THE HIGH SCHOOLS / JOHN LYNCH : Reseda Basketball Coach Applauds Paez for Staying True to His Values

Jeff Halpern put down his morning newspaper and immediately reached for a highlight pen to underline a few key passages and underscore his support. His handiwork completed, the Reseda High basketball coach mailed the article to City Section Commissioner Hal Harkness, from whom he expects no response.

Still, Halpern feels better for the effort.

“I was just happy to see that somebody at 29 still has a little integrity,” Halpern said.

Halpern was not referring to himself, a veteran coach nearly two decades removed from his 29th birthday. (“I still have integrity at 47,” he said.)

Halpern was tipping his hat to Marc Paez, the former Cleveland coach who unexpectedly resigned last week after just one season as head of the area’s premier basketball program. Cleveland was 21-6, including a one-point loss in overtime to Crenshaw in the City Section 4-A Division semifinals.

Paez cited off-the-court distractions such as meddlesome parents and the pressure to win for his resignation, but he also indicted a high school basketball system that he said features blatant recruiting, lax policing and the unchecked influence of basketball shoe salesmen and unscrupulous youth-league organizers.

“If high school basketball at the top level has reached the point where a coach has to actively recruit players, strike up deals with shoe companies and schedule trips to compete with other schools, then I don’t feel comfortable playing that role,” Paez said in the article.

That passage and several others caught Halpern’s attention.

“I applaud him for saying what he felt and that he didn’t want to be in that position anymore,” Halpern said.

“Some of us have been trying to fight that battle only to get turned off by people downtown. As a coach, you can take the pressure to win, but when they start throwing the other stuff at you, then the job becomes more than what it’s supposed to be.”

New blood: While the Cleveland program has been thrust into uncertainty in the wake of Paez’s resignation, Crespi might have taken the first step toward regaining its luster with last week’s hiring of Chris Nikchevich, a former Celt and Loyola Marymount point guard.

Nikchevich, a link to the Crespi days of greatness in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, served a three-year apprenticeship in the program before replacing Ed Marek, who resigned to devote more time to his job with a real estate company.

Nikchevich, 26, hopes to inject enthusiasm into the program and has instituted the wide-open offense he learned from Paul Westhead at Loyola.

“I want to put a product on the floor that people will enjoy to watch and the players will enjoy to play,” he said.

The addition of former UCLA guard Dave Immel to the staff will give the program a pair of former college players who are well-connected to the Southern California basketball scene. Those connections might help lure former collegiate players to the program to conduct mini-camps for the Celts this summer. Nikchevich’s first guest might be Bo Kimble, his former Loyola teammate.

It is unlikely, however, that Nikchevich will start his career with a victory. Crespi plays in the L. A. Summer Games on Saturday at Fremont, the City Section 3-A Division runner-up last season.

“We’ll debut the things we’ve been working on,” Nikchevich said. “But I wish we had more time. I’ve been throwing a lot at the kids and we need more time to teach. I wish this game was at the end of the summer.”

The more the merrier: Village Christian football Coach Mike Plaisance might have convinced the Southern Section to adopt his playoff plan for the newly formed Division X.

The Southern Section created a 10th division for next season, grouping the Alpha League with the Arrowhead, Desert Inyo-Small and Freedom leagues. Those leagues welcomed being put in a smaller division but objected to a playoff format that allows only two teams from each league into postseason play and calls for three rounds of playoffs instead of the four-round format used by the rest of the section.

Plaisance devised a plan that would send 12 teams to the playoffs--three from each league--with the four league champions earning a first-round bye. Plaisance pitched the idea to Southern Section administrator Bill Clark, who attended the Alpha League’s final athletic meeting of the school year last month.

Clark has scheduled a meeting Wednesday to discuss the proposal with representatives from the four leagues.

“We love the new program but want to have the 12-team playoffs,” Plaisance said. “With three teams going to the playoffs from each league, it provides the same number of entries as the other leagues.”

Previously, in the seven-league Division IX, only the top two teams from each league secured an automatic playoff berth. Plaisance is still smarting from the 1988 season when his 8-2 team failed to clinch one of the Alpha’s two playoff berths and sat out the playoffs.

“I didn’t want that to happen again,” he said.

Mountie objection: Not all Alpha League members are fans of the new division. Montclair Prep dislikes the plan because it places the Mounties in a separate playoff bracket from traditional Division IX powers Carpinteria and Tehachapi, which won or shared five Southern Section titles in the ‘80s.

The Mounties expect to field one of the area’s top teams next season behind running back Derek Sparks, The Times’ Valley Back of the Year as a junior last fall. Nothing would have suited them better than to avenge last season’s 7-0 loss to Tehachapi in a Division IX semifinal.

“We absolutely want another crack at them,” assistant coach John Hazelton said.