Grant Gets in Face of Sylmar, Coach

Often, when a man shaves his mustache or beard, it takes a while for those around him to identify what’s different. Friends of Grant High baseball Coach Jeremy Lawrence will have no trouble recognizing the change in him this week. He is sporting half a beard.

Just before the Lancers began their bus trip to Sylmar to play what was perhaps their last game of the season, Lawrence told his team that if they could beat the highly regarded Spartans, he would shave half of his beard and remain lopsided for the rest of the week.

“We didn’t think (Sylmar) would lose two in a row,” Lawrence cracked.

Grant (11-12, 8-9 in league play) nearly knocked off Sylmar on May 9, but the Spartans scored four runs in the seventh to win, 6-5.

But on Monday, Grant scored a 4-2 victory over the Spartans (24-5, 15-2). It was the second straight defeat for Sylmar, which had a 20-game winning streak snapped by Poly last week.

MISSION LEAGUE

Not This Time

Poly right-hander Jerry Delgado made sure it wouldn’t happen again.

Delgado’s two-run double snapped a 2-2 tie in the fifth inning against Sylmar last week, and the Parrots scored a 6-2 victory.

“We had been snake-bitten by them the last two years,” Poly Coach Chuck Schwal said.

Poly was 0-5 against Sylmar, including two extra-inning, one-run losses this season.

MARMONTE LEAGUE

Royal Just Reloads

Talk about a talent drain. Royal’s volleyball team lost five of six starters, including three who signed with NCAA Division I teams.

Time for a down year, right? Wrong.

Coach Bob Ferguson plugged in a new crop of players who have led the Highlanders to the Southern Section Division II semifinals tonight against South Torrance.

“It’s not dependent on any one or two individuals,” he said. “We have five horses and they all do their job.”

Setter Josh White is the only returning starter. The new starters are Scott Hambly, Garrison Chaffee, Eric Carlsen, Matt Olsen and Danny Rizzo.

*

Because of numerous errors in the official team scoring totals at the Southern Section track and field championships Saturday, the Channel Islands girls’ team was incorrectly listed as tied for sixth place with Hart and Nogales with 14 points.

Channel Islands actually scored 24 points, good for fifth place.

Dolores Tuimoloau won the shotput (46 feet 6 1/2 inches) and was second in the discus (130-9), and Shawanda Hotchkiss finished fourth in the triple jump (36-1 3/4) and fifth in the long jump (17-0) to account for 24 points--awarded to the top six finishers on a 10-8-6-4-2-1 basis.

MISCELLANY

Given New Life

Ryan Jones of North Hollywood and Jamarra Callahan of Cleveland will compete in the City Section track and field championships Thursday thanks in part to a City rule that allows for at-large berths in the preliminaries.

Jones will run in the 300-meter intermediate hurdles and Callahan will compete in the 400 even though neither qualified in those events at their respective conference finals.

Jones did not compete in the Valley Pac-8 Conference finals because of surgery on his nose following a motorcycle accident. In the Northwest Valley Conference finals, Callahan was disqualified for a false start in the 400.

The City allows each school to designate one athlete as an at-large entry in one running event and one field event in the City preliminaries.

Jones ran 40.16 to finish second in his heat of the City preliminaries, and Callahan timed 60.25 to place third in her heat.

Kennedy Cosgrove and staff writers Paige A. Leech and John Ortega contributed to this notebook.