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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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The constancy of prep sports in the mid-’80s was to be cherished. There were great individual talents, the great events (Crenshaw vs. Santa Ana Mater Dei in the 1986 state regional basketball championship, Granada Hills’ stunning upset of Carson in the 1987 City football championship), great rivalries (Garfield against Roosevelt, Carson against Banning, everyone against the 46-game football winning streak of Canyon Country Canyon and the girls’ volleyball powerhouse at Mira Costa) and great traditions (the late-night spaghetti dinner for all participants at the Arcadia Invitational track meet).

But it was also when so much changed.

High school sports went corporate. And, went to court.

To be on the prep beat for The Times at that time, as I was from 1984 to 1988, was to witness an evolution, only partly for the better. The better seemed strange at the time because it was all but unheard of to link a company with an event. It took a while getting used to associating the Southern Section football finals or the state basketball championships with mini-marts and gas companies. But the money pumped into the high school events helped sustain those programs.

The other part, people still can’t get used to. The 1980s, especially the second half, brought the onset of litigation-as-reaction, when people sued over teams being kept out of the playoffs or individuals being declared ineligible at a school.

Administrators lament that period to this day, when the legal briefs came so fast that even the formidable Hawthorne sprinters couldn’t keep up and the system was sometimes clogged even worse than an opponent trying to get past halfcourt against the Crenshaw press.