Rental Costs Force City to Lower Its Sites

Anybody have $25,000?

Want to be a hero?

If the City Section athletics office can find a donor, football championship games again will be played in the Coliseum where they took place for years before budget cuts forced the games to be moved.

“If I can find somebody to give us the 25 grand, we’re there,” said Lee Joseph, a City athletics administrator. “We’re there in a minute.”

“Nothing compares to the feeling of walking through the Coliseum tunnel,” said Sylmar Coach Jeff Engilman, whose Manual Arts teams won 3-A Division titles at the Coliseum in 1983 and 1984.

Until somebody steps forward with $25,000, games will be played at sites that offer the most bang for the buck. Or, more accurately, at places offering the lowest rental fee and the best chance of attracting a large regional crowd. Even if the site isn’t particularly attractive to many.

For instance, the 3-A game between Taft and San Pedro and the 4-A game between Carson and Sylmar originally were scheduled for Saturday at El Camino College at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., respectively.

Taft administrators notified the City on Monday that because many of the school’s players and students live in the L.A. Basin or elsewhere, orchestrating the busing on a Saturday would be difficult. Rounding up the players, pep squad and band members and transporting them to El Camino College before 11 a.m. would present a logistic nightmare, administrators said.

As a result, Taft requested a Friday night game, arguing the bused students already would be on campus and easier to mobilize. The City then settled on Gardena High as the site, mainly because San Pedro has a large following in the South Bay area.

The Gardena facility isn’t exactly a top-notch venue for a championship game. Last week Carson faced Van Nuys at Gardena in a 4-A semifinal. Because there was little in the way of a Gardena groundskeeping crew on site, Carson coaches said they were forced to chalk the field beforehand. One Colt assistant said there isn’t much grass remaining on the well-worn playing field.

Why Gardena High for a championship game? As usual, it boiled down to money. Last year, the 3-A final between Crenshaw and Chatsworth was held at Birmingham High and attendance was sparse.

East L.A. College charges three times as much as El Camino, Joseph said, and is too far from San Pedro and the Valley to draw a sizable crowd. Veterans Stadium in Long Beach presents potential security problems because stands are located on only one side of the field. In addition, night games are prohibited at El Camino because of security concerns.

“The more we use our own schools, the cheaper it is,” Joseph said. “It’s economics.”

SOME REWARD

A 50-mile bus ride on Saturday is not what Engilman had in mind when his team was seeded first in the 4-A playoffs. But after Sylmar was unable to persuade City officials to move the game from El Camino College, the bus ride is exactly what the undefeated Spartans got.

Carson (9-3-1), seeded second, will travel about six miles to El Camino College.

“Truthfully, I don’t think they thought a Valley school was going to be in the championship (game),” Engilman said. “When you look at it, when was the last time a Valley school was in the final? 1987?”

Correct. Granada Hills was the last Valley school to play in the 4-A final. Banning, Carson and Dorsey have been the mainstays.

Although the site is neutral, Carson has a home-field advantage, according to Engilman.

“We expect to be the underdogs,” he said. “I already told the guys, expect to get booed when we walk on the field. If there’s 20,000 people there, 14,000 will be for Carson.”

DRAINED

The surprisingly disappointing showing by Fillmore senior Maribella Aparicio in the state Division IV cross-country championships Nov. 28 and in the Kinney West regional last Saturday is no longer a mystery.

Aparicio donated a pint of blood two days before the state championships, which would explain her disappointing performances.

The 1991 state Division IV champion, Aparicio was heavily favored to roll to her second consecutive title this year, but she finished third in the 5,000-meter race behind Karen Bockel of Nordhoff and Ankai Webb of Grass Valley Bear River after leading at the two-mile mark.

Aparicio said she just had an off race at the state championships.

Based on that statement, many experts expected her to bounce back in last week’s West regional and qualify for the national championships by placing among the top eight, but she faded in the last mile and finished 20th in 18 minutes 44 seconds.

The time was 70 seconds slower than Aparicio had run on the same course to place fifth in the 1991 West regional.

“I always tell my runners, do not give blood during the season,” Fillmore Coach Epi Torres said. “But she just got caught up in helping the school blood drive. It was just an unfortunate mistake.”

JUST FOR KICKS

Sometimes it pays to have a brother on the football team. Just ask Canyon High soccer player Cristie Burnett.

One day in the fall after Burnett’s club soccer practice, she waited for her brother, Scott, to finish practice with the Cowboys’ freshman football team.

Some of Scott’s friends were kicking field goals.

“They said, ‘Oooh, here comes the stud soccer player,’ ” Cristie said.

They invited her to show off her kicking leg.

When Burnett began making kicks from 35 and 40 yards, the incredulous boys told her she should try out for the team.

Junior varsity assistant Ceasere Marlowe, who played defensive tackle for the Canyon varsity in 1991 and was the first female in school history to play varsity football, echoed their opinion.

Marlowe told junior varsity Coach Chuck Wade about their potential new kicker. Wade watched Burnett kick and offered her a place on the team.

Burnett accepted, and though she didn’t make any of her four extra-point attempts in games, enjoyed the novelty of the experience.

“I liked having people say, ‘Oh, my God. There’s a girl on the football team,’ ” Burnett said. “They were shocked. That was funny.”

Burnett is again getting her kicks on the soccer field, having scored eight goals in Canyon’s first three matches. She earned third-team All-Southern Section Division III honors last season as a freshman forward.

As for football, Burnett is unsure if she will try out for the varsity next season, but if not, she will remember her short-lived football career fondly.

“It was something that was just for me,” she said.

GET THE GLUE

It comes as no great surprise that basketball teams that are in possession of the ball stand a better chance of scoring than those that do not.

Moorpark Coach Tim Bednar is hoping his team will grasp the concept. The Musketeers have committed 47 turnovers in their 0-2 start.

“We’re just not making good decisions on our passes,” Bednar said. “We’re not getting good angles to make passes and we’re not responding well when passes are made.

“We have a lot of work to do, and we have to do it quickly.”

Staff writers Kennedy Cosgrove, Steve Elling, Paige A. Leech, John Ortega and Jason H. Reid contributed to this notebook.