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Only a team more than 400 hundred miles away and in another state could stop coach Dewey (Mike) Morrow’s powerful San Diego Hillers. The also named Cavemen dropped three of four games in a home-and-home series with Arizona’s Tucson Badgers but bludgeoned 29 teams from Southern California and won Morrow’s 10th Southern Section championship. According to Don ...

RATINGS GAME The San Diego Union-Tribune poll.  First-place points in parenthesis.  Points on 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 basis. RANK TEAM RECORD POINTS LAST WEEK 1. St. Augustine (11) 10-6 145 1 2. San Marcos (4) 8-3 139 2 3. Torrey Pines (1) 10-4 115 3 4. Cathedral (2) Catholic 13-5 97 4 5. Mission Hills (1) 11-5 96 6 6. Mission Bay 12-4 88 5 7. San Ysidro 11-5 76 7 8. La Costa Canyon 10-4 66 8 9 Mater Dei 8-3 19 9 10. San Diego 9-2 18 10 OTHERS RECEIVING VOTES Carlsbad (9-7, 6 points), La Jolla Country Day (9-3, 4), Del Norte (13-4, 3), Montgomery (12-2, 2), Scripps Ranch (12-5, 2), ...

Grossmont’s Southern California Minor Division football championship for schools with less than 1,000 students was achieved following a series of competitive and administrative tug of wars. Coach Ladimir (Jack) Mashin’s Foothillers defeated Calexico High, 9-0, on the Grossmont gridiron to complete an 8-0-3 season that included a championship in the San Diego County League. With a 4-0-2 ...

Lucky Sutton became one the 10 highest single-season scorers in San Diego County history this season. Sutton’s 40 touchdowns for 240 points tied the Cathedral senior and San Diego State-bound running back for ninth with Imperial’s Royce Freeman, who also scored 240 in 2011. Sutton played in 13 games and was deprived of a 14th when Cathedral ...

The thinclads were so good that several made national lists. Roscoe Cook of San Diego High held the national record in the 100-yard dash, if only for a few days.  Mission Bay’s Jim Cerveny came close to the national record in the 880-yard run. Bobby Staten, Jim Wade, Luther Hayes, Ed Buchanan, and Dick Verdon also made ...

Scripps Ranch Coach Marlon Gardinera would have been in the spotlight on every college, NFL pregame or postgame show. But Gardinera’s gutsy (crazy?) move did not go “national”, instead raising eyebrows and begging comment on a level just as significant to all involved. Gardinera decided to “relax” his defense and allow Santa Clara Wilcox to score a ...

The top four teams in won-loss percentage in the County were San Diego (25-3, .880), Helix (16-5, .762), Mission Bay (17-6, .737), and Hoover (19-9, .679). It was the latter that battled through four rounds of the CIF Southern Section playoffs to get to the finals. Hoover was an uninspiring 10-8 heading into the stretch run of ...

What does it mean when an unprecedented five different teams receive first-place votes in John Maffei’s latest The San Diego Union poll? It could mean that area hoops are mediocre, at best, this year. No team stands out and the usual powers have done little to get excited about. Or could it be Covid, which won’t go ...

The first The San Diego Union-Tribune basketball poll has a couple old reliables, St. Augustine (6-1) and Torrey Pines (7-0 after a 70-57 win over Santa Fe Christian last night, after the poll was completed) at the top. St. Augustine’s only loss was to Chatsworth Sierra Canyon, 51-46, in a game  the Saints led, 33-27, after ...

Cathedral, Mater Dei and Scripps Ranch will seek state championships this week in games that are ranked tossups.  All games Friday and Saturday will be at Mission Viejo Saddleback College. Cathedral (11-2) will get an opportunity to reverse a 21-14 loss in 2018 to Folsom (11-3).  Folsom is eighth in the weekly Cal-Hi Sports poll, Cathedral ...

The teams in the Southern California Division 6-AA playoffs tonight play the long game. The Quartz Hill Royals (9-4), located 70 miles north of Los Angeles and on the upper edge of the Southern Section boundary, will travel almost 250 miles, a distance not  unfamiliar to their opponent, Blythe Palo Verde Valley. The Yellow jackets have represented ...

Resurgent Patrick Henry, 19-9 in three seasons under coach J.T. O’Sullivan and 10-2 in 2021, takes on visiting Lake Balboa Birmingham Saturday night in the Southern California Division III-A playoffs. San Diego Section schools don’t often play those from the Los Angeles City Section, usually only in postseason matchups such as this. Birmingham (8-5), which has the ...

Scripps Ranch and the rubber will hit the road Saturday for a 6 p.m. game in the Southern California Division II-A playoffs at Santa Clarita Valencia, 160 miles away. Coach Marlin Gardinera’s team,  11-1 and averaging 44 points after a 42-0 win over La Jolla in the San Diego Section finals last week, are on a ...

The CIF came up with an unusual pairing this week: teams representing the same section and which should have intimate knowledge. Intimate knowledge was denied, because COVID canceled a Highlanders-Crusaders match in Week 3. There is shared common knowledge, however. Mater Dei defeated Otay Ranch, 41-7, and St. Augustine, 35-0. Helix beat the former, 29-14, and the ...

Cathedral has won its last two Southern California Division I-AA playoff games, 35-28 in 2016 and 24-21 in 2018, each time at home against Harbor City Narbonne. In attempting to win a third the Dons will head 70 miles North Friday to play Orange Lutheran, a four-loss team that was fifth in its league, at Orange ...

We’re on holiday, in the process of enriching the Las Vegas economy, so this will be short, in more ways than one. This week’s fearless, if not peerless, Division I-V predictions: D-I, Lincoln 31, Helix 20.  Can’t go against my alma mater. D-II, Scripps Ranch 38, La Jolla 35. I live in the community of three million eucalyptus ...

I went out on a very unstable limb last week and crashed. Picking Torrey Pines to beat Carlsbad and Mission Hills to knock off Cathedral not only was ill-advised but was punctuated with an in-your-face (mine) combined, 82-17 score  by the winning teams. Now we have a championship that brings together two clubs representing, on paper, the ...

The Cavers were out of sorts. San Diego High finished with an 18-8 record, its poorest since the 17-10 of 1950, and the Cavers lost four games in a row down the stretch to fall out of City Prep League and playoff contention. According to Don King’s Caver Conquest, the athletic history of the school, the streak ...

Round two of the San Diego Section playoffs offer quarterfinals in Divisions I-V and semifinals in the  Open Division. The four clubs in the highest bracket, beginning play after a week off:  4 TORREY PINES (6-3) @1 CARLSBAD (10-0) The Falcons get another shot at the unbeaten Lancers, a team Torrey Pines had on the ropes, 33-27, only ...

Track and field made a  leap with multiple outstanding performances in several events. All five area qualifiers scored points in the greatest state meet in history, witnessed by about 4,500 persons on a 100-degree day in Chico. —Coach Raleigh Holt’s Hoover Cardinals won another City Prep League championship with depth in every race, jump, and throw, ...