Prep BB: Silva

By Ed Piper

The Tony Clark saga was something that occurred before my time living in San Diego. I moved here from points north in 1993 (during the Padres Fire Sale--a nightmare in itself).

Tony Clark was a superstar baseball and basketball player from San Diego, who went on to Major League stardom with the Detroit Tigers. The Christian High graduate, who played at the University of Arizona and San Diego State, is now Executive Director of the baseball players' union.

In Fall 1989, after leading the county in scoring in basketball with 29.3 points per game, the high school senior transferred from Valhalla High to Christian High in East County. His former coach at Valhalla, Manny Silva, told the Los Angeles Times that "there was unethical recruiting" (L.A. Times Dec. 21, 1989), as did the school's principal, Bob Avant.

Meanwhile, Tony's dad, Art Clark, told the newspaper that he and his wife wanted their son in a Christian atmosphere and with coaching they saw as more suitable for their son. He didn't specify what his complaints with the Valhalla coaches were.

So, brouhaha erupted. Clark went on to average 43.7 points per game at Christian High, which was a tiny Division 5 school at the time.

Well, I had to go to the Internet to find all this out. My introduction to Manny Silva was the following.

Before La Jolla's opening game in the Hilltop Invitational Friday afternoon, Dec. 1, a man dressed in dress shirt and slacks sat at the near end of the stands inside the Hilltop High gym. It was 3:45 p.m., and with the Vikings-RBV game not slated to tip off until 4:30, hardly a soul was in the gym.

I walked toward this gray-haired gentleman and stuck my hand out in friendly style. After all, at December basketball tournaments, this is what people do: meet and greet. Share basketball stories. Enjoy the atmosphere. It's a wonderful time to reconnect with basketball enthusiasts you know, and hear stories from new basketball people.

"I'm Manny Silva. Do you know who I am?" the man said.

"No, I don't. I didn't grow up in San Diego. I moved here later," I replied.

"Manny Silva." He repeated his name. "I coached at Marian Catholic, Monte Vista, and finished up at Valhalla."

"Oh, Marian Catholic. I know that school." (I taught in the juvenile court schools in the South Bay, so I became familiar with the area.) After he told me more about his coaching, I asked him, "Why did Marian Catholic move and become Mater Dei?"

Silva: "I was in the Archdiocese of San Diego for 11 years. A priest gets promoted and becomes a monsignor. A monsignor gets promoted and becomes an archbishop. An archbishop becomes a cardinal."

I nodded, since I taught a year and a half in a Catholic parochial high school in Oxnard, Santa Clara High. "Right."

"The bishop changed," he went on. "The bishop made a promise to Mother Mary." So, with the relocation, Marian Catholic's name was changed to Mater Dei, which means "Mother of God".

It turns out that Silva, retired as a head basketball coach, is now an assistant at Hilltop High to one of his former players, Luke Kelley, now the head coach of the Lancers. Kelley, with distinctive facial hair, was busy showing teams arriving for the tournament to their respective dressing rooms.

I told the retired coach that I recently interviewed Terri Bamford, the girls coach at La Jolla Country Day School. "Great coach," he said.

He went on. "You know, Kelsey Plum (who played at LJCDS) was quite a player."

"I read that she is having a tough rookie season in the WNBA," I said. She set the NCAA career scoring record at Stanford last season.

"She isn't real big," he said. "The gay thing is a big thing. That was a big thing in women's basketball. Basketball is 80 percent mental, so you have to have the mental part taken care of to play well. It's different for women."

I said that Candice Wiggins, also a Country Day alumna, gave harassment of straight players by lesbian players in the WNBA as one of her reasons for retiring from the pro league.

Silva told me he grew up in Point Loma, where he has since moved back to, and he attended St. Augustine. In addition to coaching at Marian Catholic, Monte Vista, and Valhalla, he also taught at Rose of Lima, a small school in Chula Vista. Also, according to online information, he is "the only male teacher ever employed" at St. Agnes School, a Catholic school in Point Loma.

The basketball coach was inducted into the Crusader Hall of Fame (for his coaching at Marian Catholic from 1972-1977 and serving as athletic director 1970-1971) in 2010.

Silva is "the most successful basketball coach in Valhalla history," according to East County Sports (Jan. 29, 2011). He coached boys and girls in his various coaching stints.

An L.A. Times article from Jan. 6, 1988 describes Silva taking his Valhalla team to play games in Texas and Louisiana. He told the reporter that at a restaurant near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, his players ate "alligator and crawfish," and, "I think they liked it."

A player came up to the coach and the two embraced. The Hilltop player checked in with his assistant coach.

With the Viking-Longhorn tipoff nearing, I bid my adieu. "Manny Silva. Remember, my name is Manny Silva," he said as we parted.