Destiny or Deja Vu? : 4-A Final Decides Simi Valley’s Fate

In neighborhoods and towns all over America, this is the time of year when even casual fans begin checking the sports section for the adventures of their high school basketball team in the playoffs.

Hard-core fans, of course, don’t need the playoffs to get their attention. They have been emotionally involved all year. And now, their anxiety level is peaking, especially with playoff tickets being really difficult to come by.

In Simi Valley, the public has more reason than usual to get stoked over the high school basketball team. Tonight at the Sports Arena, the Pioneers are playing Capistrano Valley for the Southern Section 4-A Division title. But the game has taken on extra meaning for the Pioneers and their fans. It marks the end of an era. Don MacLean and Shawn DeLaittre form the nucleus of a team that was destined to win it all even before their first game three years ago.

“Everybody expected them to be great,” said Mal Thibodeaux, who cuts hair at Ralph’s Barbershop at Sycamore Drive and Cochran Street in Simi Valley. And the Pioneers have lived up to expectations--they have been a force for three years and No. 1 in The Times’ Valley rankings all season. But still, they have not put the exclamation point on their record. The coveted Southern Section crown has eluded them. Two years ago, as sophomores, they lost the final to Muir; a year ago, Santa Monica beat them in the quarterfinals. They have not won it all.

But the team can fulfill its destiny tonight, so the game has generated a lot of awareness in the city of 91,000. “There’s support up and down the valley,” Simi Valley High Principal Dave Ellis said. Not that banners hang from every light pole. “I follow recipes, not basketball teams,” said Sandy Leon, a housewife with three school-age children. “But I do know the team is playing for the championship. And I’m behind them.”

Excluding the school’s 2,400 students, Ellis estimates, there are only 800-1,100 hard-core Pioneer fans, most of them parents of children at the high school.

“There are not that many people who follow high school basketball,” said Jack Williamson, who owns the Century 21 on Los Angeles Avenue. “But I’d say in a town this size, we do pretty good.”

Williamson, who does not have a child in high school, is a devoted member of what Ellis calls “the unofficial basketball booster club.” When the Pioneers played a playoff game against Nogales last week, they were cheered by some 750 fans who had driven 90 minutes in traffic across four freeways to get to the game at Rowland High. “We had more fans than the other team,” which came from a town only a few miles away, Williamson said proudly.

The team’s success this season has made game tickets a hot item. “But that’s been a problem at times,” Ellis said. Especially when people had to be turned away at the door for Simi Valley’s game against cross-town rival Royal High.

So the 4-A final, naturally, caused a buying mania when tickets went on sale at 7 a.m. Thursday on the school campus.

“There was a long line of people when I got to school at 7:20,” said Wendy Otis, a song leader and vice president of the student body. The frenzy, she says, “was close to a U-2 concert, but nobody camped out all night.”

By 8 a.m., the school’s allotment of 1,200 adult tickets was gone, but the demand persisted. “People were really fearful” of missing the big game, Ellis said.

One of the fearful was Joanne Barkwill. At 1 in the afternoon, she and scores of other women were at Brunswick Valley Bowl taking part in the weekly Big Springs PTA Bowling League. Although she had not attended a Pioneer game all season, she had been following them every day in the newspaper. Sparked by the significance of tonight’s game, she tried unsuccessfully in the morning to get a ticket.

“I’m on the wait list,” she said hopefully.

Although the school’s Associated Student Body, which sold the tickets, was able to get an extra 600, they went quickly. “We probably could have sold 4-5,000,” said Larry Brown, an administrator in charge of ticket sales. Curiously, students did not snap up their alloted 700 tickets; by Friday afternoon, a few student tickets were still left.

So Simi Valley will be sending nearly 2,500 people to the Sports Arena. Included in the contingent will be the pep squad, which was noticeably absent from the last two playoff games. The varsity cheerleaders and song leaders, about 30 girls, missed the Nogales game because of a prior commitment--a national contest in Orlando, Fla.,--and last Tuesday, the flu and makeup schoolwork forced all but three to miss the Santa Ana game.

Their absence was embarrassing for the Pioneers. According to Ellis, even the opposing team’s fans noticed the lack of noise coming from the Pioneer side. Apparently, some Pioneer fans were angry at the girls. Ellis heard from them. “A lot of people couldn’t understand why the girls went to the nationals rather than the CIF playoffs,” he said. But Ellis backed the girls. “Every student has a right to go as far as she can take her skills,” he would tell people.

The pep squad was a finalist in the national competition, going further than any team from Simi Valley ever had. But tonight, they know they will be under a lot of scrutiny. “We got slack from parents for not supporting the team,” Otis said. “We want to make up for it at the Sports Arena.”

The intensity with which hard-core basketball fans have responded to the Pioneers is reminiscent of “a small-town atmosphere,” said Jim Vinci, student body president. But Simi Valley does not look like a Midwest version of a small town. It is suburban Los Angeles, a collection of Spanish-style subdivisions and corner shopping centers in a valley 10 miles long and 3 miles wide. There is no main street, no town center, not even a covered mall. Youths hang out at the Mann’s 6 movie complex.

But it does have a radio station, just like a small town. KWNK covers Pioneer games--it even sponsors the team’s KWNK Classic each December. Tonight, of course, the 4-A final can be heard on 670 AM. The station does not know how many listeners the Pioneers attract. But when newspapers gave the wrong starting time for an important game this season, “We received 500 phone calls--there’s a big audience out there,” station general manager Manny Cabranes said.

There is no doubt that interest in the Pioneers runs high because of the team’s illustrious record: 79 wins and only 8 losses over the past three seasons. “I follow them because they’re champions,” said Williamson, who has been a fan from the time he first heard about the magical trio of MacLean, DeLaittre and Butch Hawking, the coach’s son, coming up to the high school. “MacLean is something special,” he said. “They put on a good show.”

But if there is a flaw in the record, it is the team’s inability to win the big game. Except for championships in their own tournament, the Pioneers have not won a major title, losing this season in tournaments in Las Vegas and South Carolina. But nobody seems to hold that against them. “If they know in their hearts they did their best, then they should feel like winners,” Otis said. “Even tonight.”

Losing to Capistrano Valley, though, “would be very, very rough,” Ellis said. “But winning would be a dream come true.”

And Ellis knows that winning is foremost on the minds of sports fans--at times it seems the only reason to play. Next season, the Pioneers will have to rebuild. A new era begins, but it does not hold the promise of the old one.

“When we played in the South Carolina tournament,” Ellis said, “we represented California well both on and off the court. I was told they’d love to have us back, but only the best teams get to go. They’re not going to invite us back because of our good behavior.”

And at home, attendance is usually proportional to wins and losses. “I don’t think I’ll be going next season,” Williamson said. “That’s just me.”

But next season is a long way off. No one is thinking past tonight. “I’ve been around these guys for three years,” Otis said. “I watched them grow up and be these awesome basketball players. They’ve got to win.”