Orange County Prep Review / Gerald Scott : Mission Viejo, Lynwood Have Upsets on Mind

If there is any conclusion to be drawn from the first two rounds of the Southern Section football playoffs, it is that the best teams don’t always advance to the semifinals, but the hottest often do.

Two cases in point would be in the Southern Conference, in which Mission Viejo (7-5) and Lynwood (8-3-1) entered the playoffs unseeded but are now only a victory away from the title game.

Mission Viejo advanced to meet top-seeded El Toro in this week’s conference semifinals by beating Beverly Hills, the Ocean League champion, and Foothill, the No. 2 entry from the Century League.

Lynwood beat Capistrano Valley and Loara, schools with better records, to advance to meet Santa Ana in the other semifinal.

Often, teams that aren’t expected to do well in the playoffs can relax, have fun and not tighten up the way the favorites sometimes do.

Because of this, neither El Toro (12-0) nor Santa Ana (11-1) can afford to look past this week’s opponents.

Southern Conference fans might already be looking forward to an El Toro-Santa Ana final, which would match the Saints’ running game against the passing of Charger quarterback Bret Johnson, but Lynwood and Mission Viejo seem capable of upsetting their highly regarded foes.

The Central Conference semifinal pairings are no less interesting.

The Valencia-Sunny Hills game offers a battle of two north Orange County powers with similar records and styles. Valencia (10-1-1) and Sunny Hills (11-1) have strong defenses and ball-control offenses capable of moving the ball on the ground or in the air.

And, coincidentally, both schools are coming off close victories over well-regarded foes--Sunny Hills beat defending conference champion Saddleback on its own field, 16-14, and Valencia rallied to defeat Artesia, 17-14.

Anaheim and Bolsa Grande, two sentimental favorites, play in the other Central Conference semifinal. Anaheim is the power of the 1950s and 1960s making a return to respectability; Bolsa Grande is the longtime weakling now kicking sand back in everybody else’s faces.

Chair-man of the Boards: Dick Katz, boys’ basketball coach at Westminster, is as mad as heck about the “bench rule” that forces high school coaches to stay on their team benches, and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Katz said he will get around that rule when the Lions open their season Dec. 9 against Mission Viejo in the Santa Ana Tournament by coaching his team from a wheelchair, where, technically, he’ll be seated as the rule requires but also be as mobile as he’d like.

“I’ll stay in my seat, but I’ll be able to move around,” the able-bodied Katz said. “It’s just a bad rule--when you’re sitting (in one place) on the bench you can’t communicate with your kids. It’s like a teacher trying to teach but having to sit behind a desk all day.”

Ocean View Hoop Dei: County basketball fans might want to mark Saturday, Jan. 31, on their calendars.

That’s the day Ocean View and Mater Dei will play a basketball fiesta at Ocean View, with five games between the Seahawks and Monarchs on tap: two freshman games, a sophomore game, a junior varsity game and the varsity game.

Also scheduled are a free throw contest between the two schools’ principals and a tug of war between the schools’ football teams.

The basketball fiesta comes in the middle of Ocean View’s Sunset League season and Mater Dei’s Angelus League season, presumably helping break up the pressure of their respective title drives.

Ocean View will also be in Hawaii Dec. 28-Jan. 5 for two games before beginning Sunset League play.

Prep Notes

Capistrano Valley High School quarterback Todd Marinovich passed for 248 yards in a 20-15 loss to Lynwood in the first round of the Southern Conference playoffs and finished the season with 2,359 yards. He stands second on the Southern Section’s career passing list behind Pat Haden (Bishop Amat), who passed for 7,633 yards in 1968-70. Marinovich, a junior, needs 918 yards next season to surpass Haden. He threw 22 touchdown passes this year, giving him 56 for his career. He is third on the section’s career list behind Haden (82) and Rick Costello (Neff), who threw 63 in 1971-73. . . . Bill Graham, a 16-year-old sophomore at Kennedy High, recently bowled 300 games on consecutive nights at the Aztec Bowl in Buena Park. . . . John Cooper, head coach of Rose Bowl-bound Arizona State, will be the guest speaker at The Times’ football awards brunch scheduled for 9 a.m. on Dec. 14 in the Anaheim Hilton. The all-Orange County team will be announced in the Dec. 10 issue of The Times.