Brea’s Oziminski Finds Soccer Is a Hard Habit to Kick : Forgoes Decision to Concentrate on Baseball After Seeing Team Lose

For Mike Oziminski, this was to be a soccer season without soccer.

He had planned it carefully. Weekday afternoons, he would lift weights and jump rope. Weekends, he’d work on his swing in the nearest batting cage.

A handful of professional baseball scouts took a look at him last spring, and Oziminski decided to give them a little more to look at next season. Soccer season would be nothing more than a long preseason devoted to baseball.

Sorry, coach, really I am, he said to Manny Toledo, Brea-Olinda High School’s soccer coach.

Toledo tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of it. Finally, he told him: “You know where my office is.”

So Brea-Olinda, last season’s Southern Section 2-A co-champion after tying Central of El Centro in the final, began the season without Oziminski, a senior forward who had nine goals and five assists last season.

All was well enough, until Oziminski made the small misstep of going to the first game, a 3-0 loss to Dana Hills.

Oziminski knew where the office was, and the next day he went there.

“I missed it,” he said to Toledo. “I want to play.”

He started practice that day, just in time for a hard workout after the poorly played game he had watched from the stands.

“I didn’t mind,” said Oziminski, an all-league performer in football, soccer and baseball. “I was glad to be back.”

Toledo said: “He’s not the kind of guy who can just sit around and lift weights.”

Since coming back, Oziminski has three goals and three assists for the 3-3-1 Wildcats, who returned only four starters from last season’s team. Robert Hillard, Kenny Claborn and Mark Dunlap have each scored three goals as well.

“Without Mike on the front line we’d been trying to find another person to do the job he did last year,” Toledo said. “I hadn’t found one.

“I thought we could win the (Orange) league without him, but it was going to be twice as hard,” Toledo said.

Oziminski, Hillard and Eric Frost are the starting front line. Oziminski has been starting at center-forward, but sometimes Toledo moves him to the left or right, taking him out of a double-team.

“He can play anywhere,” Toledo said. “He’s very quick. When he gets a one-on-one situation, he beats him. If he sees he’s being marked very tightly, he passes to the open man.”

It would be easy to forgive Oziminski if he had walked away from the soccer field permanently after last season’s final. With two minutes left in regulation and the score tied, 2-2, Oziminski drove down the left side of the field and took a shot from about 20 feet. The ball hit the lower-left corner of the goal post and rolled across the width of the goal, never crossing the plane necessary to score. Had the posts been rounded instead of square, Oziminski says, the ball would have rolled inside the goal. Instead, Brea-Olinda was left with a “co” in front of champion.

Toledo still calls that game a moral victory, because Brea had come back after trailing, 2-0. Oziminski just shakes his head. “Maybe I can redeem myself,” he said.

Oziminski, who rushed for 505 yards and 10 touchdowns for the football team this past season and hit about .380 for the baseball team last spring, can’t pick a favorite among the three sports. That may seem obvious, considering he can’t stick to a decision to drop one (he almost didn’t play football this year, either).

“There is a lot of the same stuff in all of them,” he said. “Just like you want to hit a baseball, you want to kick a soccer ball--in just the right spot. In soccer you’re running down the baseline, in baseball it’s around the basepaths and in football you’re trying to get around to the outside.”

And which sport is his best?

Steve Hiskey, the Brea baseball coach, said he thinks Ozimisnki’s best sport is baseball.

“But if you ask the football coach,” Hiskey said, “he’ll probably say football, and the soccer coach will say soccer.”