Prep sports: 'Sondy'

One of my "play for your
neighborhood school"
poster boys, Reed Farley,
now playing for
Harvard.
(Photo by Ed Piper)



By Ed Piper

The more I write about high school sports, the more I appreciate Eric Sondheimer.

When you're in the peanut gallery, not actually doing something, it's easy to take a jaundiced eye at those in the arena who are doing the task day-to-day.

This was my view of the high school sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a publication which I have read regularly since I was in my early teens in Camarillo, California.

Covering prep sports is not considered real glamorous, and gets the poo-poo from others who fancy themselves as more in the limelight by virtue of the fact they cover college or pro sports.

I had people look down on me for covering La Jolla High sports. I remember during the peak years when Lincoln High had basketball star Norman Powell, and a lot of bandwagon riders came into the picture.

One gentleman, otherwise thoroughly likeable, was drawn to the Hornet hoop scene like a firefly to light by the state playoff success of the program. He readily admitted it as he went about his rounds taking video of the Lincoln starlets. He comments reflected an attitude of, "Why do you even bother hanging around a program that isn't as glamorous and doesn't have the star attraction?", meaning the Viking ballers, who always came into a Lincoln-La Jolla game as the underdogs.

Eric Sondheimer has now been the Times' high school point man for a couple of decades. And he writes with a lot of wisdom and common sense, in an arena that more and more resembles a place where the denizens have lost their minds--school-to-school transfers, coaches forcing players to pay them for private coaching if they want to play, idiotic stuff.

The other day Sondheimer had a piece on the drop in attendance at playoff games in the Southern Section (which encompasses a lot of Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties). One of the factors he attributed this decline to is poor matchups.

That rang a bell. With elite school teams grouped in the Open Division of the playoffs, lesser teams fill up the Division 1, 2, 3, and 4 brackets. There aren't enough good school teams to fill all the slots, so even teams with bad losing records qualify for the postseason.

That means that in the early rounds of the playoffs--now I'm bringing it home to the San Diego Section--many of the pairings are lopsided. A good team has to play an opponent that has no business being in the playoffs. They call this playoff competition?

Another factor Sondheimer cited for low attendance is ticket prices. I've always thought those were at fairy-tale levels. Ten dollars for an adult ticket to see your local team play? It's to support the CIF structure and pay the officials. I get it partially, but not totally.

Another new factor, besides the creation of the Open Division, is the sky-rocketing number of transfers. One high school basketball team had four of its five starters last year as new transfers from other schools. What happened to the kids who grew up in the neighborhood? They don't get to play, because we've gone to a pro-like cattle-call system of free agents who you don't recognize from one year to the next?

Stay home, is my motto. Stay home, in the sense of student-athletes (they're still students) playing for their hometown team. Don't transfer. Don't yield to the temptation that so many others do that "the grass is greener on the other side" to enroll elsewhere just so the coach there might give you more playing time.