LJ softball: LJHS's fifth CIF title this year

By Ed Piper, Jr.

If I'm not mistaken, the La Jolla High softball team's CIF title May 27 is the fifth CIF title for LJHS this school year.

Paula Conway, the Viking Athletic Director, said the school already had four titles up till last week. I believe my memory is correct, although I can't enumerate the four: We have girls soccer, boys volleyball, and boys lacrosse. I know that a pair in girls beach volleyball won, but I don't know if Paula was counting them.

What was pretty remarkable about the boys lacrosse and boys volleyball titles was that they occurred the same evening, the same day. I was busy attending to softball playoff duties that day, having been out of the area for a while and having stayed home from events to let my nasty back recuperate a little.

Back in my days, in the CIF Southern Section, there were only four divisions, 4A through 1A, 4A being the highest. And in the major sports at least, football, basketball, and baseball, only the league champions advanced to the playoffs.

So, after having gone to all-star baseball tournaments for years in youth league, Pony League, and so forth, my brother and I were shut out in our high school competition from playing in the CIF playoffs. My brother, a backup first baseman at the time, went one year, but he didn't play.

I know the arguments about the dilution of the meaning of a CIF title when San Diego Section has a billion divisions. But I never see any parent or player complaining when their team just won the championship game. All I see is a major dogpile celebration on the field among the players, and family members and students whooping and hollering in the stands.

It's just plain fun and exciting.

Another aspect to having many opportunities to advance to the playoffs is the invaluable experience it yields to players. They've been tested in the heat of competition, when games are often do-or-die, and it's just fantastic.

I never went to the basketball playoffs, but hitting key free throws in the third overtime of an upset win over Santa Barbara High, the giant in our league at that time featuring future Laker Don Ford, gave me the confidence to play much better players in pickup ball on Saturdays at Loyola Marymount College and in competition in Mexico City, where I played in a men's league.

I remember stepping to the line in a game in Xochimilco, where there are floating gardens in southern Mexico City, and calmly thinking I had done all this before and succeeded. I made the free throws, which I expected, and our team won.

Hopefully, that confidence blends over into other parts of student athletes' lives as they get older and mature. A healthy confidence. Not a cocky, irritating self-assurance. I would call it a right view of ourselves, in perspective, with us having value and worth, beneath a God who loves and cares for us.