Erickson, Gonzalez Garner More Athletic Honors

Four high school senior athletes, including Brea-Olinda’s Nicole Erickson and Huntington Beach’s Tony Gonzalez, have been named Southland Athletes of the Year by the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s All-Southern California Board of Athletics.

The selections mark the first time co-male and co-female athletes have been selected. Joining Erickson and Gonzalez are Simi Valley’s Sara Griffin and Newbury Park’s Keith Smith.

Erickson will attend Purdue in the fall on a basketball scholarship, while Gonzalez will be at California, where he will play football and basketball. Griffin is headed to Michigan on a softball scholarship, and Smith has signed with Arizona, where he hopes to play football and baseball. Griffin also was a fifth-round pick of the Detroit Tigers in this month’s draft.

The last Orange County boy to receive the honor was El Toro’s Rob Johnson (1991), now the quarterback at USC. The last county girl to win the honor was El Dorado’s Janet Evans (1988 and ‘89), gold-medal winning Olympic swimmer.

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Katy Eklof, a track standout at Rice University, has been selected to the GTE/CoSIDA women’s at-large academic All-American team. Eklof, a 1992 graduate of Costa Mesa High School, has a 3.95 grade-point average and is a biochemistry major.

She was second in the 10,000 meters in the Southwest Conference outdoor meet and was third in the 5,000 indoor meet.