By Ed Piper
While coaching and substitute-teaching at Point Loma over 25 years ago, Dave Jones was instrumental in starting the Beach Cities Invitational tournament, which has grown to be one of the largest high school volleyball tourneys in the region.
The long-time La Jolla High volleyball coach, who also teaches English in the classroom on campus, texts, "I subbed (19)97-99 and coached at LJ in (19)98, then got my teaching contract at Point Loma." Jones, amiable and looked to for direction by his fellow coaches in CIF San Diego Section, then coached for the Pointers from 1999-2001 before moving "back" to LJHS, this time with the teaching contract in Fall 2001.
Through all that time, Dave has seen plenty of change on the court and on campus. But of his "baby", the Beach Cities Invitational, it has grown and grown.
Jones is proud of this fact: "We (La Jolla High boys) are the only team that has won it twice in the 24 years" of the tournament (not convening during COVID in March 2020). The years were 2008 and 2017.
The current Vikings, led by senior setter Adam Grushkevich and Sonny Wiczynski--who are also partners in beach volleyball, which Jones also assists Jay Northrup in coaching--met a tough team in St. John Bosco Saturday morning, March 21, in bracket play on the second day of the tourney, and got smoked 3-0. But that's the way it is in the BCI, drawing top teams from within the area and outside the area.
The first afternoon of play, after school on Friday, the way the Invitational is set up, boys teams play in three-school pools. From that round-robin competition, squads move on to the second day of competition, Saturday, placed in brackets according to Friday's results.
La Jolla was set in a pool including Malibu and Queen Creek, a community south of Phoenix. Teams come from far and wide.
Jones: "I actually grew (the tourney) to 60 teams, but then started shrinking the field purposely, while maintaining the caliber of teams.
"Now my goal is to have 12 of the top local teams and 12 high-level teams from other sections and states."
Jones started the BCI in both girls and boys volleyball way back in the day at Point Loma, then moved them to La Jolla with his teaching move.
"The same name (for both genders) was too confusing when I stopped coaching girls about 15 years ago (when this reporter met Jones). So they still run a similar tournament, but it's not the same."
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The Vikings have quite a star-studded volleyball program, with the girls headed by Kelly Drobeck, a respected and long-time coach, the boys under Jones' tutelage. The girls were lucky to get Drobeck a decade ago when then-Athletic Director Paula Conway (now AD at Bishop's) scooped Kelly up in the aftermath of her dismissal at Cathedral Catholic.
The two coaches represent quality coaching, but in two very distinct streams: Jones has always been vocal in advocating for student-athletes "playing on school teams with their friends". Drobeck represents the talented former athlete (she was an All-CIF performer at "Uni", USDHS, the precursor to Cathedral Catholic) who coaches full-time and serves as a walk-on coach in her specialty sport.
For the sake of clarity, I'll call the one model the "American scholastic" model, the other the "European" system, which is used in most of the rest of the world.
For example, this reporter lived and taught in Mexico City right out of college. I was exposed to a setup of athletic teams divorced from academic institutions, which has the advantage of focusing only on athletic development. The system also has the drawback of not directly encouraging young people to pursue their educations alongside their sports involvement. In a Two-Thirds World country like Mexico, that means that you have talented soccer players, for example, who often don't go past middle school for who don't finish the equivalent of high school.
Another example is the German wrestler who spent a year in America attending La Jolla High and competing for the Vikings' wrestling program. She and her parents were astounded that she could participate in sports linked to the academic institution was attending for her high school matriculation. When she earned her letterman's jacket by competing in enough dual meets and tournaments, she and her mother were overjoyed, sending photos of her in the jacket to family and friends back in Germany.
At present, the state of high school athletics would, kindly, look chaotic, with thousands of transfers between schools occurring at a much higher rate than even five years ago. Some students across the national scene have transferred to four different high schools in four years of competition, thereby compromising any outward intention of pursuing education for education's sake.
Unfortunately, the college situation has helped foster this environment, with the same chaos being passed down to the prep level. In addition, the NIL movement--Name, Image, Likeness--in which an amateur can keep his or her amateur status and still receive money from commercial deals endorsing products has gone way off the rails.
The worst example of a young person trying to deal with the sudden access to millions of dollars features Mikey Williams, a former San Ysidro basketball player, who put four bullets in a Tesla in a fit of jealous rage a handful of years ago outside his own million-dollar abode in Jamul. His lawyer negotiated a plea bargain that kept him out of custody and enabled him to play college ball, though not at Memphis State, where he had been recruited. At last report, he is playing out his eligibility at yet another college, Sonoma State.
