RIGHT FROM THE START

High school sports serve as a rite of passage for the athletes who play them, the students, 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 scrawny red-headed lefty could barely grip the football when he showed up for summer passing drills at Saddleback College in 1984. It was obvious this freckle-faced kid wasn’t coming out for the team, mainly because he wasn’t old enough to drive.

He got in line with the college-aged quarterbacks, and though his arm could barely float the ball more than 30 yards downfield, his technique and rythym were sounder than those five years his senior. It wasn’t my proudest moment, running patterns for a kid who had yet to participate in a high school game, but it turned out to be an experience I would brag about for years.

Todd Marinovich went on to earn the starting quarterback job as a freshman at Mater Dei that fall. He then moved on to Capistrano Valley the following season, where he set a national career record for passing yards and finished with a then Orange County record 74 career touchdown passes.

I confided to a few friends about my encounter with Marinovich while sitting on a backyard fence watching the Capistrano Valley/El Toro game in 1987. Marinovich and El Toro’s Bret Johnson, who threw for 64 touchdowns and won two Southern Section titles from 1985-87, met in the legendary South Coast League game, which was won by Capistrano Valley, 22-21, in front of 7,000 fans.

Three years later the story was repeated in the Rose Bowl as I watched Marinovich, now at USC, throw a game-winning touchdown pass to Johnny Morton in the closing seconds against UCLA. When Marinovich was drafted in the first round by the Raiders the following year, it allowed me to watch him perform a few more times in person, and keep relaying my story to whomever was close enough to listen.