Prep sports: Supporting our young people

Rick Eveleth, former Viking coach,
athletic director, three-sport athlete
(Photo from partletonsports.com)

By Ed Piper

"It's difficult for student athletes" when they're being pulled different directions, Rick Eveleth, former LJHS basketball coach and athletic director, was saying.

The subject was the present state of youth and high school athletics. It wasn't a "Doomsday" discussion of everything now being "bad", and everything in the old days being "good".

One subject of interest was E.J. Watson, a standout running back for the Vikings football team who was named the CIF Player of the Year on offense in 1991.

"J.M. Tarvin, La Jolla's principal, and Bob Salcido, vice principal, took E.J. under their wing and mentored him. The school as a whole did a lot for him. E.J. was a nice guy. And he is a nice guy to this day. He has a doctorate. I think he has said he is thankful for all the support he got at the school."

This was where the emphasis of the conversation lay--on the availability, extra support, and time for students that was possible when coaches were teachers who were on campus, and young people had access all through the school day to these very caring people who were professional educators.

Eveleth, an all-CIF basketball performer for the Vikings, was one of these people. He began his head coaching career in basketball at La Jolla High in 1971. He was later recognized as a "Coaching Legend" by the San Diego Sports Hall of Fame for his efforts.

Watson came up because the original motivation for the reporter's call was the Vikings' Eastern League championship in football this year, the first for the school in 24 years, dating back to the coaching years of Gene Edwards (1961-1989, when he retired) and Dick "Hud" Huddleston, an assistant coach who then moved into the head coaching spot in 1990-1997.

E.J., whose kid brother Ja'Rod was a classmate of my granddaughter's, Alexis Damond, LJHS Class 2008, led the Vikings to the CIF title game in 1991. I didn't know any of this when I began taking photos of my granddaughter and her fellow cheerleaders at La Jolla football and basketball games in 2004 with a manual SLR film camera and a tiny, slow lens.

The "difficulty" we discussed came front-and-center in Eveleth's story about a member of his basketball team years ago. At a game, a gentleman came up and sat near the coach's location on the bench. He pulled him over, and said, "Coach, you have to start so-and-so (a player on the varsity)." Rick answered, "No, I don't." The man said, "Yes, you do." Rick: "Then you don't know me very well."

The gentleman explained with high anxiety, "I'm handling his dad's investments. If he doesn't start, I'm going to lose him as a client."

I had a similar story. I was told by a fellow attendee at a Cathedral Catholic basketball game a few years ago about the quandary of Brandon McCoy, a five-star seven-footer playing for the Dons. In the stands during the game was the young man's club coach, whom McCoy's mother had signed over guardianship to. On the Don bench was Coach Will Cunningham, doing his job. McCoy, though, didn't know who to listen to, his private coach calling out to him from the stands, or his school coach.

The poor young man, understandably, looked bewildered, as anyone in that spot would be.

And that is one facet of the more professionalized, higher-pressure state of high school athletics in the present age.

Eveleth and this reporter share a kinship in our mutual concern for student athletes who have the normal needs for support, affirmation, a patient listening ear, wise counsel, as well as coaching in the X's and O's. There is much more pressure on them these days, with Hudl highlight videos, international scouting, and the like.