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Modified Sportsmen race cars and the arrival of the San Diego Chargers may have saved night football in the hills and valleys east of San Diego. An unusual alliance. Grossmont School District teams, faced with an illumination problem, played many games on the infield of the dirt track oval near the Gillespie Field airport from 1958-66. New schools (Mount Miguel, 1957, ...

Madison’s Doton Ogundeji continues to lead state and national shot putters and Mt. Carmel’s Derek Morton has moved in front of California 800-meter runners. Both are expected to take on some of the nation’s best in the annual Arcadia Invitational Friday and Saturday. Ogundeji leads the nation with a throw of 65-4 1/2 and is 10th in ...

Sprints and hurdles times are fully automatic.  Some better marks in parenthesis are hand timed. w–wind aided. BOYS 100— Lucas (Poway), 10.81, Dickens (Grossmont), 10.82, Doan (St. Augustine), 10.84, LeBlanc (University City) 10.88, Brewer (Brawley) 10.90, Dosier (Monte Vista) 10.90, Hennie (San Marcos) 10.94, Miller (Oceanside) 10.95. STATE–Godin (Santa Ana Mater Dei), 10.36.  200— Doan (St. Augustine),  21.76, Lucas ...

Madison’s Doton Ogundeji continues to lead state and national shot putters and Mt. Carmel’s Derek Morton has moved in front of California 800-meter runners. Both are expected to take on some of the nation’s best in the annual Arcadia Invitational Friday and Saturday. Ogundeji leads the nation with a throw of 65-4 1/2 and is 10th in ...

There wasn’t just a millennium going on. Wholesale league changes and the San Diego Section’s second annexation of schools in the Imperial Valley were creating a new landscape. What started in 1980 with the addition of Calipatria, Holtville, and Imperial, was completed after Blythe Palo Verde Valley,  El Centro Central, Brawley, Calexico, El Centro Southwest, and Calexico ...

Madison’s Doton Ogundeji, who made noise in the state meet in 2013, raised the decibel level to a shout  at the Sundevil Invitational Saturday at Mt. Carmel. The all-San Diego Section football linebacker last season took the national lead in the shot put with a 65 foot, 4 ½ inch heave, almost two feet better than ...

La Jolla Country Day’s 60-42 loss to Los Altos Hills Pinewood in the State Girls’ V championship last week was the final, tumbling domino in a disappointing San Diego Section season. Mater Dei Catholic was the only boys’ team to advance beyond the first round of the Southern California Regional and got to the Division II ...

Bill Walton and Larry Blum had more in common than just being among the crowd at the University of San Francisco’s National Invitation Tournament game recently. Both are former San Diego Section basketball players of the year, Blum at Crawford in 1962-63 and Walton at Helix in 1969-70. Blum set a San Diego Section record with 737 ...

It only took 46 years. The population growth of San Diego’s North County coincided with the rise of the once small and remote Avocado League, founded in 1953. After recent years of  ascendancy, a punctuation mark was added this season. As Tom Shanahan of The San Diego Union pointed out: –Five Avocado schools ranked in the top six of ...

Wipeouts like these usually are reserved for the North Shore of Oahu. San Diego Section boys basketball teams lost 10 of 11 games in the first round of the Southern California regional playoffs. Girls teams helped ease the pain and won 6 of 14. In four games in which San Diego boys teams had more favorable seeds their ...

What goes around, comes around. La Costa Canyon, ranked No. 1 in the first UT-San Diego basketball poll in December, is first again after vacating the top spot weeks ago. The Mavericks defeated St. Augustine, 62-60, in the San Diego Section Open Division championship last week and received 10 first-place votes.  St. Augustine dropped to second and Mater Dei, ...

Talk about a kick in the pelvic region.  The new State Basketball Tournament Open Division pairings did no favors for two San Diego Section stalwarts. The seedings and pairings were announced by the state CIF this evening. St. Augustine (28-3) will visit Santa Ana Mater Dei (31-0), the nation’s No. 2-ranked team, Friday night, March 14. Santa Ana ...

St. Augustine and La Costa Canyon, which played arguably the game of the regular season in January, go for the gold tonight. The Saints edged the Mavericks, 79-74, as part of a Martin Luther King Day doubleheader at Francis Parker and things haven’t changed.  Expect the score to be a little lower but the intensity a ...

Kearny High found the key to ending Sweetwater’s great run Saturday afternoon. Coach Carl Bronson, ably assisted by UT-San Diego sportswriter Mark Zeigler, exposed the shorter Red Devils’ lack of a low post defense. The strategy allowed the Komets to repeatedly attack from the low block under the basket for layups and point-blank shots. Kearny took the lead ...

How uncommon is this? When Kearny (23-2) meets Sweetwater (28-0) Friday afternoon the teams will be coached by alumni of their respective schools. At stake will be the San Diego Section Division IV championship. Historian Greg (Stats) Durrant came up with this and other nuggets as the veteran prep sports maven prepared to take in five boys’ and ...

There are 20.8 seconds remaining in the game.  Your team trails, 57-54, after battling back from down 14. A blocking foul is whistled on one of your players. The frustration finally got to Foothills Christian coach Brad Leaf. Leaf channeled his inner Jim Boeheim and was slapped with a technical. The Knights mentor’s outburst at the officials differed from ...

There will be basketball almost every night this week in the San Diego Section. Girls begin quarterfinals play in Divisions II, III, and IV tonight and  Tuesday night.  Boys tip Tuesday night in II, III, and IV. Open semifinals are Tuesday and Wednesday and finals  Saturday at the Jenny Craig Pavilion on the University of San Diego ...

St. Augustine is top-ranked in the final UT-San Diego regular-season poll and is the defending state champion in Division III as playoff teams enter the homestretch of the season. Coach Mike Haupt’s team,  29-4 a year ago, take a 26-2 record into this season’s playoffs and are ranked 18th in the state by Cal-Hi Sports. St. Augustine finished 10th overall ...

Seventeen teams with losing records and three .500 squads  made the San Diego Section playoffs. It doesn’t look as ridiculous as in previous years. Pairings announced Saturday promise good games, even  in early rounds, especially considering size of brackets and number of divisions. Only in Division II is there virtual mediocrity. Seven of the eight, first-round visiting clubs ...

San Diego County was “free” of the giant Southern Section and on its own, twenty-eight schools strong. The formation of the local CIF section pleased administrators and assorted education honchos who wielded the sharp end of the stick. Coaches and most fans were ambivalent. The great competition against Northern schools and the building excitement of playoffs at foreign ...