Female Flyer

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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Until the early 1970s, there was no organized high school track and field competition for girls, and athletes were developed through a club system that produced such stars as middle-distance runner Mary Decker of Orange and javelin throwers Kate Schmidt of Long Beach and Karin Smith of La Jolla.

Starting in the mid-1970s the vast majority of the best athletes came from high school programs, including national-record holders such as shotputter Natalie Kaaiawahia of Fullerton, Denean Howard of Granada Hills Kennedy and Polly Plumer of Irvine University.

But for me, Marion Jones was clearly the best.

The first time I saw her was in the summer of 1989, just before her freshman year at Oxnard Rio Mesa High, when she won a special high school race during an International invitational meet at UCLA. Tall and powerful, even at 13, she burst from the blocks even with the field and then suddenly sped away from her older competition. What I was seeing, although I didn’t fully realize it, was just a glimpse of what was to follow.

During the period 1990-1993 Jones won an unprecedented nine individual state titles, including a quadruple-double--taking the 100 and 200 four years in a row. Her ninth championship came in the long jump in her senior year.

By the time she was a sophomore, in 1991, she had broken the national 200-meter record. The next year, after transferring to Thousand Oaks High, she again broke the national 200 record, finishing fourth at the 1992 Olympic trials.

In her senior year she began long jumping for the first time and leaped 22-0 1/2 to move into second place on the all-time high school list and just miss the national record of 22-3.

What makes Jones’ performances all the more remarkable is that during the entire time, she devoted only three months a year to track. The rest of the time she was developing basketball skills that earned her a scholarship at North Carolina.