Pioneering Effort

High school sports serve as a rite of passage for the athletes who play them, the student, friends and families that gather to watch them and the sportswriters who cut their professional teeth covering them.

High school football games in Los Angeles date to 1896, but it wasn’t until 1934 that the Los Angeles City Section was born.

The Southern Section was established in 1912 and held its first athletic competition in 1913.

This story is not an attempt to document the achievements of every outstanding athlete, coach and team that made a mark, for there are far too many to chronicle here.

Rather, it is a history lesson of sorts told by current and former Times staff writers who have written about Southland prep athletes. Most of the writers graduated from Los Angeles-area high schools. And while many have gone on to cover college and professional sports as beat writers or columnists, all maintain indelible images of the prep athletes they watched, covered and, in some instances, competed with and against on the playing field.

*

I was on the field when Steve Young threw his first practice pass with the L.A. Express, on the sideline when Doug Flutie’s miracle beat Miami, in the stands when Reggie Jackson hit his 500th homer, in the winner’s pen when Tommy Moe won the Olympic downhill in Lillehammer, in the press box when Eric Dickerson rushed for 248 yards against Dallas and ringside when Mike Tyson punched out Peter McNeeley.

But the best athlete I ever played against was a girl.

She and her younger brother Jeff took on all comers during summer pick-up basketball games in the La Habra Sonora High gym in the mid-1970s.

Sometimes you’d be standing there on defense, thinking you had this girl covered, and she’d do a stutter-step and leave you with high-tops nailed to the floor.

Sometimes she’d drain a jumper in your face, or go by you with a spin move, or make a no-look pass that clipped your ear.

In La Habra, where we both grew up, she was a legend. I remember first hearing about her in junior high breaking some record in track and field.

She should have played on the boys’ basketball team at Sonora but was not allowed.

Even us geeks on the wrestling team knew she was special.

Of course, we had no inkling then she would become an All-American at UCLA, help the U.S. team to a silver medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, win a tryout with the Indiana Pacers, pave the way for Cheryl Miller, make professional basketball an option for women, marry a Hall of Fame pitcher and conduct herself, always, with uncommon dignity and class.

But that’s what Ann Meyers did.