Prep Wednesday : THE YEAR IN REVIEW : MALAPREPS: QUOTES OF THE YEAR

AH, YOUTH

Scott Ross, El Toro linebacker: “My mother is always saying I drive my car the same way I play football. But honest, some of those wrecks weren’t my fault.”

Add Ross: “I don’t even want to talk about my insurance.”

Kernit Seaton, El Dorado water polo player, after he scored three goals in the Southern Section 3-A final: “I hope this ends all the frog jokes.”

Kirsten Petersen, Laguna Beach track athlete, on being labeled a beach girl: “You wouldn’t want to be called an inland girl . I would die if I didn’t live by the beach.”

Kristi Smith, Edison basketball player, on her former hometown of Lake Elsinore: “Lake Elsinore was just too small. There was only one McDonald’s.”

Derek Brown, Servite running back, on how he felt going into a game against Mater Dei: “I thought I might be able to do something.”

He gained 334 yards.

THOSE DARN COACHES

Bob Johnson the El Toro football coach, with his version of offensive newspeak: “We kind of lost our hump-tiddity in the second half.”

Dave Demerest, La Quinta baseball coach, to describe his team’s season: “It hasn’t been a roller-coaster year. It’s been more like Hekyll and Jyde.”

John Hattrup, Mission Viejo girls’ basketball coach, on El Toro basketball player Elaine Youngs: “She’s fast as a deer and jumps like a lizard.”

Joe Vaughan, Buena High girls’ basketball coach, on his team’s performance against Mater Dei in the 4-A playoffs: “We were going so fast I thought the flesh was going to come off their bodies.”

TOUGH TIMES

Steve Ruiz, University baseball coach, describing his situation after he turned himself in for illegally throwing batting practice to a player on a Sunday: “I’ll be the guy with the target on my back.”

Ruiz had turned in Tustin High for practicing on Sunday two weeks earlier.

WRESTLING

Tom Osendorf, Savanna wrestler: “I’m getting sick of wrestling. That’s all I do seven days a week. If I’m not wrestling, I’m running. If I’m not running, I’m wrestling. I’ll be glad when the season is over, so I can relax go out for track and catch some sun.”

Tom Odar, Fountain Valley wrestler: “The hardest part about dieting is wanting food.”

Add Odar on food: “You crave everything, even things you normally don’t like, like liver.”

Gary Bowden, Canyon wrestling coach, describing Canyon wrestler Byron Schultz: “He’ll squeeze you to a pulp, put you on your back and destroy you. You’ll come out of a match with him all purple, black and bleeding.”

Add Bowden, on what it means to be a wrestler: “It means never forgetting. I used to wrestle a guy every day in practice. And we’d go at it like crazy. A couple years ago, I went to a high school reunion at the Anaheim Marriott, and I see this guy. I went to shake the guy’s hand, and he shoots in at my legs and slams me on the rug. For about five minutes we went at it like the old times. We turned over a couch, broke a vase and knocked over a lamp. People must have thought we were crazy.”

ODDS AND ENDS

Kerry Reed, Orange running back, on the difficulty of his eat-for-success diet: “I just hold my breath, put the zucchini in my mouth and swallow.”

Brad DeLoof, Troy basketball player, on being a gym rat: “What you get from being a gym rat is of very intrinsic value.”

Helen Johnson, mother of Bob Johnson (El Toro football coach) and mother-in-law of Bill Crow (Mission Viejo football coach, on the school’s annual football meetings: “A lot of people have told me ‘How can you lose?’ But I look at it as, ‘How can I win?’ ”

CHEERS

Corona del Mar fans to Sunny Hills fans during the 4-A water polo championship:

“We’ve got the beach, we’ve got the sand, you’re so bummed, you live inland.”

Fans late in the fourth quarter of La Quinta’s 101-96 Garden Grove League overtime basketball victory over Rancho Alamitos: “Defense, defense.”