LJ baseball: Plethora of sources

By Ed Piper

From a selfish standpoint, it is refreshing--and overwhelming--to have so much information, intricately detailed, on the 2022 Viking baseball team.

I'm casting no aspersions on other coaches or their programs. But with Gary Frank, the head coach, and his father, Howard Frank, names, year in school, height--everything--are so readily available for us journalists who try to keep abreast of teams' prospects so that we can write intelligently (you make conclude otherwise) about them.

COVID has been a tough experience. I know that. I am sitting in a classroom, as I write this, at Canyon Crest Academy, where we have only been able to sub in person to full classes only in the past month. Prior to two and a half weeks ago, students were still testing positive, being exposed, having to be quarantined. And numbers were still down when several students had been exposed at once.

I had classes back then, both here and at Torrey Pines High, La Costa Canyon High, and other sites (I also sub in the Poway Unified School District, including Rancho Bernardo High, Del Norte High, Poway High, and Mt. Carmel High), in which nine students were absent one period, eight students the next. COVID was trying to die out, but we were still dealing with the Christmas/Holidays exposures in which people just loved infecting one another--I'm using humor here--and a month later individuals were testing positive.

I did a story for the La Jolla Village News, one of my other identities, later in January in which University City High played a game at High Tech High Point Loma in a tiny gym at an elementary school off Rosecrans St. The Centurions were only able to send out seven players, six at the start of warmups. One of the players remarked, "Wow, I'm doing layups among six players!"

It didn't seem to be like any game I had covered before, spanning 50 years, back to working for the Chico Enterprise-Record as a college student and taking for granted that there would be full 15-or-so players for each of the two basketball teams playing that night. I don't take it for granted anymore.

Which is all a long way to say I don't blame any coach for not knowing which of their players, or how many, were going to show up for each game in January and early February. It has been said before by others, the Omicron variant of COVID spreads easily, but it doesn't seem as deadly.

Break into this all the data organizers like Gary Frank and his dad, who are meticulous in keeping track of statistics and the history of the Viking baseball program. They have printed up sheets with every possible record any player or team in the LJHS baseball program could have set.

And one representative of that, if we are naming names, is Brett Volger, a shortstop/third baseman who played varsity all four years at La Jolla and who started the Alumni Game for the alumni against the Vikings Sat,, Feb. 12. He set records for games played, etc. that I have probably not even seen yet. (Maybe I can cite some of Brett's records in a different post.)

I love the photographic side, which I worked on and "perfected" later with my big cameras (Nikon D3, D4, and D5) and lenses (200 mm/f 2.8; 100-400 mm; etc.). But I began as a writer. That has always been the craft I have loved and labored at.

It disturbed a week ago when a Viking student said, "Oh, (on your blog) you post photos." I said, "No, I write stories, too." You see, I have been attending so much events over the winter, and trying to keep up with the COVID restrictions, quarantines, cancelled games, makeup games, etc., that sometimes I have not been able to sit at a computer like now and write up accounts of the games I have attended.

It's enough sometimes just to load my photos on my computer, post those before I run out in the morning at 6:30 a.m. to substitute-teach, and run; then catch my breath, cover another or two events after school, process those photos...

It's easy to get behind. I try to take the battery out of my camera and charge it before I fall in bed; take the charger with battery out of the wall once the green light comes on in the middle of the night in the dark bedroom; put the battery back in my camera; then once I get up the next morning, along with all my other activities to get ready for the day, I rush to the computer where I process all my photos, quickly/often randomly select individual images, lighten or darken them, increase the contrast, and neutralize the green/yellow tint I am getting to post useable photos.

Again, in the midst of this ongoing dynamic in the context of everyday life, I love and am very grateful for the more information I can get.