Recent Football Record Dogs Burbank High in Wake of Scandal

As if the Burbank High football team wasn’t down far enough, recently the Bulldogs were shaken by two scandals.

One involved the 50-year-old president of a district educational foundation being charged with two felony counts for allegedly offering a 17-year-old Burbank football player money for his team’s athletic program in return for sex. In the other incident, a 60-page report by the Burbank district and the Southern Section said that school board President Joseph Hooven and former Bulldog Coach John Hazelton might have exercised “undue influence” to induce several football players to transfer to Burbank.

Well, Mike McDonald, vice president of the Burbank school board, doesn’t have much in a definitive way to say about the sex case, but he did react strongly to word that the Burbank football program might have been recruiting players illegally. “If anyone in this district is recruiting, they’ve got to fire the guy who did it, because he did a lousy job,” McDonald said.

That’s for sure. In the two-year period during which the violations might have occurred, the Bulldogs were 3-17--not including a victory by forfeit.

McDonald, no doubt, knows his football. He played at USC and eight years with the Rams.

Streaker: Mark Covert, Antelope Valley College’s cross-country and track coach, calls it “the last major milestone that I’ll care to admit to.” On Saturday, barring any unforeseen circumstances, Covert’s streak of running at least three miles daily will hit 10,000 consecutive days.

The streak started on July 23, 1968, before Covert’s freshman year at Valley College. He has logged more than 111,000 miles--an average of 11 miles a day--during the streak and kept it alive by running through a variety of physical ailments ranging from stress fractures to hemorrhoids that required surgery to dehydration from flu that required hospitalization.

When asked what the 10,000-day milestone means, Covert said: “I know there have got to be people out there saying, ‘Boy, now there’s a sick man for you.’ ”

Distance-running 101: Covert is a firm believer that athletes need to know a certain amount of history about their sport to truly appreciate it.

With that in mind, he will require members of his cross-country teams to attend several lectures about distance running in the coming months. Covert said that Laszlo Tabori, the third man to break four minutes in the mile, and Bobby Thomas, the 1975 World Junior cross-country champion as a freshman at Glendale College, will speak at two of the sessions.

Covert saw the need for the lectures in October when he discovered that no one on Antelope Valley’s men’s cross-country team had heard of Marty Liquori, one of the world’s top distance runners in the 1970s and one of only three Americans to break four minutes in the mile in high school.

“When I mentioned that Liquori had broken four minutes in the mile in high school, one of the guys said, ‘No one’s ever done that,’ ” Covert said. “That’s when I decided that these guys needed to know more about the sport. How can they truly appreciate it if they don’t know anything about its past?”

New approach: After losing four of its first five games, most in ugly fashion, the Cal State Northridge women’s basketball team is seeing a new side to first-year Coach Michael Abraham.

“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” Abraham said. “I think I felt a little sorry for what these kids had been through [a 1-26 season] when I first got here and I didn’t push them hard enough.”

Abraham said he had a “heated discussion” with his team at halftime of Tuesday’s game against Pepperdine and the Matadors responded with a relatively decent second half. Senior Maureen Batiste told him she thought the players needed to hear such discussions more often.

“I think he should have pushed us a little harder,” she said. “After he yelled at us, he usually apologized. I can’t stand it when he does that. . . . If people just could take the criticism and not worry about getting their feelings hurt, we’ll be OK.”

Quotebook

“It was just like a high school game.”

-- Pepperdine forward Will Weir, commenting on the atmosphere at Cal State Northridge’s gym, where only 320 fans showed up to watch the Waves defeat the Matadors, 90-81, Tuesday.

“We got the ball inside pretty well, and it came out pretty quickly too.”

--Cal State Northridge basketball Coach Pete Cassidy, after 7-foot Pepperdine center Gavin Van Der Putten blocked six of his team’s shots.

Things to Do

Several local high school seniors are scheduled to play in the East-West all-star water polo match Saturday at 2 p.m. at Mt. San Antonio College.

Burroughs High Coach John Kunishima is coaching the West squad that includes Joey Bennett and Jon Conrad of Crescenta Valley High.

The East team will be composed of players from the San Gabriel Valley area.

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Contributing: Darin Esper, Jeff Fletcher, John Ortega, Peter Yoon.