A Friendly Game of Football : Sports: After being teammates in college and the pros, former Santa Monica players Sam Anno and Pat O’Hara have crossed paths again, this time in San Diego.

Sam Anno and Pat O’Hara were destined to be teammates.

Although Anno is the elder by nearly four years, the Santa Monica natives have crossed football playing paths several times since the mid-1980s.

From Santa Monica High to USC, to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the San Diego Chargers, Anno and O’Hara always seem to find each other.

“I’ve never really thought of us being destined to be teammates,” O’Hara said. “But it is kind of unbelievable.”

Anno was the first of the two players to burst on the Westside football scene. When he was a sophomore, Anno was a standout quarterback at St. Monica.

Anno decided that he wanted to play for a bigger football program and transferred to Santa Monica before his junior year.

He was a two-way starter at tight end and linebacker on Santa Monica’s 1981 California Interscholastic Federation Major Division championship team.

“I was just in junior high school then and even though I didn’t know him personally, I knew of him,” said O’Hara, who grew up a mile from Anno. “Everyone knew who he was. Sam was a legend.”

As a senior, Anno was one of the most recruited prep players in California. After considering UCLA, Arizona and Colorado, he decided to attend USC.

The next season, when Anno was a freshman linebacker for the Trojans, O’Hara was making his debut as a quarterback at Santa Monica.

“At this time, I knew who he was but I still didn’t know him,” Anno said. “I didn’t meet Pat until he started getting recruited by SC.”

Like Anno, O’Hara was heavily recruited as a senior at Santa Monica. He had narrowed his college choices to USC and Stanford before he made a visit to USC.

That is when Anno and O’Hara met.

“He was my host,” O’Hara said of Anno. “He just took care of me and put me under his wing. He’s a reason why I went to USC.”

Anno quickly adopted O’Hara because of their Santa Monica background.

Although they were teammates at USC for only a year, their friendship grew during a frustrating season for both.

Anno had a season-ending knee injury in his third game as a senior and O’Hara spent the season as a redshirt freshman quarterback.

The next season, Anno was playing with the Rams as a long snapper-linebacker. “I lost touch with him when he went to the NFL,” O’Hara said.

After seven weeks with the Rams in 1987, Anno was released. The next week he was signed by the Minnesota Vikings.

Anno was left unprotected by Minnesota in 1988 and signed as a Plan B free agent with Tampa Bay. He was named the NFL’s special teams player of the year by the NFL Alumni.

O’Hara’s college career was ending before it really started.

In a spring practice before his junior season, O’Hara seriously injured a knee. It prevented him from playing in his final two years of college.

O’Hara worked hard to rehabilitate the knee and Tampa Bay noticed. The Buccaneers selected him in the 10th round of the 1991 draft.

“It was really weird when I found out that they had drafted Pat,” said Anno, who was about to enter his third season with the Buccaneers. “I said, ‘No way . . . I can’t believe that Pat is coming here.’ ”

Anno and O’Hara renewed their friendship at Tampa Bay. O’Hara spent most of the season on the team’s development squad and Anno led the Buccaneers in tackles on special teams.

In April, both players signed as Plan B free agents with San Diego.

“I didn’t know he had signed with San Diego until I read it the next day in the newspaper,” Anno said.

Said O’Hara: “We probably signed at the same time and didn’t know it.”

Anno has competed in the NFL for six years.

“I feel older but I don’t feel like an NFL vet,” he said. “I realize that I have six years in the NFL, but it’s weird. I remember when I was a rookie and saw players who had been in the league for six years, I thought that they were old.”

Anno has played in an NFC championship game and a Rose Bowl, but he considers the season in which he played on Santa Monica’s championship team as one of his most notable memories.

“It’s that Santa Monica pride in us that has kept us trying so hard,” Anno said. “We both have setbacks in our careers, but we both battled back.”