Santa Margarita Proves It Belongs on Top Shelf

The Esperanza and Huntington Beach boys’ volleyball teams were expected to be a notch above everybody else this season, but Santa Margarita has shown that it belongs in that group.

“I think Santa Margarita is right there with us,” Huntington Beach Coach Rocky Ciarelli said after his team won the Orange County Championships’ Division I title on Saturday.

Santa Margarita, Esperanza and Huntington Beach each were undefeated in pool play before the Eagles and the Aztecs bumped up against each other in the semifinals.

As starting middle blocker Kyle Anderson sat on the bench with a sprained ankle, Dan Harrington led the Aztecs to a come-from-behind, three-game victory over the Eagles. The victory was a payback for a nonleague match last week, when Santa Margarita defeated Esperanza in four games.

Esperanza advanced to the final, where it lost to Huntington Beach. The Oilers did not drop a game in six best-of-three game matches in the tournament.

Huntington Beach (4-0) moved up a spot to No. 1 in the Orange County Sportswriters’ rankings this week, and previously top-ranked Esperanza (4-1) fell to No. 2, where it is tied with Santa Margarita (3-0).

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Dennis Masuda of Division I champion Huntington Beach and Jim Polster of Division II champion Dana Hills were selected the most valuable players of the Orange County boys’ volleyball tournament Saturday.

Players named to the all-tournament teams were: Division I--Jon Alleman (Esperanza), Justin Dalton (Esperanza), Tim Gerlach (Santa Margarita), Caleb Guimaraes (Huntington Beach), Nick Mauro (Santa Margarita), Dave McKienzie (Huntington Beach) and Chris Van Reusen (Edison); Division II--Eddie Araza (Tustin), Morgan Byers (Dana Hills), Jacob Caldwell (Dana Hills), Dave Klingman (Tustin), Aaron Lev (Dana Hills), Dave Moser (Dana Hills), Aaron Sizer (Tustin) and Casey Winn (Tustin).

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Four Orange County high school boys basketball players have been invited to participate in the Southern California All-Star Classic April 15 at the Pyramid at Long Beach State.

They are Kevin Augustine (Mater Dei), Wes Bunn Jr. (Cypress), Ben Jones (Sonora) and Mike Vukovich (Mater Dei), all seniors selected to the Times’ all-county team.

Augustine will play in the “premier” high school game at 7 p.m., which will be televised by Fox Sports West 2 and will feature five of the top 50 high school seniors in the nation.

The other three players have been invited to play in a 5 p.m. preliminary game.

A game featuring some of the state’s best junior college players is slated for 9 p.m.

For tickets, call the Pyramid box office at (562) 985-4949.

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Heather Nelson, an All-Sunset League selection for the Esperanza girls’ soccer team, has signed a letter of intent to attend Loyola Marymount this fall.

Nelson led Esperanza to a second-place finish in league this season and to the second round of the Southern Section Division I playoffs.

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The Palm Springs Cup in Palm Springs turned out to be an Orange County tennis affair. Woodbridge defeated Santa Margarita, 44-37, for the boys’ tournament title. Woodbridge defeated Mission Viejo in the semifinals and Santa Margarita defeated Corona del Mar.

The tournament victory capped a huge week for the top-ranked Warriors, who defeated the Southern Section’s second- and fourth-best teams, Palos Verdes Peninsula and Dana Hills, on Tuesday and Thursday. Santa Margarita also had a nice week, going 3-0 in match play and leaping from seventh to third in the county rankings.

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The most overly optimistic statement at last week’s 10-game CIF state high school basketball tournament at the Pond may have been uttered by Sacramento Encina boys’ Coach Jon Hightower, whose team was run off the court by Southern Section Division IV-A champion Santa Monica Crossroads, 93-57, in the Division IV title game.

Despite trailing by as many as 40 points in the second half and being thoroughly outplayed in just about every area, Hightower steadfastly told reporters after the game that “I am extremely disappointed. I really expected to come down here and win this game.”

This was the first appearance by Encina (15-21) against a Southern California team of any kind this season. The only losses by Crossroads (31-3), which entered the game with a 24-game winning streak, were to two-time state Division I champion Los Angeles Crenshaw, state Division II champion Compton Dominguez and to Mt. Zion (New York), a national power, at the Las Vegas Holiday Prep Classic.

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During the media session after Laguna Hills’ 41-40 victory Friday at the Pond, Whitney Houser hinted she would listen to any and all college scholarship offers.

Ten minutes later, she was offered a trip to Cal State Northridge--her first.

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There has been too much poor shooting against Laguna Hills to call it bad luck. Brea Olinda shot one for 23 from the three-point line, Newark Memorial two for 23, Moorpark shot one for 19 and Lemoore shot four for 18.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence that no team scored more than 50 points this season, either, against the Hawks’ prolific 2-3 zone defense.

“I have never played a team, ever, in 20 years that had to make so few adjustments,” Brea Olinda Coach Jeff Sink said. “I watched them at the beginning of the year and they basically had the same people and same game plan then that they did for the state finals.

“It’s hard to believe they could get through the entire playoffs and not be forced to do something different.

“We had about the best shooting team around, and you think, ‘We’re going to take them out of that zone.’ But you lose confidence, and then you’re not prepared to attack it other ways. The thing is, you can’t believe you’re going to shoot that poorly.”

It was a simple plan, said Laguna Hills Coach Lynn Taylor, and it worked especially well in the last two games--at the Pyramid and the Pond.

“Most people have trouble shooting threes in an arena,” Taylor said. “It gives us one step back [on defense]. It might not seem like much, but it is.”

Staff writers Martin Henderson, Dave McKibben and Paul McLeod contributed to this notebook.