By Ed Piper
We learned a few things from the La Jolla-El Capitan summer league basketball game at Grossmont High Thurs., July 13:
--The girls basketball team at El Cap goes by "The Stampede". I suppose this is an alternative to the school mascot, which is the Vaquero. How do you make a female cowboy? That's a cowgirl, but not something in the East County school's nomenclature, apparently.
--Sina Anae can block shots and generally create some problems for the tall girls playing against La Jolla. Sina, as everyone knows from her forays into softball and basketball, is athletic. She just hasn't practiced ball skills much.
Her blocks against the Stampede big girls came flat-footed, and she still created jam-ups. She can improve her footwork as she gains more experience on the court.
With the Vikings playing their last summer game, what can we say about the state of the union at this point?
Coach Darice Carnaje said earlier this week that things are "better than last summer". That's a hopeful sign. Her team was able to break the press a few times in the Monday game against Otay Ranch.
The girls had the fire Wednesday, but the only thing that is going to make them better individually and collectively is more time invested in improving their skills in dribbling, passing, practicing the right position defensively, and practicing their free throws and shooting.
These things don't happen magically or by osmosis. When I was a baller at age 17, I carried a basketball with me as I hitch-hiked from Occidental College to my family's home in Camarillo 55 miles away every weekend during the spring quarter of my freshman year in college.
I dribbled whenever I could. I lay on my back on my bed working on the rotation of the ball coming off my fingers on my shot. There is no substitute for the time spent in working on these skills.
There is a direct correlation between the time spent practicing, and results.
You can see it when you watch a basketball player (or for that matter, an athlete in another sport) doing their sport.
So, everyone on La Jolla's team needs to put in time on their own, or request help in addition to formal practice time. Otherwise, they will continue to face juggernauts--you can look up the better girls teams these days--and be challenged to stay up with girls on opposing teams who play on club and travel teams.
It's great that girls who have never played the sport go out and participate with their friends on their school team. That is what high school sports are for.
On the other hand, if a girl--boys, same thing--wants to see steady improvement, and hopes for classmates to come out to games to watch them during the regular season, they're probably going to have to work diligently on increasing their basketball I.Q., ball-handling, shooting, and defense.
Only family members are going to be nice enough to say "Good job" when their daughter has played with energy and tried her best--with no other time investment put in than formal team practice and games.
To draw classmates and the greater student body to root for the team, you're going to have to be realistic and realize that they would much rather see a team that is making visible steps of progress and improvement, and whose team members are willing to do more than "give it the old college try".
In my experience, this is more of an issue in girls sports than boys sports. Boys tend to play pickup ball and practice shooting even when their team does not have formal practices. Girls, though their sports involvement is light years beyond where it was in 1972, the first year of Title IX mandating equal opportunities in federally-supported activities, are still socialized from a young age more in the social graces and avenues that are more traditionally "feminine".
You see girls and women jogging along the road in a way you never saw in 1972, when I was early in my college years and Title IX was on the horizon about to begin a cataclysmic change in girls and women in sports.
Fast-forward to high school sports in 2017, and the reality is that Carnaje's varsity, as it has her first two years coaching at La Jolla, is going to face teams next winter that are populated with club-experienced ballplayers.
At this point, to my knowledge, none of the girls on the Viking squad--they're all great people, I've met most or all of them--plays on a non-school basketball team.
That is the rub.
Petra Eaton is a county record-holder in track. That's her number-one sport. Skyla Loux puts the shot and throws the discus in track. That's at least tied for her number-one sport, I'm thinking. Rebecca Saul only plays basketball, to the best of my knowledge, but I could be wrong.
The three girls coming up from last year's junior varsity who played Monday and Wednesday in the Grossmont league are inexperienced, pretty new to the sport of basketball.
Probably Katrina "Kat" Kurtchi, besides Saul, identifies the most as a basketball player. She wears the leggings, she seems to thrive on and live for hoops.
If that becomes more contagious, that can only help the girls basketball program. I wish them all the best, and I look forward to the regular season next December 1.
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