There’s No Place to Go but Up : Prep baseball: North Torrance, once a force among area teams, has suffered through four consecutive losing seasons. Coach Dan Campbell is optimistic that better days are ahead.

The decline of the North Torrance High baseball program is a sore subject with Mike Neily.

Once proud to call himself a Saxon, Neily now elicits sympathetic responses when he tells players he used to coach North’s baseball team.

“The kids go, ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ ” said Neily, in his third season as an assistant at Redondo High. “I’m going, ‘Wait a minute, (North) used to win.’ ”

Unfortunately for Neily, few of today’s high school players remember when the Saxons fielded winning teams and routinely challenged for league titles and Southern Section championships.

These days, North baseball is associated with losing.

“It’s sad, very sad,” Neily said.

North completed its fourth consecutive losing season this week by sweeping two games from Centennial, 21-5 and 17-0, to avoid finishing in last place in the Pioneer League. The victories gave the Saxons a 4-21-1 record. Last year they finished 1-17, their only victory coming against Centennial.

North has not reached the Southern Section playoffs since 1989--Neily’s last season as coach--and has not won a league title since 1988.

No one is more frustrated by the current state of affairs than North Coach Dan Campbell, 26, who took over the program last season.

“I’ve lost more games in my two years of coaching than I did in my entire playing career,” Campbell said. “I’m 26 going on 50.”

A former player at Bishop Montgomery and Harbor College, Campbell said he expected North to win more games this season. But several close losses early in the season took their toll on a team already lacking confidence, he said.

“The kids are so used to losing,” Campbell said. “The seniors have won about 10 games in four years. When they fall behind, their response is, ‘Oh, here we go again.’ They play not to lose instead of playing to win.”

Campbell’s colleagues believe he will turn things around.

“Dan is a class guy,” El Segundo Coach John Stevenson said. “If he can stick it out, he can do OK. It’s very tough to bring something back when it’s dead. There’s no magic bullet. It just takes time and hard work.”

Said Neily: “For North to be successful and have a winning team, there has to be leadership from the coaching staff. I know from talking to people that Dan Campbell is doing a good job. The Saxons will be back.”

North Athletic Director Steve Schmitz said the school will give Campbell time to revive the program.

“It’s not fair to expect miracles right away,” Schmitz said. “I think things will get much better next year.”

Prior to the 1990s, North built a reputation as a strong baseball school under former coaches Jim O’Brien and Neily. O’Brien coached the team for 12 seasons from 1964 to ‘75, guiding the Saxons to eight league titles and two Southern Section major-division titles, in 1971 and ’74.

Five seasons after O’Brien left to embark on a successful career at Harbor College, Neily started a 10-year coaching run at North in 1980. Neily’s teams won four league titles and reached the playoffs nine times, averaging 17 victories a season.

Neily left North after the 1989 season to pursue real estate endeavors and spend more time with his family.

It proved to be a rough transition for the baseball team. Under Roger Rosenthal, a walk-on coach, the Saxons slumped in 1990 and ’91.

“After Neily left, things really went downhill,” Stevenson said. “The facilities were not taken care of. Everything just drifted.”

In a short time, losing fostered disinterest in baseball at North. Teams on all levels lost players, Schmitz said.

At least one player who would have helped the Saxons went to school elsewhere. O’Brien said Jim Zambarelli, El Segundo’s standout second baseman, would have attended North if the program had been stronger. Zambarelli’s father, also named Jim, played for O’Brien at North and was a member of the Saxons’ last Southern Section championship team in 1974.

Zambarelli, a senior, transferred to El Segundo after spending his freshman year at St. John Bosco in Bellflower. He moved in with his divorced father in the El Porto section of Manhattan Beach, just south of El Segundo.

“When Jim (Sr.) saw his son play against North, I think he had mixed emotions,” O’Brien said. “But when he made the decision to move, the (North) program was in total disarray. If North was strong, Zambarelli would have been a Saxon. He alone would have made that program this year.”

Players who stuck it out at North endured more than just losing seasons.

Frank Ramirez, a senior shortstop in his fourth year of playing varsity baseball at North, said the team is much more disciplined now than it was two years ago when it finished 6-16.

“When Coach Rosenthal was here, we didn’t even practice all the time,” Ramirez said. “Now things are a lot different. We work on a lot more drills and things we need to know.”

Attempts to reach Rosenthal were unsuccessful.

Ramirez recalled a time during 1991--his sophomore year--when several seniors called the locker room before a game and said they weren’t going to play.

“They said they had nothing to play for,” Ramirez said. “That was the worst thing that happened. We had to bring up (junior varsity players) for the game. It made me realize that when you start something, you have to finish it. I would never want to do that to any team.”

Campbell said changing players’ attitudes was one of the biggest obstacles he faced when he became coach.

“Players would show up to games after missing practice and expect to play,” Campbell said. “That was the kind of stuff that had gone on. It was a battle from the beginning.”

Things still aren’t the way Campbell would like, but there were encouraging signs this season. One of the North’s four victories was against Mary Star, the eventual Santa Fe League champion, and the Saxons came close to beating several strong teams.

North led Pioneer League champion El Segundo, 6-3, in the sixth inning but wound up losing in the bottom of the seventh, 7-6. The Saxons lost a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the seventh to Pioneer runner-up West Torrance, which rallied for a 2-2 tie. North also played Western League champion Westchester close, losing, 10-8.

“We needed a stopper,” Campbell said. “We lost a lot of games because we let our pitchers stay in too long.”

Because the Saxons are a young team--they started six underclassmen--Campbell is optimistic about next season and the future of the program.

He isn’t alone.

O’Brien, who coached Campbell at Harbor and recommended him for the North job, said it is only a matter of time before the Saxons rise again.

“You have to give Danny at least three years,” O’Brien said. “Things can disintegrate in a hurry, but it takes time to build it up again.”