LJ baseball: Tryouts Feb. 8

By Ed Piper

Tryouts for the La Jolla High baseball team start this Sat., Feb. 8. The Alumni Game follows on the next Sat., Feb. 15. The season is almost upon us.

"This is the first time in my 26 years here that the winter sports and spring sports regular seasons overlap," said Gary Frank, beginning his 16th year as head coach, the longest tenure in the history of the school since its founding in 1922.

That tight non-window presents certain challenges: Frank and his assistants will be carrying on tryouts while some athletes, still occupied with their winter teams, will not be able to participate initially. "We're going to have to figure out some kind of multiple tryouts," the former All-CIF second baseman said last week.

Many, even most, of the spots on the 2020 varsity squad are already spoken for, in this sportswriter's unofficial charting of returning players from last year's varsity. Several, even most, of those took part in last summer's American Legion program in which the Viking team (not affiliated with the school, named after a fighter plane by the sponsoring American Legion) made it into the postseason playoffs. So there is a lot of stability in the program.

The annual Alumni Game, played on Ronnie Spellman Field, is always a special event, featuring many returning players of the past.

Never, though, in recent memory has the game been scheduled so early in the late winter. Often in previous years, the game was played on or around March 1.

A seismic shift is occurring with the big push for state playoffs in football and every other sport. The baseball coaches from San Diego CIF recently voted against instituting regional and state playoffs in 2021. Southern Section also opposed the motion. However, there was enough support across the state's other 11 or so sections to pass the motion.

Frank, discussing this, said part of the challenge with playoffs reaching up to the state level is the time it takes to play those games--into the end of May, preparations for graduation, and so forth. Already, without baseball playoffs instituted, the Viking football game played its first real game in the middle of August a year ago. The slate of months for the three sports seasons--fall, winter, and spring--had to be expanded somewhere, and the end of the summer was where the expansion started.

Unfortunately, even with week one of football pushed back to Aug. 24 or so this past season, the Vikings were playing a game before students had even begun classes for the school year. That means zero spirit-building, lower attendance the first week... Aren't interscholastic athletics intended to involve students, including non-players, in healthy, positive activities like attending extracurricular sports events played by their classmates?

Anyway, Frank will have a seasoned team returning to the "Jewel Diamond". Shortstop Noah Brown, his throwing arm fully healed, will be transitioning from soccer. Leftfielder Calvin Hyytinen, ditto. (He was named First Team All-Eastern League in football.) There are others.