When Handshake Is Setback to Sportsmanship : High schools: Ventura County league bans the practice to avert postgame fights. Critics say key lessons are lost.

It is the very symbol of sportsmanship--the victors and the vanquished shaking hands at the end of a bitter contest. Evert and Navratilova. The Trojans and the Bruins. Grant and Lee.

But after a series of scuffles between high school teams in eastern Ventura County, officials in the Marmonte League say they are sacking the symbol to save the sports.

From tennis matches to baseball games to swim meets, competitors in the league, which includes schools in Simi Valley, Camarillo and the Conejo Valley, are now forbidden to shake hands after contests.

Critics complain that the new policy, enacted earlier this month, is also a symbol--a disturbing though perhaps apt one in an era of bratty tennis players swearing at line judges and coaches hurling chairs onto basketball courts.

“For them to ban it is bad for sports,” said Billy Miller, a junior football and basketball player at Westlake High School.

In recent years, high school sports events around Southern California have been marred by violence between opponents. Punches were thrown as fans mobbed the field after a 1990 football game between Dorsey High and Banning High. Football players from Costa Mesa High and Laguna High engaged in a third-quarter melee in 1991. And last year, a Harvard-Westlake soccer player was charged with assault for kicking an opponent in the head.

As a result, some high school sports leagues have scrapped postgame handshakes in especially tense circumstances. The Marmonte League appears to be the first to abolish the practice altogether--in all sports, for boys and girls.

Principals of the eight schools in the league, which encompasses mostly white, middle-class bedroom communities, voted unanimously to ban postgame handshakes, encouraging handshakes before games instead.

“I think (the prohibition) is promoting sportsmanship, but an honest sportsmanship rather than just going through the motions,” said the man who proposed rule, Camarillo High School Principal Terry Tackett, who is a former baseball coach. “I don’t want to play someone and have them beat me up for 40 or 50 minutes, then have to tell them they played a good game. I’d rather tell them good luck before the game.”

Critics don’t see it that way.

“It’s about resolution,” USC philosophy professor Dallas Willard said of the postgame handshake. “It recognizes that in the competition feelings are aroused. There is hostility. But the idea is now the game is over and the two sides come back together. . . . Without it, there is no resolution. You carry the resentment or the feeling of domination off the field with you.”

Coaches in neighboring leagues voiced similar opinions.

“If we’re that far gone, we shouldn’t be playing at all,” said Darryl Stroh, football and baseball coach at Granada Hills High School in the Northwest Valley Conference. “If kids can’t handle losing, then we aren’t doing our job. Overcoming the adversity of losing is part of growing up.”

But scuffles broke out after several Marmonte League basketball games this past season--including one in which a player threw a punch during the handshake.

No players have been hurt in any of the outbreaks, but cautious principals in the league want to make sure they don’t escalate into the kinds of brawls that marred a 1984 baseball game between Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks high schools. That fight started with the handshake and ended with five players being hospitalized.

Critics agree that safety of the players is a top priority, but argue that coaches should have the discretion to handle volatile situations as they arise.

“I personally think if there is any misconduct, coaches ought to be fired,” Camarillo softball coach Darwin Tolzin said. “If the coaches can’t control their players, they need to get different coaches. My personal opinion is: I think handshaking after the game is fantastic. I love it.”

Simi Valley baseball coach Mike Scyphers agreed. He cited a game his team played this month against Edison High of Huntington Beach. During Edison’s 8-1 victory, the two coaches noticed friction between the teams and agreed to call off the postgame handshake.

“I think that’s a good way to handle it, but the coaches have to be very observant,” Scyphers said. “I like the sportsmanship, that we shake hands. But they don’t do it in the big leagues and they don’t do it in college. I’m not so sure if someone is beating you pretty good that you want to go shake their hands anyway.

“But I think when you’ve got a great ballgame, and it’s 3-2 and well-played, I’d like to see the kids shake hands.”

Some local observers see the decision as a quick fix that fails to address a deeper problem: the postgame flare-ups themselves.

“I think it’s a shame,” said John Aylsworth, whose son Steve plays basketball at Westlake. “I think the kids need to understand how to (conduct the handshake) appropriately rather than just prohibiting it entirely.”

UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Alexander said the Marmonte League principals are sending the wrong message to their athletes.

“In some ways, the decision seems to give a certain legitimacy to the aggressive behavior by giving into it and saying, ‘We’re tying our hands because we can’t do anything about it,’ ” Alexander said.

Dean Crowley, commissioner of the Southern Section of the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body of high school sports in the state, said a rule similar to the Marmonte League’s was proposed for all of the region’s 400-plus schools a few years ago, but was defeated.

“I’m sorry a league had to make that decision,” Crowley said. “It says that we need to get back to what athletics are all about, ethical conduct, sportsmanship, fair play, all the things that we perpetuate in our code of ethics.”

Orange County athletic teams are not immune to fighting; assistant boys’ basketball coaches from Mater Dei and Dana Hills high schools recently scuffled after a junior varsity game, and a boys’ soccer match between Newport Harbor and Woodbridge high schools was stopped with 17 minutes left when players brawled.

But the after-game handshake was not involved in either case, and coaches and longtime observers could not recall an instance when that ritual had led to violence in Orange County.

Tom Danley, veteran boys’ basketball coach and athletic director at Katella High in Anaheim, said he could nonetheless understand the Marmonte League’s decision.

“I believe they’re doing what they believe is right under their circumstances,” he said. “We’ve never had a major problem with that in Orange County, but for us to be judgmental wouldn’t be right.

“Under normal circumstances, I would think teams would want to shake hands and show due respect for their opponent, whether they’ve won or lost, and the same goes for the coaches and administrators,” he said. “I would hope it wouldn’t come to (a ban) in Orange County, but things do change.”

Dennis Sullivan, a spokesman for Little League Baseball in Williamsport, Pa., declined to comment specifically on the Marmonte decision. But he characterized the postgame handshake as one of the most important parts of the game.

“One of the aims of Little League is to teach kids how to win and how to lose with dignity,” he said. “The handshake at the end of the game signifies true sportsmanship and friendship. To me, it’s the beginning of the second half of the game, the part you carry away with you.”

But Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley, said that if abolishing niceties such as handshakes is needed to preserve high school sports, then it should be done without regret.

Edwards, a noted sports sociologist, added that too many youths are scared away from athletics by the threat of violence from off the field, saying some boys have quit teams rather than travel into unfriendly neighborhoods.

“The thing of developing sportsmanship is all well and good, but the mere connectedness they get from the fact that they still want to come out and play ball--that becomes the critical point,” he said. “The rest has to be considered gravy.”

So far, the rule has not made much of a difference.

After the Thousand Oaks boys’ volleyball team stunned Simi Valley’s Royal High in a fiercely fought match on Tuesday night, snapping Royal’s 66-match league winning streak that had lasted more than five years, opponents sought each other out through the fans who had streamed onto the court.

Some players even hugged.