Lakewood Coach Tries to Ease the Pressure

No team has repeated as Southern Section major-division baseball champion since Chaffey of Ontario in 1956, ’57 and ‘58, the significance of which has not been lost on the athletes at Lakewood High School.

Coach Spud O’Neil, whose Lancers won the title last season behind the all-Southern Section pitching of Mike McNary, knows all about it.

“The tradition at Lakewood is such that we usually have fine teams,” O’Neil said. “But with us winning it all last year and me still sort of a new coach, it really opened the door for the pressure to be there. And a lot of the pressure has been put on by themselves.”

To ease the pressure, O’Neil, normally a low-key coach, has been varying his wardrobe. One day, he showed up in shorts. On other occasions, he has worn a cowboy hat or his cap stuck full of baseball pins.

This would be a good time for the effect to materialize. O’Neil, whose Colton team reached the 4-A championship game in 1983 before losing to Millikan of Long Beach, had three first-place finishes in his first 4 years at Lakewood. But this season, with injuries having picked apart the pitching staff and McNary having graduated, the realistic goal is to just make the playoffs.

The good news at Lakewood is that the Lancers--10-7 overall and 3-2 in the Moore League heading into today’s game at Long Beach Wilson--are historically strong finishers.

“We’ve been scoring runs like crazy and averaging about .375 at the plate,” O’Neil said. “We’re hammering the ball. But the pitching has been the key.

“We are playing our best ball now. Five of the kids are batting over .400, so we’re doing quite well offensively and defensively. If we get the pitching squared away, and it looked like it was in the Pomona tournament (two weeks ago), we’ll be contenders.”

He meant for the league title. No need to deal with the pressure of history this soon.

On a night when 13 national bests for the year were turned in, Reggie Betton, a senior high jumper at Antelope Valley, was a face in the crowd.

Even so, he cleared 7 feet 2 inches while competing in just his fifth track meet, and cleared it with room to spare, in last Saturday’s prestigious Arcadia Invitational. That made him No. 1 in the country outdoors in 1988.

It also brought up an obvious question: Is he a natural?

“That’s what my coach says,” he said, and then agreed with his coach.

“I think I’m a natural at this. It doesn’t seem hard to me. I already have the jumping ability. I just need to work on my form.”

Betton, a 6-foot 4-inch athlete with a left-side approach, had a previous best of 6-11. Against a field that included three who had cleared the 7-foot mark--Andre LaCoste of Lakewood, Mark Wilson of Covina Charter Oak and Tim Prince of Union City Logan--he came back after missing his first two attempts at the opening height of 6-0 and won.

Once Betton got started, he rolled. He topped 6-8 on the first attempt, 6-10 on the second, 7-0 on the first and, finally, 7-2 on the second. He estimated that he cleared the final mark by 2 inches.

His night ended only after he had missed three tries at 7-3.

“I just didn’t have it after that 7-2,” said Betton, who averaged 28.1 points a game for the Antelopes’ basketball team before going out for track. “I was tired.”

The Central Section will merge with the Southern Section for 8-man football playoffs in the fall, with one champion emerging. The separate 8-man small and large divisions will be dissolved.

About 50 schools in the Southern Section and 5 in the Central play 8-man football.

The merger apparently is not a harbinger of things to come in 11-man football. The key here is that the number of 8-man teams makes it manageable.

No word as to how the championship will be designated, since it’s no longer the Southern Section title.

More bookkeeping high jinks from Muir of Pasadena, the school that brought you forfeits by the bushel in football and basketball.

This time it’s track.

The Mustangs had to forfeit the frosh-soph sprint medley relay race at the March 26 Pasadena Games, even though they finished sixth. Two of their competitors are in 11th grade.

Coach Bill Paul resigned in the wake of the incident. Paul, along with top assistant Clyde Turner, had kept Muir among the top programs in the state after taking over for the legendary Walt Opp in 1983.

Jim Brownfield, who resigned as football coach after the 1986 season because of health problems, only to take over as athletic director earlier this school year, has now become the boys’ track coach. He already headed the girls’ program, and has suddenly become Mr. Fix-it at Muir.

Prep Notes

Scott Sharts of Simi Valley broke the Southern Section record for home runs in a career April 1 during the Pioneers’ game in the Colonial Tournament at Orlando, Fla. His 26th homer pushed him past former Templeton standout Mike Arthurs. It also moved him into second on the all-time state list. Brian Johnson, a baseball-football star at Skyline of Oakland, hit 39 from 1984-86.

West Covina pitcher Joey Eischen, who was 4-6 with a 2.10 earned-run average last season, is off to a 7-1 start in 1988, with three one-hitters, a two-hitter last Friday in a key Valle Vista League victory over Edgewood of West Covina, and a three-hitter. A lot of people have noticed. “We haven’t had scouts around like this since Tom Brunansky was here (in 1978),” West Covina Coach Jeff Platt said earlier this season. “We have all these people around, and it’s nice to have the attention, but (Eischen) feels a lot more pressure. He feels like he’s in a fishbowl. If he gets 10 strikeouts, he feels like he had a bad game.”

Since then, though, Eischen has adjusted to the expectations. “He’s handling it well now,” Platt said last week. “He seems to have settled down. Things have settled down, with the scouts and all. It’s gotten to be a routine now.” Eischen, who has struck out 74 and walked 25 in 50 innings, plays first base when he isn’t pitching and is batting about .530.

Scott Davison of Redondo, anything but a surprise, is 7-0 with 6 complete games. The only time he didn’t finish was last Saturday against Downey, when he left after 5 innings with 13 strikeouts. The 1987 Southern Section 3-A co-player of the year after going 12-2, Davison had 31 strikeouts and 1 walk in a pair of wins two weeks ago at the Babe Herman tournament in Glendale, including one stretch in the championship game in which he struck out 10 straight Long Beach Poly batters. “Those middle innings were probably as impressive as I’ve ever seen him,” Redondo Coach Harry Jenkins said. Davison is 37-5 record lifetime, good for seventh place on the all-time Southern Section list, but is only 4 wins away from jumping all the way to second place, behind Scott McGregor, who won 51 games for El Segundo. . . . Henry Schelb, a transfer from Cleveland of Reseda, is 5-0 as a pitcher at Redondo. The Sea Hawks are 15-1 and No. 1 in the 4-A.

Todd Marinovich, the record-setting quarterback at Capistrano Valley of Mission Viejo, has decided to skip the Shrine and Orange County all-star games this summer. He said the short time to prepare for the games usually doesn’t produce a good passing attack and the risk of injury just before he starts at USC are the main factors. . . . Rick Scott, who went 41-9-2 in 4 years as football coach at Newhall Hart, including the Northwestern Conference championship in 1986 and a Coastal second-place finish the year before, has resigned to take over the program at Buena. Hart went 11-2 in 1987, Buena 2-8. Scott cited personal reasons for the change. No replacement has been named at Hart.

In five games of the Woodbridge Easter tournament two weeks ago, De De Weiman, the star softball pitcher at Gahr of Cerritos, pitched three no-hitters and, in the championship game, an 11-inning, one-hitter. . . . Roland De La Maza, a junior right-hander at St. Genevieve of Panaroma City, struck out 21 in a 14-4, 10-inning victory over Palmdale March 12. De La Maza struck out the side five times. . . . Laguna Beach and Woodbridge of Irvine played a 19-inning baseball game April 5, matching the fourth-longest in Southern Section history. Laguna Beach won, 6-5, when Neil Collins, who had pitched the first 10 innings, was walked home, ending the game that lasted 6 hours.