DOWNSIDE TO RUNNING IT UP : In Girls Basketball, No One Wins When Score Is Lopsided

“I looked at the clock and there was 3:37 left and the score was 94-6. I turned to my assistant, Tony Matson, and I said, ‘God, I don’t want us to break 100 in our first game. What should we do, hold the ball?’

“Tony turns to me, smiles and says, ‘Coach, that’s 3 minutes 37 seconds left in the THIRD quarter.’ ”

--Jeff Sink, Brea Olinda girls’ basketball coach, recalling a 137-10 victory over Ontario Chaffey in 1994

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When Jeff Sink went to his office after that 127-point victory--the largest in Orange County history in boys’ or girls’ basketball--there were three anonymous messages on his answering machine. None was very nice. They accused him of trying to make a reputation for himself at Chaffey’s expense.

“And nothing could be further from the truth,” Sink said.

But it underscores a point. Blow out a team, appear to run up a score, and people notice. The accusations can fly pretty freely.

Blowouts can be found throughout the girls’ basketball season. They are less common in boys’ basketball, which, unlike the girls, doesn’t have a 30-second shot clock.

Girls’ basketball also seems especially vulnerable to lopsided scores because tournaments pit the best teams against the worst as a part of the seeding process. That’s the reason Brea played Chaffey in Sink’s first game as the school’s coach.

In last year’s Southern Section playoffs, with three teams qualifying from each league, there were 11 games decided by 50 points or more, and 10 decided by 40. It even happened in the state playoffs, where three games were decided by 50-plus points, and five by 40-plus.

John Hattrup, who coached Brea Olinda during its undefeated state championship season in 1993-94 and is now at Westlake, was accused of running it up while at Brea and while at Mission Viejo in the 1980s. There, his team beat Santa Ana Saddleback, 63-3, in the 1980-81 season.

Hattrup, who taught at Saddleback High while coaching Mission Viejo, says he caught a couple of Saddleback players sneaking cigarettes in the locker room before tip-off.

“We had a couple of [Mission Viejo] kids injured and I made them play so I could take my starters out,” Hattrup said. “They [Saddleback] were horrendous. We played a zone defense the entire time. We were averaging more than 63 points per game. It’s hardly like we ran up the score.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, someone is going to find something wrong with it. People say, ‘Oh, you scarred those kids for life.’ Those [Saddleback] kids couldn’t care less. ‘Here, let me put out my cigarette and shoot a couple.’ ”

The three points given up by Mission Viejo were the county record until Liberty Christian of Huntington Beach recorded a 63-2 victory over Huntington Beach Claremont last month. Six days after that game, Claremont lost to Connelly, 85-4.

Those outcomes represent the dichotomy of the blowout, at least for Claremont Coach Brian Whitman. Liberty Christian slowed the game and Whitman had no problem with the one-sided score. He wasn’t nearly as understanding about Connelly, which scored, quarter by quarter, 23, 22, 21 and 19 points.

Claremont didn’t field a team last year. Against Connelly, only six players suited up.

“This coach [Jett Del Mundo] ran a full-court press in the fourth quarter,” Whitman said. “He ran the first team throughout the game. At the end, his first-string kids were still going into the game. My kids are all freshmen and have no experience. Unless the guy was an utter moron, he knew the game was over.”

Del Mundo’s response?

Connelly played with nine players. Del Mundo said he fielded his tallest team--without a point guard--in the third quarter, his shortest team in the fourth. And after two very hard fourth-quarter fouls on attempted layups--intentional fouls, he said--Del Mundo told his players to use a full-court press for two possessions, just to drive home the point that he had been trying to take it easy on Claremont.

Bill Clark, Southern Section assistant commissioner, said there was an alternative: “Games in any sport can be stopped at any point by mutual consent of the coaches.”

In one of the most controversial games in state history, South Torrance Coach Gil Ramirez didn’t wait for mutual consent before pulling his team off the court of a lopsided loss to Inglewood Morningside in February 1990.

In that game, Morningside’s Lisa Leslie was fed the ball repeatedly in an attempt to break the national single-game scoring record of 105 points established by Cheryl Miller of Riverside Poly in January 1982. Leslie scored 101 points in one half--16 minutes--in a 102-24 victory.

Ramirez, no longer South Torrance’s coach, refused to put his players on the court in the second half. He was promptly suspended by the Southern Section office for breaking its rules on sportsmanship.

The story made headlines and Leslie, who later went on to star at USC, was thrust into the national spotlight. Although she did fall short of Miller’s record, Leslie did ask Ramirez to play the game long enough so she could score three more baskets. He denied her request.

Morningside was back in the national spotlight last year after defeating Beverly Hills, 120-3. The press turned out en masse at Beverly Hills High the day after the game to see how such a prominent school could get beaten so decisively.

With her players already embarrassed by the score and upset over the attention given to it, Beverly Hills Coach Tere Curle asked her players not to comment and administrators asked reporters to leave the campus.

“These are a bunch of hard-working girls, and tearing them down doesn’t do much good,” Curle said. “When teenagers’ self-esteem is involved, I think running the score up like that is highly unethical. I hated to see that done to my kids.”

Many coaches, though, are conscientious about not running up the score.

“Last year in the Woodbridge tournament, we played Rancho Alamitos, and they probably shouldn’t have been in that tournament at all,” Huntington Beach Edison Coach Dave White said. “The score was about 25-2 in the first quarter and Marie Philman had 20 points. She didn’t play the rest of the game. Marie could have scored a hundred points.

“If you set [a record] against a good team, that’s one thing, but I don’t believe in setting records against teams that you’re beating by 30. I’m a believer in winning and losing with class, and what goes around comes around.”

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The overall level of play has improved since girls’ basketball was sanctioned as a high school sport in 1974. The Southern Section had only one divisional championship game in ‘74, but last year had 10.

The four most lopsided girls’ basketball games in state history were set between 1980 and ’82. Three of those games involved Riverside Poly, where Miller attended. Miller, one of the sport’s best players ever, scored her record 105 points in a 179-15 victory over Riverside Norte Vista in 1982.

As competition has increased, the lopsided scores have become less frequent. But they still exist.

Just ask Anaheim Magnolia players, who have taken their share of lumps this season. The Sentinels lost their best player, Stacy Tewell, three games into the season because of a broken hand, and another sat out December because of commitments to her church.

Magnolia lost consecutive games at the Garden Grove Bolsa Grande tournament by 84, 63 and 86 points to San Clemente, Newport Harbor and Huntington Beach. Point differential determined who played for first, third and fifth place, leading to the big scores.

But Magnolia Coach Marian Mendoza said most coaches were “pretty compassionate,” especially Huntington Beach and Newport Harbor, which at one point led, 60-0.

“The coach from Huntington Beach [Bill Thompson] called me for a week apologizing,” Mendoza said.

Imelda Ortiz, a junior who is captain of the Magnolia team, said blowouts can be a little bothersome. “We get a lot of negative feedback from the other students--I think it’s just teasing. It’s not that it’s mean-spirited, but it sometimes bothers me. You just have to ignore it.”

Times staff writer Eric Shepard contributed to this story.

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Blowouts

Widest winning margins for high school girls’ basketball games in California:

164--Riverside Poly (179) vs. Riverside Norte Vista (15), 1982

127--Brea Olinda (137) vs. Ontario Chaffey (10), 1994

126--Riverside Poly (137) vs. Norte Vista (11), 1981

124--San Bernardino (145) vs. Apple Valley (21), 1981

120--Riverside Poly (132) vs. Riverside Ramona (12), 1980

117--Inglewood Morningside (120) vs. Beverly Hills (3), 1996

115--Riverside Poly (126) vs. Norte Vista (11), 1980

115--Walnut Creek Contra Costa Christian (120) vs. S.F. French American (5), 1992

114--Sacramento El Camino (129) vs. Sacramento (15), 1994