Winning Is What Griffins’ Melsby Does Best of All

It took 41 games before someone could beat Brad Melsby and the Los Alamitos football team.

Melsby, The Times Orange County back of the year, led the county in receptions and receiving yardage this season. He finished his three-year varsity career as Orange County’s all-time leading receiver in receptions, yardage, and touchdowns.

“If the ball is in the vicinity he’ll get it,” Esperanza Coach Gary Meek said. “He has great hands, will take the big hits and still hang on to the ball.”

But the legacy Melsby leaves is his penchant for winning. Los Alamitos was 39-1-1 during a career in which many great players and teams were left in the Griffins’ wake.

USC’s Grant Pearsall and Villa Park got close in 1992, but Los Alamitos prevailed, 28-27, in Game 3 of the Melsby era.

UCLA’s Travis Kirschke--a two-time Times Orange County lineman of the year--and Esperanza lost 34-14 to Los Alamitos in Game 8. Later that season, the Aztecs could manage only a 14-14 tie with Melsby and the Griffins in the ’92 Southern Section Division II championship game.

California’s Tony Gonzalez--The Times lineman of the year in 1993--and Huntington Beach barely got within three touchdowns of Melsby and Los Alamitos, which won its third consecutive section title with a 39-21 victory over the Oilers in the ’93 Division II game.

This season, 12 more opponents fell by the wayside as Los Alamitos ran its unbeaten streak to 47 games, a section record.

Then, only a perfectly executed onside kick recovered by Mater Dei with less than four minutes remaining helped the Monarchs erase a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit in the Division I semifinals.

That night at Anaheim Stadium, Mater Dei defeated Los Alamitos, 28-24, before toppling La Puente Bishop Amat in the championship game a week later.

“We executed, we just didn’t execute well enough,” Melsby said after the only loss of his high-school career. Two section championships and a fistful of individual records were small consolation in Melsby’s eyes.

Still, the records he has compiled are mind boggling.

Melsby, the Sunset League’s most valuable player, caught 77 passes for 1,204 yards this season and scored 14 touchdowns. He finished his career with 185 receptions to break the record of 177 set by a former teammate, Los Alamitos’ George Sagen (1990-’92).

Melsby’s 2,979 yards receiving and 35 touchdown receptions broke 19-year-old Orange County records set by Kennedy’s Rick Parma.

Melsby, a 6-foot-1, 183-pound senior who is being recruited by UCLA, Stanford, Arizona State, and Minnesota among others, also started at free safety, where his defensive skills were just as instrumental to the Griffins’ success.

“He’s a special, special kid,” Los Alamitos Coach John Barnes said. “Brad is one of the few guys we’ve ever asked to play both ways all of the time.

“When he scores, he acts like it’s all in a day’s work. He just flips the ball to the official and there’s no hot-dogging. I think that’s what makes him extra special because he doesn’t do any of that. But everyone else still tells me what a great player he is.”