Golden State Convert

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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I left New Jersey to play football at USC in 1982 and believed at the time there wasn’t a state that could match the all-around talent of the Garden State.

After I met some of my college teammates from California, and even more so after I began working for The Times and covering preps in 1987, my viewpoint changed to give California the edge.

One night in 1990 I was working the phones in the office and received a call from a stranger. I was told that a high school girls’ basketball team walked off the court at halftime because someone scored 100 points. I knew immediately it was Inglewood Morningside’s Lisa Leslie.

Leslie, who actually scored 101 points, was so dominant it was scary. People compared her to Cheryl Miller, who scored 105 points in a game for Riverside Poly in 1982 and set a state record with 3,446 points in her career, but I considered Leslie the Wilt Chamberlain of high school basketball. She was so tall and athletic, opposing teams looked like the Washington Generals when she played.

The best prep performance I witnessed, however, was the night Tracy Murray, now in the NBA with the Washington Wizards, scored the first 24 points for Glendora in the 1989 Division II state championship game against Menlo Atherton. Murray outscored the Northern champion, 22-19, in the first quarter on his way to 64 points in an 89-83 defeat.