LJ winter sports: Where we are

By Ed Piper, Jr.


Where we are beginning the latter third of January is appropriate to ponder, considering the time to write afforded by the heavy rains that are going on outside, as well as the big chunk of the winter league sports season already under our belts.


In this day and age, we're pretty fortunate to have artificial turf fields to play our sports on. La Jolla High's soccer teams can continue to fulfill the obligations of their schedules, even with the recent rains and expected continuance thereof.


Back in the day, at Camarillo High, we would have been hard pressed to play on the natural grass fields we had grown up with and didn't know could be otherwise in weather like this. (The Houston Astrodome's artificial grass wasn't commonly used by the time I graduated from high school in 1971.)


It would have been too water-logged and sloshy, creating immense mud slogs. I can picture our JV baseball diamond with this much rain--it would have been unusable for a couple of days after the rains, until it could drain a little.


But baseball is a spring sport, and soccer had not moved much beyond being an AYSO youth sport since the youth soccer organization was established in 1964 in not-too-distant Torrance, in greater Los Angeles. We didn't yet have school soccer teams yet in CIF.


I digress, but it's worth the telling: Our family's foreign exchange student from Rio, Frederico, a capable soccer player, had to suffer through playing his favorite sport in physical education classes at my high school. He would come home from school and say that it was miserable, getting kicked in the shins by all the (American) kids who didn't yet know how to play the sport.


Anyway, La Jolla's boys basketball team is going to try to put things back together in an Eastern League contest at Patrick Henry tonight, Fri., Jan. 20. Reed Farley is suffering from a tender left shoulder he dislocated last week--his first time ever dislocating the limb, according to his father. And Charlie Gal suffered what looked like a high ankle sprain in the win last Friday at home over Madison. (His mom shared a screen capture from her game video of poor Charlie's twister. It didn't look like fun.)


Both Farley and Gal sat out the Wed., Jan. 18 nonleague game at Orange Glen, when the Vikings' severely truncated lineup went down to a sizeable 71-39 defeat. The Diaz brothers, whom Reed knows, were effective in building a big lead as the game progressed, especially in the second half.