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Four outstanding athletes who graced the San Diego sports scene were among those who passed in the past months. HORACE TUCKER He was late reporting for football practice at San Diego High in 1952, because Tucker and teammate Floyd Robinson were involved with the American Legion Post 364 baseball team that was runner-up to a Cincinnati squad ...

San Diego continued to impress; coaches moved on leaders in all-time victories, and St. Augustine rebounded. San Diego improved to 7-0 with a 34-7 over Kearny, which took a 6-0 record into the game, as big, fast Raiden Hunter rushed for 270 yards in 17 carries and scored two touchdowns. An impressive Central League turnout of about ...

The dateline said San Diego, not somewhere in the High Sierra or North Dakota. Snow had forced postponement of two games. In the dead of winter a couple high school basketball contests in San Diego County were called off because of the flaky white stuff. Southern Prep League games sending Brown Military to Mountain Empire in Campo and ...

There was no Week 6 blog, with the attendant rankings from The San Diego Union, because we were celebrating my beautiful bride’s birthday on a seven-day cruise south, along the Mexican Riviera. I had a fat attack, unable to resist the relentless, daily, gastronomic temptations. There are several interesting games this week, two in particular:  San ...

Twelve former San Diego Section stars made the 32-team NFL rosters of 1,693 players at the start of the 2017 season. Thirteen made the list in 2016 and 15 in 2015. Helix was one of 40 schools with 3 players active.  St. Thomas Aquinas of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had 12, followed by Long Beach Poly with 7, ...

Opinions are like a certain area of the anatomy.  Most of us have one. The opinion of Scouts.com, which maintains a running list of  who’s who in high school football and who is being recruited by whom, is that the following table is indicative of the probable 10 best players in the San Diego Section. The table ...

How significant is 4-0? Depends on your perspective. Nice, but, hey, we’re used to being there, would be the reaction from Mission Hills, Calexico Vincent Memorial, Christian, Crawford, El Centro Southwest, San Marcos, and Calvin Christian. All of those teams have reached the above juncture at least once since 2013. Madison, La Costa Canyon, and El Centro Central have ...

San Diego was leaving the Southern Section at the end of the school year but was going out with an unprecedented show of force. Hoover was ranked No. 1 and Helix No. 2 in seeding for the 32-team major playoffs.  Glendale, beaten by both Hoover and San Diego, was seeded fourth. Hoover’s undefeated regular season and the ...

Seldom was a defeat as disappointing as that which knocked out Hoover in the semifinals of San Diego’s swansong in the CIF Southern Section playoffs. The Cardinals sustained a numbing, 39-34 loss to Anaheim in the round of  four in a season when they were unbeaten for 26* straight games. Coach Charlie Hampton had returned several key ...

Baby steps to others are leaps and bounds at San Diego High. Save for a 13-8-2 record by the Keir Kimbrough-coached squads in 2010 and 2011, the Cavers have endured stretches of apathy and losses that extend into the misty past. San Diego is 32-109-3 since 2002 and have had 12 winning seasons in the last 48, ...

Palm Springs defeated Scripps Ranch, 42-35, in two overtimes and Army-Navy’s topped Perris Military, 21-20, in one overtime last week. Both of those game results presumably were more easily reached than the first in 1976. That was the year of imposition of the new “California Tie-Breaker”. As noted by Steve Brand, The San Diego Union representative who covered ...

Too early for trends, but Cathedral’s defending state 1-AA champion has some catching up to do and Helix is positioning itself to make a run such as the Dons’ in 2016. The Highlanders, preseason ranked 12th in Cal-Hi Sports’ overview, eased to a 35-0 victory over Utah’s No. 15 West Herriman, and moved up to 10th ...

Enriched by the transfer from St. Augustine of running back-defensive back Isaac Taylor Stuart (a four- or five star recruit, according to  grading services), coach Robbie Owens’ Helix Highlanders begin the season as the No. 1 team in the San Diego Section, according to the 28-member Union-Tribune voting panel. The Scots, 10-3 a year ago, received 19 first-place ...

Name Hoover’s starting five in 1959-60 and Johnny (Bo) Williams probably would be the fifth to come to mind. But Williams, a 6-foot, 1-inch guard, was an effective offensive player (269 points in 27 games) and outstanding defender for arguably the finest San Diego-area team before Bill Walton and Helix arrived a decade later. Williams, 75, passed ...

David Grayson, who retired before the 1971 NFL season as one of the pro game’s all-time defensive backs, passed away recently at age 78. Grayson intercepted 48 passes from 1961-70 in the American Football League and NFL as a member of the Dallas Texans, Kansas City Chiefs, and Oakland Raiders. The 5-foot, 10-inch, 187-pounder with sprinter speed ...

They have been cast in the 6-foot, 11-inch shadow of Bill Walton and Helix’ 33-0 team of 1969-70. History has overlooked the Mount Miguel clubs that dominated the Grossmont League and San Diego Section in the late 1960s. The Matadors were 25-6 in 1966-67 and 32-0 this season. But coach Dick Ridgway’s squad did not embrace an intersectional ...

Who would have thought a team that started the season with a 1-8 record and finished 10-10 would be celebrated? Hats off to the Sweetwater Red Devils. An eighth loss in nine games was where coach Wells Gorman’s team stood on January 6, 1957, after a 55-50, Metropolitan League, opening-game loss at Helix. But that score against Helix, ...

Coronado paid an old debt. Hoover’s playoff advance was halted at the foul line. Merrill Douglas ended a great run at San Diego High. Lincoln showed that patience had virtue. —John Kovac was a football coach who happened to come along at the right basketball time at Coronado. The dour Kovac without prompting often recalled that he coached future professional ...

A decidedly thin year in San Diego Section track and field ended on a promising note in the 99th state meet at Clovis over the weekend. Sophomore Karson Lippert, who came into the season with a best of: 49.77 as a freshman in the 400, crashed the big stage and will be billed as one of ...

CLOVIS–11 boys and 8 girls from the San Diego Section qualified yesterday for tonight’s 99th state track and field championships at Buchanan High. Six, all-time County top 15 performances came amid gusty winds and a temperature in the high nineties when competition began at 5 p.m. The breezes eventually eased and the thermometer had gradually cooled to the low eighties ...