Difficult Choices for Fans, Coaches

When he was growing up, Scott Hamilton looked forward to attending the Tournament of Champions basketball tournament. Hamilton got a chance to see good high school basketball teams from Orange County, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and Santa Barbara.

And when Hamilton grew up and became basketball coach at Servite, he was proud to bring his team to the Tournament of Champions as a participant. Sometimes there were big losses to tough teams in the games played at Ocean View High, but those games were a measuring stick and a way to broaden the experiences his team would have during a season.

Until this year.

This year, Servite is playing in the new Edison International Holiday Basketball Festival at the Anaheim Convention Center. Sixteen Orange County teams were invited to play in the sparkling Convention Center across the street from Disneyland. Big venue, fancy locker rooms.

A day of practice before the tournament began was all the teams were given--an hour of public display, just like they do at the NCAA regionals and Final Four.

It was, Hamilton says he decided, what his kids would like, to play in this big-time place. It was, Hamilton thought, what he would have enjoyed when he was a high school player.

“But it’s not like I wouldn’t want to play in the Tournament of Champions either,” Hamilton says. “It’s a great tournament and it was a tough decision.”

The Tournament of Champions and the Edison International Festival have been going on, head-to-head, a full-court press of high school basketball this week. It is tradition versus a new venture loaded with good intentions and lofty causes.

How to choose? What to choose?

Jim Harris, the coach at Ocean View and director of the Tournament of Champions, says that in the case of his tournament and the Edison International event, it’s a pretty clear choice.

“We offer the stronger competition,” Harris says, “and the Edison offers the chance to play in the big arena.”

Tom Danley, Katella’s coach and also director of the Anaheim Prep Sports and Activities Foundation, had been percolating the idea of this Edison International tournament for several years. His idea is that the tournament will raise funds for the foundation.

The foundation has been established to raise money to help sustain after-school activities--activities like sports--at the junior high level, where budget cutting has forced programs to be slashed.

Last year, Danley said, he sent letters to 40 Orange County schools asking if they’d be interested in playing in a 16-team, all-Orange County tournament. “I got 30 positive answers,” Danley says.

The city of Anaheim cooperated by providing the Convention Center rent-free for five days. It wasn’t his intention to go head-to-head with the Tournament of Champions. “It was just a matter of when we could get the Convention Center.”

Harris says he has no hard feelings and that Danley told him the conflict wasn’t intentional.

“But yes,” Harris says, “it has hurt us a little. Mostly in the area of publicity. We aren’t getting any. All the attention is going to the new tournament. But we only lost one school that has been playing here: Servite.”

“There are so many tournaments out there,” Hamilton says, his words marked with a sigh. “Everybody has a tournament it seems like.”

Indeed, there are at least four other tournaments going on this week for boys’ high school teams and four more for girls’ teams.

Just as is happening with the colleges, every year there seems to be another classic, festival, showcase or just plain tournament. At the college level, it is often TV programmers behind the formation of events like the Great Eight or the recently announced Big 10-ACC Challenge.

At the high school level, Hamilton says, it is more about being able to play extra games and maybe making a little extra money by hosting an event.

State high school rules allow a team to play as many as five games in a tournament, but those games only count as two against a regular-season allowance of 20. Teams are allowed to play in as many as three tournaments during a season.

Kevin Reynolds, the coach at Villa Park, says he chose to play at the Edison because “it is an all-Orange County tournament to showcase Orange County teams.

“Sometimes I think our teams get lost behind Los Angeles and Long Beach teams. This gives us a chance to be in the spotlight a little bit.”

Harris agrees. Kind of. “Yes, that might be true,” he says. “And there’s a reason for that. L.A. and Long Beach teams are better. Maybe they don’t have better coaches, maybe not better teams per se. But a better pool of talent.

“It’s the reason Crenshaw, Westchester, Fairfax, Long Beach Poly vie for state championships. Those are the teams you’re going to end up facing in the state playoffs. If you don’t have experience against that kind of quickness and athleticism, you’re going to be stunned. When I heard about this [new] concept I thought, ‘I don’t know if this will make my team better.’ ”

Hamilton isn’t sure either.

His team got knocked into the consolation round and played Tustin Thursday night. “We’ll play them again this year, so, yes, we end up playing teams we’d play anyway.”

So the tournaments play on to their conclusions. Harris says he has eight of the top 20 teams in the state for the Tournament of Champions. Danley’s Edison tournament has six of the top 10 Orange County teams. Next year, Danley says, he’d like to have this event in the third week of December to avoid conflict with the TOC and the make it more truly a holiday festival. Harris says he’s looking at what to do so the two big events don’t conflict.

And coaches will have to figure out where to play, when to play and how much play is enough.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com