In Realignment Game, Bishop Montgomery Is a Big Winner

The Angelus League won’t have Bishop Montgomery High to kick around anymore.

That’s one of many repercussions resulting from the realignment of the South Bay’s CIF-Southern Section athletic leagues. The changes take effect this fall.

The shuffling significantly alters the outlook for the 1990 football season for several local teams. But nowhere will the alterations mean more than at Bishop Montgomery.

The Knights are grateful to be out of the Angelus League--a Division I league dominated by section-wide powers La Puente Bishop Amat, Santa Ana Mater Dei and Anaheim Servite--after six seasons. They will move to the Division III Mission League for at least two seasons.

“I don’t want to say that we felt overmatched in the Angelus League, but we didn’t have great success there recently,” said Bishop Montgomery Coach Steve Carroll, who suffered through a winless league schedule in 1989, his first season. “(The league switch) takes a big burden off us.

“It enables us to have a fresh outlook and a new perspective on football. I think we’re all genuinely excited.”

The only other local team in the Mission League is St. Bernard. But Carroll said St. Bernard’s presence will help Bishop Montgomery develop the type of rivalry it missed in the Angelus League. St. Bernard left the Division VII Camino Real League.

“In the Angelus, St. Paul (Santa Fe Springs) was the closest team to us, so we didn’t have the chance to build a local rivalry,” Carroll said. “Now, we’ll be able to get a good South Bay rivalry going with St. Bernard, which will mean a lot to both programs.”

With Bishop Montgomery moving down two divisions, Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills are dropping six divisions, relocating in the Division VIII Ocean League after previously competing in the Division II Bay League.

Although Coach Gary Kimbrell guided Rolling Hills to a respectable 6-3-1 mark last year (3-3-1 in the Bay League), he said that dropping divisions makes sense for his team and Palos Verdes.

“Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills were in the Bay League in anticipation of increased enrollment due to the imminent closing of Miraleste,” Kimbrell said. “But (Miraleste didn’t shut down), so we were put in a position where we were playing schools like Hawthorne, Leuzinger and Santa Monica--schools with much larger enrollments, almost double.

“I guess it didn’t affect (Palos Verdes) too much last year; they were co-champs. But the leagues should be based on enrollment, and we’ll now be in more of an even standing with the other teams in our league in terms of enrollment.”

Kimbrell also said he’s glad that the natural peninsula rivalry between Rolling Hills and Palos Verdes wasn’t a victim of realignment. Another school on the hill, Miraleste, is moving up to the Division VII Camino Real League from the Division IX Olympic League. The Marauders are coached by former New York Giant Tony Bantula, one of three new local head coaches.

Bantula, who has no coaching experience at the high school level, has two sons and a daughter who attend Miraleste. He said he took the job to help out a school with an uncertain future.

“Nobody wanted to go up there because there’s no guarantees,” said Bantula, who was a running back at the University of Georgia in the early 1960s and the Giants for a year. “But the reason why I took this job is that the program was so down, and I want to see if we can build everything up.

“They never had a summer program here, and the equipment was (poor). We’re trying to take care of those things.

“This summer, we had a 10-game passing league schedule with some other South Bay teams and got a chance to get the team together. Before, they’d try to pull everybody together three weeks before the start of the season and nobody knew each other’s moves.”

Bantula said Miraleste, with less than 30 varsity players, will feature a run-oriented offense. Most of the Marauders will play offense and defense, including senior tackle/kicker Brett Ostergard, Bantula’s stepson.

John Misetich, a former head coach at San Pedro, will be Miraleste’s defensive coordinator. Dan Phillips, a former head coach at Rolling Hills, is the line coach and will help Bantula direct the offense.

While Miraleste goes for a grind-it-out attack, another first-year coach, Redondo’s Chris Hyduke, will be trying to get his team to master a more diverse offense. Hyduke, defensive coordinator under former coach Les Congelliere, who resigned, said it will take time for everything to come together.

“We’ll be putting in a couple of new things, which might not show their effectiveness right away,” said Hyduke, who is hoping for a physically strong team as the result of a new weight room. “But we have good leaders, and we have a lot of continuity from the things we did with Les.”

Along with Mira Costa and Morningside, Redondo is a holdover from last year’s Ocean League. Hyduke said newcomers Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills will have a distinct competitive advantage.

“They’ve both done well against what is supposed to be tougher competition (in the Division II Bay League,)” Hyduke said. “That experience has to give them a lot of confidence coming into our league.”

Hyduke, 39, who was born in Inglewood and raised in Manhattan Beach, graduated from Mira Costa and Pepperdine University.

Another longtime South Bay fixture is Joe Austin, the area’s other new coach. After a year away from football, he is taking over the program at North Torrance.

He was the head coach at South Torrance for 17 years, leaving after the 1988 season. Prior to that, he was an assistant at West for six years.

Austin, 47, who played football and baseball at USC, lists former Trojan Coach John McKay and current Ram assistant coach Marv Goux as influencing his coaching. He has a simple goal as he opens a new chapter on his long career in football: “To win more games than we lose.”

Austin said North will utilize a “4-4, attacking defense” and “a balanced offense. We’ll run the power game and throw the football.”

North is joining the other Torrance schools--South, Torrance and West--and Compton Centennial in the Division VIII Pioneer League, which returns after a two-year absence. South, Torrance and West were previously in the Ocean League.

In another move, El Segundo is moving from the Santa Fe League to the San Fernando Valley League.