Marketable Skills Tested in Quest to Bag a Victory : Contest: Grocery baggers compete on speed, technique and style in Anaheim. State champion will be named today.

Friday was the day James Bayly had been waiting for.

The 18-year-old grocery bagger for Ralphs in Villa Park had been training for weeks and felt primed to do well in the California Grocers Assn.’s Bag-Off Contest.

But when Bayly of Orange stepped up to the stage and looked at the 44 items he was supposed to stuff into paper bags as quickly and neatly as possible, he felt a sudden wave of panic.

The boxes of cereal and crackers, cans of soup, toothpaste, toilet paper and other items were all mixed up.

It turns out that organizers of the contest at the Anaheim Convention Center had purposely arranged the items differently from the diagram they had earlier provided the 17 state finalists to study.

“It really threw me,” Bayly said of the last-minute switch. “But I just used common sense and that got me through. Common sense tells you not to put cans on top of bread.”

In the end, the switch didn’t hurt the Cal State Fullerton student’s chances. He was among the nine contestants who made it through Friday’s preliminary round and will compete to become state champion when the contest resumes today.

“The way most of them had studied the diagram, they could have bagged those groceries in their sleep,” said event coordinator Vicki Berends. “We changed the items around slightly but that made it more challenging. It slowed things down, but this helps them prepare for the nationals.”

The winner of the final will be awarded $1,000 and will go on to compete in February national bag-off held in Las Vegas. Previous winners have appeared on David Letterman’s network variety show.

The contestants are judged in speed, bag-building technique, number of bags used, weight distribution, style, attitude and appearance.

Friday’s event resembled a rowdy pep rally, with each contestant being cheered wildly by co-workers, friends and relatives. Many in the audience blew horns and waved pompons and signs.

In the midst of the pandemonium was a Joan Rivers look-alike, Dee Dee Hanson, who kept the proceedings moving at a swift pace between rounds, interviewing bashful contestants and telling supermarket-related jokes.

The group supporting 17-year-old David Davey, representing Hughes market in Los Angeles, was the largest cheering section. They waved large signs bearing the likeness of their contestant.

Before the contest, Davey admitted that the chaos had him feeling a little jittery but he said, “I know I’m going to win.”

And true to his word, Davey was among the top nine finishers, despite some dissatisfaction with his performance.

“I did my best but they switched things around,” he said. “I think I could have done better.”

Linda Zepeda, a 19-year-old bagger at the Alpha Beta store in Indio, didn’t make it to the final round, but she was proud to have been one of only three women to qualify for the state competition.

“Girls can bag as good as guys,” Zepeda said. “I always bag fast. It’s just the way I am. I’m very active and like to go fast.”

Like many of her colleagues, Zepeda said she enjoys her job because she gets to meet a lot of people, even though some of them aren’t always in the best of moods.

“If you work in the morning, people are very friendly,” she said. “But at night, they’ve had a long day, and they can be real grouchy.”

Contestant Doug Favelo, from Reedley, was among the winners and wondered what his customers would think if he packed their groceries as fast as he packed on Friday.

“I think it would be fun to try it,” he said. “But I think they might be frightened off.”