Success Story

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.

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This isn’t easy for a guy who attended Long Beach Wilson to admit, but which high school is the best of the 1900s, athletically speaking? It would have to be cross-town rival Long Beach Poly.

Poly has sent more players to the NFL than any school in the nation.

It has produced, among others, track/football stars Earl McCullouch and Bob Hayes, 1959 Southern Section football player of the year Willie Brown, tennis legend Billie Jean King, future baseball Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn and what seems like half of USC’s starting football team any given year.

Poly won the first of its 11 Southern Section football titles in 1919 and the first of its 12 section basketball titles in 1921, both under coach Ed Keinholz. The Jackrabbits also have won cross-country, golf, swimming, water polo and wrestling championships.

Left barren by white flight and the inevitable racial unrest that came with it, Poly was a war zone in a decaying part of the inner city during my football and baseball playing days of the early 1970s. The city’s elite scoffed at sending their kids “down there” (several of my teammates who lived within Poly’s attendance boundaries used fake addresses to play at Wilson) and everyone looked forward to a game with the Jackrabbits because they lacked numbers and were an easy “W.”

In 1972, I went on to college, started my writing career at the hometown newspaper and later that decade the Feds launched a lawsuit to force busing to integrate Long Beach schools. As citizen opposition grew and tension mounted, the school district took a novel approach, placing magnet schools for academics at Poly in an attempt to keep students from suburban northern areas of town that fed the school from fleeing.

It worked. In the last 20 years those academic programs have become second to none. So has Poly’s success rate on athletic fields. In 1980 the Jackrabbits started the resurgence by winning the Coastal Conference title in football and the train hasn’t stopped since.