only as basketball players but as mature individuals and nice guys.”

“They got after us a little this summer,” MacLean recalled. “It got a little rough sometimes although there were never any punches or anything. I think they just had to test us. They wanted to show us what it would take for us to play varsity basketball.”

Apparently, the osmosis is complete. The team had a few hours of free time each day, but instead of splitting into groups they were usually seen together, often either playing nickel slots on fringes of casino, or crammed into one suite for a game of poker.

If there is jealousy over the amount of publicity the sophomores have received, it is well hidden.

“If anything, all of their publicity has brought the team closer together,” said reserve point guard Todd Johnson.

“It’s something we joke about. If one of the sophomores does something stupid, we say, ‘Da, gee, no wonder you get so many write-ups.’ ”

Some of those write-ups are genuine tall tales.

Len Czarnecki, assistant coach and athletic director for host Eldorado, asked a visiting reporter about “that 7-foot center of Simi’s” before the tournament started.

MacLean is the Pioneers’ tallest player at 6-8. Meanwhile, Las Vegas newspapers were classifying Simi Valley as anything from “one of the best teams in Southern California” to “one of the top teams in California.”

Simi Valley won its first-round game, 76-73, over Bishop Gorman of Las Vegas on Wednesday night.

The Pioneers led by as many as 11 in the fourth quarter before Bishop Gorman mounted a comeback.

Said Hawking after the game: “We played well only in spurts, but it wasn’t bad for our first game on the road. We started off kind of slow. I thought we looked a little nervous.”

That became obvious before the game started.

Gus Gates, a senior forward, was so anxious to play that when his name was announced during the introduction of the starting lineups, he pulled off his warmup pants so fast that his uniform shorts came off, too.

Gates was near center court before he noticed that he forgot something. His embarrassment was spared only by the length of his game jersey.

“Definitely one of the trip’s highlights. Or is that a lowlight?” quipped Hawking later.

The first ebb on the trip would have to be the Pioneers’ 61-50 loss Thursday night to Eldorado.

It was Simi Valley’s first loss of the season after six wins.

“We were pretty listless out there,” Hawking said after the game. “We didn’t have any fire. Maybe the travel caught up with us, but one of the reasons we’re here is to learn how to deal with that.

“Hopefully, we will come away from this a better team--a more cohesive unit,” Hawking said. “The more experience we gain, the better.

“The important thing is that we play well. If we do that winning should take care of itself.”

If only blackjack was so easy.