Boon or Bust? System Can Wreak Havoc : Open enrollment: Some coaches say athletes are using the Santa Ana district program to attend schools with the best teams.

The Santa Ana Valley High School football team nearly made the playoffs for the first time in 10 years last fall. But instead, Santa Ana beat Valley in the league final to win its fourth consecutive Century League title.

What hurt most for Santa Ana Valley football Coach Dan Castanon is that Santa Ana lineman Oscar Wilson recovered a fumble and ran 35 yards for the winning touchdown in the 14-7 game.

“Oscar made every big play in the game,” Castanon said. “He was the difference between Santa Ana winning the league title and keeping us out of the playoffs.”

Wilson, a 230-pound defensive end, was The Times’ lineman of the year for two consecutive seasons. The senior lives in Santa Ana Valley’s attendance area but has attended Santa Ana for four years under the Santa Ana Unified School District’s enrollment system.

Under the system, an incoming freshman may enroll in any of the four high schools in the district to specialize in a field of education. For instance, Santa Ana High offers performing arts, Saddleback offers business, Santa Ana Valley has college preparatory academics and newly opened Century offers technical training. “A lot of good things have happened to us athletically because of the system,” said Bill Ross, Santa Ana’s athletic director and a teacher in the district for 31 years. “The system is a joke. I’ve always felt that if a kid lives in a certain attendance area, he should go to that school.”

Santa Ana’s system essentially is an open enrollment program that some athletes have used to attend the school with the best teams, according to Castanon. His football teams have struggled to a 10-27-3 record over the past four years while Santa Ana has claimed four league titles in football and four of the past six league titles in basketball.

“Ideally, the system is great,” Castanon said. “I have no qualms, as long as everything is equal. But it’s very easy to take advantage of the system if things are not equal. Athletics in our district has made the (our) system an unjust system.

“When you have one school winning more than others, all the athletes start attending one school. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s been a long, long fight to survive at Santa Ana Valley, but we’re starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Ross, who will retire as Santa Ana’s baseball coach after 31 seasons this year, said the system is relatively new in the district but incoming freshmen have been able to choose their high school within the district “for as long as I can remember.”

“All they have to do is fill out the forms and they’re in,” Ross said. “Now, we have the strand system, but a kid can take basically the same courses at any school in the district and graduate and that’s what makes the whole thing absurd.

“There have been problems with Santa Ana Valley athletes coming to Santa Ana in the past. We’ve gotten a lot of Valley athletes. But we’ve also lost athletes. I don’t know how many of our athletes have gone to Foothill under an intra-district transfer.”

Some coaches fear Century, a new school with a beautiful gymnasium that opened with freshmen and sophomores last fall, will become the magnet school for athletes in the district.

“Century has been perceived as the school where smart kids attend,” Ross said. “It’s too early to tell if it’s going to become an athletic power, but let’s suppose it does. What’s going to happen to the kids who live within the school’s attendance area, but they can’t attend the school because it’s overcrowded. That could happen.”