August 21, 2007

Grass bluer, newer in Santa Ana
Steve Fryer takes his first look at the high school season

STEVE FRYER
Register columnist
HIGH SCHOOLS

Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:

•Let's start this 2007-08 high school sports year with a great note: There is artificial turf on Santa Ana Stadium's Eddie West Field, and a new scoreboard, too, that includes a video screen. The old bowl is the home football field for so many teams — Santa Ana College, Santa Ana High, Santa Ana Valley, Saddleback, Century and Mater Dei — these are most-welcomed improvements. The end zones are blue and a large logo at midfield is blue and orange, a smart choice given that none of the teams that use the stadium has a blue-and-orange combination for its school colors.

•Orange Lutheran is using Santa Ana Stadium for one home game — a Trinity League game against Mater Dei. Sure, that's Mater Dei's home field, but, Lutheran coach Jim Kunau said, there was not another suitably large-enough location. Lutheran also will be playing home games at Brea Olinda High, as usual, and one at Cal State Fullerton (against Los Alamitos) and even at Saddleback College (against Valencia of Valencia).

•Servite will use Brea Olinda as a home field for games against Santa Margarita and Lynwood. The Friars again will have multiple home locations, with two games at Cal State Fullerton and one at Glover Stadium. The Servite-Mater Dei game again is at Angel Stadium, but this time it's Mater Dei's home game (and you can bet that Mater Dei will use the big video screens to display its attributes just like Servite did last year).

•Mission Viejo has added a familiar name to its football coaching staff — Rob Johnson, son of head coach Bob and brother of offensive coordinator Bret, and a record-setting quarterback at USC, an ex-NFL starting quarterback, and one of the best all-around athletes in county history during his days at El Toro High. That makes six Mission Viejo coaching staffers with pro football experience — the others are Bret Johnson, Scott Miller, Dan Brandenburg, Mike Piel, and Mark Royster. "They're all great teachers of the game," Bob Johnson said, "and great guys, too, or they wouldn't be doing this. Pro guys rarely come back to coaching high school football."

•A few other interesting assistant-coaching changes in football: Longtime Mater Dei line coach Ed Begany is the offensive and defensive line coach at Fairmont Prep; brothers Greg and Joe Cicero have left Servite, where they also had been outstanding players before coaching there, and are on Jim Kunau's staff at Trinity League rival Orange Lutheran; and Tim Ellis is coaching linebackers at Laguna Hills after many years as an assistant football coach, and head baseball coach, at Trabuco Hills.

•The county preseason football top 10 will be out next week at ocvarsity.com — in a new way. It will be a preseason top 25, and it will be only at our ocvarsity.com Web site. We will start with teams ranked 11-25, then 6-10 and then 1-5 on three successive days.

•That's not all that is happening at the ever-improving ocvarsity.com. All of the league and team previews will be there exclusively, starting this Monday. There will be plenty of high school sports coverage in the Register newspaper, sure, like all of the football schedules which will be in the paper Sunday to kick off upcoming important segments of our high school sports coverage, and we still will have the separate OC Varsity section as part of Saturday's newspaper.

•When evaluating top 25 candidates, and starting at the top to do so, it appears there are various shelves, with three teams — Mater Dei, Mission Viejo and Orange Lutheran (that's in alphabetical order, so relax, OK?) — on that top shelf, a group that includes Edison, Esperanza, Los Alamitos, San Clemente and Servite (alphabetical, again) on the next shelf, and then a mix of teams that includes El Dorado, Newport Harbor and Troy and a bunch of others that can go anywhere from the lower strata of the top 10 to No. 15 or so. We're still working on it.

•Be sure that every smart coach in every sport reassessed their practice methods upon learning of the tragedy that fell upon the family and friends of Beckman football player Kenny Wilson, who collapsed during practice Friday and died on his way to a hospital. Statistically speaking, the most sure-thing coaches, and us parents, can do to keep kids safe is take away their car keys, given that on an average day 19 people between the ages of 15 and 20 are killed in car crashes. Still, anything like what happened to Wilson, who by all accounts possessed that bouncy spirit we find in the best of our young people, should make everyone in a supervisory capacity in high school athletics pause and review.

•In Friday's column, we will take a look at some of the season's top teams and trends going on in other fall sports.